Didn't expect to see something I made on HN while my wife is trying to find something to watch on TV.
So about the site in case anyone is interested. I made it with a friend who was studying multimedia. He helped with the data and I did the coding. Took about a week or two.
The site was originally Flash (remember that). But I ported it to HTML5 a few years ago. It still has those Flash vibes I think. Posted the code to GitHub when I ported it. I did this mostly to keep it alive for old times sake.
So about the mobile support. I planned to do it but got sidetracked building a custom WebGL map renderer because phone performance was poor. However I never finished, life finds a way to get in the way and all that... I have some mobile designs lying around.
The other issue was when I first built the site YouTube didn't really play ads much at all, just those little text ads, and you could embed the player really tiny. So it worked better. In the original flash version I actually hid the video player. But that got the site blacklisted from YouTube, I asked a Google engineer on a dev forum to put a word in and they removed the block, very different times, this was back when Google was a different beast, and you could chat to real people online and the dev communities were much smaller.
I have a illustration of a much bigger map in my sketchbook. It has a lot more subgenres and interconnected things like historical events and so on. But it's huge unfolded, like 2x1.5m or something ridiculous.
I miss those days when the web was full of weird and experimental stuff. I grew up with Newgrounds and Geocities, I'm sure it's all still out there buried under a giant pile of SEO optimised refuse.
Younger people would never understand how amazing the internet was back in the 90s. Particularly before ads and SEO became an industry.
Also Flash, most people don't realize what we lost with Flash. The amount of non-professional multimedia content available was so great. It was a cooking ground for people to experiment with animation ideas. Very low hanging fruit.
HTML5/Canvas/CSS just don't have that accessibility.
Now the internet is a complete different beast. There are 10 main websites that everyone sees only, and everyone wants to monetize. All content is full of "antipatterns" to maximize monetization. It's very very sad.
Aaaanyway, sorry for the rant. I love your website. I'm a Metalhead myself, and this year I'll go back to Wacken for a 2nd time after 15 years!!
Amen! The only things that made the early web bad by comparison were popup ads and the lack of tabbed browsing. Popup windows that didn't rely on user interaction were always a bad idea and should never have existed. But besides that, yeah, I miss those days. I miss the days when I was a kid and I could stick some HTML on a server and people would actually find it. No SEO, ads, or shameless self promotion required.
Have you open any US news website in 5 years? Usually there are 2 or 3 layers of popups: subscribe!, cookies box, and news video stream playing on top of everything.
Seriously. EVERY game style that is now on the app store with ads between levels was completely free and hosted on sites like kongregate, ebaumsworld, or other flash game sites. Incremental games specifically were available in droves. It was a pretty cool time.
> Now the internet is a complete different beast. There are 10 main websites that everyone sees only, and everyone wants to monetize. All content is full of "antipatterns" to maximize monetization. It's very very sad.
This was going to happen regardless of if we had Flash or not
> Younger people would never understand how amazing the internet was back in the 90s. Particularly before ads and SEO became an industry.
I don’t even think they’d value it to be honest. The culture of putting stuff out online now is to view everything as a potential revenue stream. If you can’t monetize it, why do it?
Thanks so much for this write up. It’s not often thought of that when you put something weird and experimental online just for fun that you’re signing up for years of careing and feeding. But that’s also kind of nice, it makes you go engage with your cool thing long after your impulse drove you to make it.
This is a cool thing. I hope you enjoyed remembering about it again today.
Very cool. Explored a lot of nodes, rekindled some old bands. I was wondering how this was vibe coded, since it was done so well, art wise. Then I read your post. This has such a different feel for whatever is usually made today, I really enjoyed it. Cheers
Do you disagree with hardcore punk influence as being one of the key disambiguation between thrash from speed metal? Personally at least that's what I feel. I do understand this means for example a lot of Metallica won't count as thrash but I like to say if you slow down Metallica it sounds more like Black Sabbath while slowed down Slayer or Anthrax sounds quite different, so I feel there may be a hard physical evidence for my theory. I found it a bit odd you didn't have this aspect written in the statements about differences between speed metal and thrash metal.
