Why Australian Metal Is A Complete Joke, And Why It’s Your Fault

If you read TNM then you’ve probably get yourself pegged as one of those fandangled ‘genuine’ metal types. You acknowledge the fact that metal, despite being the only true art form, has a fan base that is nothing short of mindbogglingly false. Some of the shit people in this community get away with while still possessing the sheer fucking audacity to decree that they are ‘metal fans’ is enough to send my blood pressure skyrocketing so high that the tip of my Johnson shoots off with violent force and your girlfriend chokes to death on it.

But not you. You’re a true metalhead. You haven’t cut your hair or paid for a record since 2004. You are an island of kvlt solidarity adrift in a sea of ear-gauging poseurdom. You, as one of the last of the trve metal warriors, stands proud and tall like a wise old oak tree resisting all the forces that threaten to topple true metal as we know it today, like the fact that the 80’s have been over for two and a half decades and no one gives a shit about thrash metal anymore.

But it’s not easy. Your parents are threatening to kick you out of their basement, your favorite band broke up (don’t worry, they’ll probably get back together in 15 years and release an album so butt-chaffingly awful you’ll forget why you ever liked them), you haven’t had sex since the Bush administration (see what I did there?) because the entire female race unanimously decided 30 years ago that not showering for four days at a time is not a sign of sexual prowess and there’s only one radio station in your whole STATE that plays anything even approximating passable metal.

But y’know what? You don’t even fucking know how good you got it, buddy.

You would not last one single agonizing Amity Affliction-filled minute in the Australian ‘metal’ scene. Life as a metalhead is so tough in this country that it’s easy to forget that everything around you is plotting your imminent demise.

Go to sleep. I’ll be right here.

The following is a list of Australian bands that I could possibly be coaxed into admitting are metal after eight to fifteen beers:

• 4Arm
• Portal

That list took me four days to finalize, after heavy consultation with the only other actual metal fan in the entirety of Australia (my roommate, but he actually seems to think that Solution 45 made a positive contribution to metal, so his input was ultimately discarded).

Yes, I have heard of King Parrot. All you need to know about King Parrot is that they, as a band, made the conscious decision to star in a four minute long video for a two minute long song. King Parrot are a Hardcore band that wears corpse paint occasionally. If you think King Parrot are a death metal band, congratulations on being part of the problem.

Every year in Australia we have ONE festival that even comes close to being something a metal fan might want to think about attending. It’s called Soundwave, and it fucking blows. Here’s a poster with the lineup for the one that happened this year. I hope you’ve got your binoculars handy, meatbags, because you’re gonna have to look real fucking hard to find a true metal band among this pile of unsophisticated gutter trash.

More like ‘FalseWave’. Hahaha fucking nailed it.

It truly is a testament to my metal cred that I have never once attended Soundwave, because even Australia’s only ‘metal’ festival, even the only drop of water in the Sahara that is the Australian metal scene, is not even fucking close to good enough for me to bother with. I would rather have no metal at all than endure the unfettered garbage that is Australia’s best effort at an ‘alternative music’ festival.

But how did we get here? How many wrong turns does a culture have to make to wind up as the embodiment of everything not metal?

This is a question that has kept me up at night for quite literally decades, and the best answer that I came up with as that, on the whole, Australia doesn’t really have anything to complain about.

We have socialized medicine, a pretty decent minimum wage, some of the best weather and most revered natural wonders on the planet. We have no reason to be perturbed enough to write a true metal record. The reason the Australian metal scene blows so fucking hard is because this country pretty much kicks the shit out of everyone else by every observable metric. If every other country on the planet wasn’t so fucking shitty, maybe we would, as a nation, be able to band together and produce a half decent metal record. Our overall positive outlook and genuinely happy lifestyle is the envy of most other developed nations where anyone of sound mind would consider living.

And I’m not having a bar of it.

In my unyielding effort to make Australia the most metal island nation on Earth, I am officially lending all of my (considerable) metal cred to declaring Tony Abbott, our prime minister, the most metal political representative in the history of the world. Since his election he has done absolutely nothing but try and ruin everything we’ve got going on here.

Politics is boring, so I’m not going to waste your time laying out the whole political climate here in Australia for you (I’m sure you’re totally flat out eagerly fingering your barn hole in anticipation of the forthcoming Five Finger Death Punch album, you poseur worms), but I will tell you that Tony Abbott, our prime minister, has made it legal to imprison and mentally torture children indefinitely.

Not a death metal album cover.

Holy fucking shit. This guy is operating on a whole other level.

But I digress. Your average Australian metal fan (or should I say the average person in Australia who claims to be a fan of metal) usually turns up in a fucking Ramones T-Shirt. These people are not metal fans. They are the adult version of the weird smelling, overwhelmingly awkward dude you knew in high school who realized that dressing and acting like a stereotypical 80’s metal warrior was a great way to act like you were being a fucking sperg on purpose. If you didn’t know anyone like this at your high school, it was you.

People who like metal in Australia don’t actually like metal. They like being different because it justifies the fact that they are unemployed and can’t get laid. No one in this country knows or cares who Jari Mäenpää is (I may have added extra umlauts because umlauts are undisputedly the most metal of vowel modifiers). [Edit: I did not add extra umlauts, fuck you. (Edit Edit: if you don’t know what umlauts are, kill yourself)]

Basically what I’m saying is that every country that is not Australia and produces metal needs to lift their fucking game as a society. The fact that people in this country actually think that Northlane are a good band is frankly nothing short of embarrassing.

-Jimmolation.