I do like and agree that you put Slayer - Necrophiliac under the development of death metal. Though by those same accounts I'd have moved Kreator - Ripping Corpse from the thrash column to the death metal column, but that's just a personal line.
I also feel your tech death is biased too much toward 2000s rather than stuff like Sadus, Demilich or Disciples of Power.
Absolutely loved the inclusion of death n roll, one of my favorite substyles.
Well, sped-up Cathedral sounds like Bathory so... I don't know what that's physical evidence of? But I accept your theory as a valid theory, just because there's a test for it, even though I don't understand what the test shows.
I think Cathedral is closer to death metal structure in my personal view compared to classic Black Sabbath, so that should not be too surprising. My test is simple, the history of thrash itself shows a lot of it coming from combining hardcore punk influence directly to metal, a lot of old thrash feels to me having mild to overt hardcore sections or riffs at points. And I think that's the aspect that gives thrash its political themes and more direct lyrics compared to the more fantasy or generic bragging style of older metal.
Your map was very formative for me when I was exploring metal, thanks a lot !
I would love for this Map to be expanded to modern subgenres. There are lot's of subgenres that completely changed in the last decades (notably, the *cores and the tech* ...)
This is an awesome visualization. I have always enjoyed 'structural taxonomies' as a way of visualizing data relationships. I appreciate you keeping it alive.
I was looking through this, seeing the years radius and having my expectations validated/refuted was really fun! Lots of yeah but no, or no way but yeah? The curation of it is really respectable no matter my own taste and that is something that is in real low stock. Thanks for making my day and I'll add a few respectful issues when I can
This was hugely influential on a younger me! I remember tracing forward and backwards from the bands I liked, finding and checking out new bands at every stop. Thank you!
Absolutely fantastic project! I completely understand you've got other things going on, but for me on Firefox mobile, I'm seeing a YouTube pop-up window for Black Sabbath and I don't see any obvious way to close it.
Historical comment only. I first listened to this music in the late 1970s. One big change in the story, over time, is how few people trace the sound to Hendrix now. (Not this map in particular. Metal fans I know would agree with the map.) I think (?) a common current viewpoint is that Led Zep [!?] was foundational but the genre really started with Black Sabbath and Judas Priest.
Which, definitions change. But in 1977 I listened to Purple Haze and, sure, it was "Psychedelic Rock" as indicated on the map. 100%! But it was also almost definitionally metal. Forty-nine years ago, I mean, not today.
[!?] I love Zeppelin. But I would have been laughed out of high school if I'd compared them to metal, or claimed they were even hard rock.
That’s interesting. Somehow my brain never really put that together. He was obviously ripping heavy blues and innovated more than anyone before and arguably since. Thanks for adding him into my mental Metal flow chart.
For me I would always say that somewhere between 68-71 metal was being cooked up by Black Sabbath in Birmingham, Motörhead in London, Pentagram in Virginia, and Blue Cheer in San Francisco. Obviously Hendrix’s influence would be most obvious with the latter.
I started learning guitar in 2006 and my guitar teacher pointed out how metal originated from Hendrix's sound. I always thought that was common knowledge
In my opinion Hendrix is to electric guitar what Beethoven was to (Western) harmony. All contemporary lines go through him.
One thing to note though is that Hendrix had a very short career in which he lived/performed in Nashville, the Chitlin' Circuit, Greenwich Village, and London. On top of being an incredibly proficient/creative guitar player he also had an incredible ear and picked up sounds/techniques/songs from everywhere he lived and with everyone he played with.
Part of why you can trace the evolution of guitar playing through Hendrix is that on top of his records being popular and everyone learning those tunes as a first/second year student, his own musicological background was a fusion of the major songwriting movements of the 1960s that spawned modern blues, pop, funk, fusion, rock, and metal. It's easy to see Hendrix as an influence on modern music because he was a magnet for players of all those genres.
What's interesting about Hendrix is that he is "an artist you listen to" instead of "an artist who an artist you listen to, listens to" from the same era like Albert King or Joe Pass.
I'd love of this showed me the spiritual successors of a band / sub-genre even if they're not mainstream or well known. For example, I really love Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and a number of other "classic" Heavy Metal bands with a slow, hard but not sludgy brooding sound and amazing vocals. But it's hard finding modern acts with a similar sound. What tends to happen when I search for modern metal is I end up finding stuff that is more a descendant of speed metal, or thrash, or black metal... and none of that really strikes the right chord for me.
There used to be a thing like 20-ish years ago called Musicovery that could sort of do this if you clicked around.
FWIW, There's a lot of new bands sounding like the old classic Metal bands, they are `tagged` as NWOTHM (New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal), such as:
Absolutely love Lucifer and Tailgunner. Wouldn’t put them in the same category, but highly recommended for fans of Iron Maiden or anyone who listened to Deep Purple growing up.
Tailgunner seems to sound just enough like Iron Maiden to satisfy Maiden fans but not so much to be a clone band or a tribute act who does “originals.” Tough line to find.
Very curious the conspicuously absent genre in your list, especially given how much of modern doom is death metal. I can't help much with traditional doom however as I don't listen to it much, I just found it a bit funny you never encountered modern death metal during your searches for slow metal.
You ever heard of Every Noise at Once? You can search for an artist, see the genres they belong to, and then look for artists nearby in 2D musical space (oversimplified a bit to be fair) within that genre. I've found it's generally pretty accurate, and I've found plenty of new artists this way.
Unfortunately no longer being updated, but still has a fantastic backlog of new-ish artists.
Both these maps of styles have most of their richness in the past. Modern era is mostly stagnation. I suppose it would be different if I had a map of hip-hop?
I've got a particular itch that's difficult to scratch, and I'm not seeing anything on this site that reflects the genre.
I've heard it as 'metalstep' but I'm sure there are other names for it. Very aggressive cross between metal and EDM. More of a metal sensibility than hardcore EDM; more of an EDM / trance sensibility than, say, Fear Factory. The drum tracks have more of a death metal vibe to them. It's probably easy to blend into other genres.
I'm thinking stuff like Invocation Array, Rave The Requivm, Follow the Cipher, even stuff like The Algorithm and Neurotech. I suppose Fear Factory would count here as well.
I clicked into this thread expecting hobbyist/hacker machining with steel and brass and aluminum, and was surprised to see someone getting into electrical discharge machining. Those hair-fine wires, milled graphite electrodes, and ultrapure water baths can achieve incredible precision but are challenging even in an industrial context, though I know a few have made it work in their garage.
Great map. There might be some categories missing, couldn't find any Katatonia, Agalloch, Alcest nor Tiamat. Alcest and some Deftones are considered blackgaze and Agalloch, Wolves in the Throne Room fall more into grey metal.
It's interesting because some of these bands are older than these terms. Alcest wasn't considered blackgaze until albums inspired by their own sound became popular, for example.
Metal also has history where a genre is aesthetically defined as well as sonically, which complicates things.
I can't thank you enough for mentioning Agalloch! I used to listen to them so much in university but somehow completely forgot about them until I read this comment!
I'm going to lose myself to "The Mantle" this weekend (best part is that I can now learn to play these songs on guitar). Thank you so much again - you made my day!
I get the thematic connection but I feel like Blind Guardian is an institution whereas the Diggy Diggy Hole band is perhaps in a different league with a more selective core fan base and a song that has novelty appeal.
> 2024-01-05 status update: With my 2023-12-04 layoff from Spotify I lost the internal data-access required for ongoing updates to many parts of this site. Most of this, as a result, is now a static snapshot of what, for now, will be the final state from the site's 10-year history and evolution..
what a shame. I didn't realize the author worked for Spotify. Guess it makes sense. Spotify should've acquired it from the author or made a deal with him to keep it live since all the links lead to Spotify anyway.
Given this is Hacker News, this easily could have been some re-vamped "table" of metal elements or what the linked site ultimately is ... LOL. Personally, I am more happy with the actual site than metallurgy.
i also made something like this. it cover 17M entities across tracks albums artists and labels. posted on show hn a few times but it went unnoticed (hate u (joking))
I was enjoying this until I started reading the descriptions of the genres. The person that made this is very opinionated and not afraid to say what they think about certain genres they do not like!
Looks great! However I'm not sure how it is supposed to work. Like, should it play doom when I click doom? For me it started with Black Sabbath, and it doesn't change
Swedish death is a specific sound like Entombed, which is fairly different than melo-death bands like In Flames.
I'm not entirely sure why those specific song choices for the Swedish Death category. The older At The Gates albums are more like the original Swedish sound but Slaughter of the Soul (included in Swedish Death) is essentially THE Melo-death album.
Mastodon isn't sludge in any way, mate... sludge is hardcore punk + (proto) doom metal. It's what the Melvins, the B-side of Black Flags's My War and early Flippers spawned, so mostly the NOLA scene (Eyehategod, Crowbar, Down, Acid Bath, Buzzoven, etc...) and "others" (Grief, Floor, 16).
Perhaps we need a word to disambiguate "atmosludge" from actual sludge, for the same reason "skramz" was invented.
m̈ëẗäl̈ üm̈l̈äüẗs̈ (awww, you can't put an umlaut on a space) (oh wow the HM font does not like what I just did. It looks fine in the monospace font)
Holy crap, someone recognizes Neue Deutsch Härte as the legit metal genre it is! And the playlist includes 5 März by the Alexx-era Megaherz! Excellent work!!!
why when i click the different links does new music representing that period not play? I expected to hear 1960's progenitors to metal when I clicked that section
I liked the anti-establishment, Anarchist/socialist vibes of the Hardcore punk rock island. Don't like all of the macho posing and shrieking (neither in punk and especially not in the more "black" part); and double dislike the crass commercialization of so much of it.
Consult "Homage to Catalonia" by George Orwell. In the Spanish Civil War, Orwell soldiered with anarchists and socialists and the rest of the worker's parties, against the fascists.. until the inevitable purge.
So about the site in case anyone is interested. I made it with a friend who was studying multimedia. He helped with the data and I did the coding. Took about a week or two.
The site was originally Flash (remember that). But I ported it to HTML5 a few years ago. It still has those Flash vibes I think. Posted the code to GitHub when I ported it. I did this mostly to keep it alive for old times sake.
So about the mobile support. I planned to do it but got sidetracked building a custom WebGL map renderer because phone performance was poor. However I never finished, life finds a way to get in the way and all that... I have some mobile designs lying around.
The other issue was when I first built the site YouTube didn't really play ads much at all, just those little text ads, and you could embed the player really tiny. So it worked better. In the original flash version I actually hid the video player. But that got the site blacklisted from YouTube, I asked a Google engineer on a dev forum to put a word in and they removed the block, very different times, this was back when Google was a different beast, and you could chat to real people online and the dev communities were much smaller.
I have a illustration of a much bigger map in my sketchbook. It has a lot more subgenres and interconnected things like historical events and so on. But it's huge unfolded, like 2x1.5m or something ridiculous.
I miss those days when the web was full of weird and experimental stuff. I grew up with Newgrounds and Geocities, I'm sure it's all still out there buried under a giant pile of SEO optimised refuse.
Also Flash, most people don't realize what we lost with Flash. The amount of non-professional multimedia content available was so great. It was a cooking ground for people to experiment with animation ideas. Very low hanging fruit.
HTML5/Canvas/CSS just don't have that accessibility.
Now the internet is a complete different beast. There are 10 main websites that everyone sees only, and everyone wants to monetize. All content is full of "antipatterns" to maximize monetization. It's very very sad.
Aaaanyway, sorry for the rant. I love your website. I'm a Metalhead myself, and this year I'll go back to Wacken for a 2nd time after 15 years!!
Have you open any US news website in 5 years? Usually there are 2 or 3 layers of popups: subscribe!, cookies box, and news video stream playing on top of everything.
https://homestarrunner.com/toons/backtoawebsite
This was going to happen regardless of if we had Flash or not
I don’t even think they’d value it to be honest. The culture of putting stuff out online now is to view everything as a potential revenue stream. If you can’t monetize it, why do it?
This is a cool thing. I hope you enjoyed remembering about it again today.
I do like and agree that you put Slayer - Necrophiliac under the development of death metal. Though by those same accounts I'd have moved Kreator - Ripping Corpse from the thrash column to the death metal column, but that's just a personal line.
I also feel your tech death is biased too much toward 2000s rather than stuff like Sadus, Demilich or Disciples of Power.
Absolutely loved the inclusion of death n roll, one of my favorite substyles.
I would love for this Map to be expanded to modern subgenres. There are lot's of subgenres that completely changed in the last decades (notably, the *cores and the tech* ...)
And it's definitely missing Thall (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtV9pcHh8vM). :D
> It still has those Flash vibes I think.
I can say I noticed. I wondered if the site had been Flash.
Historical comment only. I first listened to this music in the late 1970s. One big change in the story, over time, is how few people trace the sound to Hendrix now. (Not this map in particular. Metal fans I know would agree with the map.) I think (?) a common current viewpoint is that Led Zep [!?] was foundational but the genre really started with Black Sabbath and Judas Priest.
Which, definitions change. But in 1977 I listened to Purple Haze and, sure, it was "Psychedelic Rock" as indicated on the map. 100%! But it was also almost definitionally metal. Forty-nine years ago, I mean, not today.
[!?] I love Zeppelin. But I would have been laughed out of high school if I'd compared them to metal, or claimed they were even hard rock.
For me I would always say that somewhere between 68-71 metal was being cooked up by Black Sabbath in Birmingham, Motörhead in London, Pentagram in Virginia, and Blue Cheer in San Francisco. Obviously Hendrix’s influence would be most obvious with the latter.
One thing to note though is that Hendrix had a very short career in which he lived/performed in Nashville, the Chitlin' Circuit, Greenwich Village, and London. On top of being an incredibly proficient/creative guitar player he also had an incredible ear and picked up sounds/techniques/songs from everywhere he lived and with everyone he played with.
Part of why you can trace the evolution of guitar playing through Hendrix is that on top of his records being popular and everyone learning those tunes as a first/second year student, his own musicological background was a fusion of the major songwriting movements of the 1960s that spawned modern blues, pop, funk, fusion, rock, and metal. It's easy to see Hendrix as an influence on modern music because he was a magnet for players of all those genres.
What's interesting about Hendrix is that he is "an artist you listen to" instead of "an artist who an artist you listen to, listens to" from the same era like Albert King or Joe Pass.
- https://www.music-map.com/ - https://everynoise.com/ - https://chartmetric.com/ - https://musicroamer.com/ - http://davidmckinney.com/app
But they're all kind of generic, I would love to see something more genre-specific with additional historic context and personality.
There used to be a thing like 20-ish years ago called Musicovery that could sort of do this if you clicked around.
- White Wizzard
- Tailgunner
- Skull Fist
- Wolf
- Enforcer
- 3 Inches of Blood
- Lucifer
- and many others
Bands like Sleep, OM, Electric Wizard, Weedeater, Dopesmoker, Satans Satyrs, Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats, Salems Pot, Acid Witch… there’s so so many.
Also heavier bands that are more stoner/psych than metal like All Them Witches, Mars Red Sky, Dead Meadow, Aunt Cynthia’s Cabin, all rip too.
Unfortunately no longer being updated, but still has a fantastic backlog of new-ish artists.
Bands that you are saying. Maybe Hangman's Chair, Pallbearer, Faetooth, Rezn, Conan, and Monolord.
https://music.ishkur.com/
Both these maps of styles have most of their richness in the past. Modern era is mostly stagnation. I suppose it would be different if I had a map of hip-hop?
I've heard it as 'metalstep' but I'm sure there are other names for it. Very aggressive cross between metal and EDM. More of a metal sensibility than hardcore EDM; more of an EDM / trance sensibility than, say, Fear Factory. The drum tracks have more of a death metal vibe to them. It's probably easy to blend into other genres.
I'm thinking stuff like Invocation Array, Rave The Requivm, Follow the Cipher, even stuff like The Algorithm and Neurotech. I suppose Fear Factory would count here as well.
For concrete examples of what I'm thinking, something like Crossbreed[1], or more recently Electric Callboy[2]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS2zMciGHBE [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1NdGBldg3w
I clicked into this thread expecting hobbyist/hacker machining with steel and brass and aluminum, and was surprised to see someone getting into electrical discharge machining. Those hair-fine wires, milled graphite electrodes, and ultrapure water baths can achieve incredible precision but are challenging even in an industrial context, though I know a few have made it work in their garage.
But you meant electronic dance music.
Metal also has history where a genre is aesthetically defined as well as sonically, which complicates things.
I'm going to lose myself to "The Mantle" this weekend (best part is that I can now learn to play these songs on guitar). Thank you so much again - you made my day!
No offense to dwarf metal fans intended.
They do speak to more of the gamer culture... for example Rock and Stone https://youtu.be/8ZXBm1NXBaI - there's a lot of other dwarf rock.
Consider "The Breed of Durin" - who preformed it? https://youtu.be/dV51_xsV4uI
Other than seeing "Wind Rose" and knowing Blind Guardian discography, you'd likely have to listen carefully to identify if this was Blind Guardian or Windrose. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIhpnUMTxak&list=OLAK5uy_m3G...
Just read the update:
> 2024-01-05 status update: With my 2023-12-04 layoff from Spotify I lost the internal data-access required for ongoing updates to many parts of this site. Most of this, as a result, is now a static snapshot of what, for now, will be the final state from the site's 10-year history and evolution..
what a shame. I didn't realize the author worked for Spotify. Guess it makes sense. Spotify should've acquired it from the author or made a deal with him to keep it live since all the links lead to Spotify anyway.
https://toposonico.com/#lon=14.4313&lat=-1.0200&z=9.10&entit...
https://music.ishkur.com/
https://www.metal-archives.com/
One of my favorite documentaries to learn the history of metal is "metal: a headbanger's journey" (available on YouTube).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jkl4Yeh-BTo
https://www.artsy.net/artwork/ward-shelley-history-of-scienc...
https://websites.umich.edu/~esrabkin/sf/HistoryOfSFVisualize...
I'm not entirely sure why those specific song choices for the Swedish Death category. The older At The Gates albums are more like the original Swedish sound but Slaughter of the Soul (included in Swedish Death) is essentially THE Melo-death album.
It might be fun to have a sort of gazetteer for the map so we can find bands.
Btw, the map interface is very well implemented, what is it based on?
[0] https://openseadragon.github.io/
Perhaps we need a word to disambiguate "atmosludge" from actual sludge, for the same reason "skramz" was invented.
Except Dixie Dave. Eyes crossed from Jim beam and cough syrup works too.
I suppose you used ◌̈ (U+0308).
Went through a phase of listening to Beryllium and Fortal.