Earlier this year, I submitted a book manuscript for a project that involved rowing and paddling long stretches of North Atlantic coast in the UK, Sápmi, Faroe, Greenland, and beyond. While doing these journeys, and spending time in workshops with boat builders, I was struck by the number of metal musicians I both met and heard about – whether Scottish, Sámi, Inuit, or Mi’kmaw - far more than I’d met in fourteen years of living in Birmingham (which styles itself the “home of metal”).

At home, I’d also become a little too comfortable with the classic interpretations of ‘heavy metal’ as urban and postindustrial. These present distorted guitars, in the hands of icons like Tony Iommi, as 'decidedly unnatural, non-organic…electric industrial machines’ (as Ronald Bogue put it in Deleuze on Music). But after coming back I plunged into a world of nature-inspired, environmentally activist ‘ecometal’ that I’d known existed but had drastically underestimated.  

I quickly found quotes from metal musicians that are as rich with meanings as any novel. I loved, for instance, the way Maria Stock (vocalist with doom and black metal band, Ragana) compares one of the definitive techniques of extreme metal drumming to erosional geographies and emotional catharsis:

a blast beat to me is like water, maybe others think of it as something really tough and hard.

It feels like a waterfall to me, like crying really hard.

Ragana’s black-metal peers, Wolves in the Throne Room, insist the genre is all about attentiveness to ecological surroundings:

if you listen to Black Metal but you don’t know what phase the moon is in or what wildflowers are blooming, then you’ve failed…

the music is about wild forests, unfettered rivers, nature: furious and vengeful.

Black metal is also now part of the revivals of indigenous cultures that are the most important intellectual movements of our time. The Mohawk musician who records as Blackbraid wrote in 2022 of his nature-inspired music riding ‘a massive wave of native black metal this past year or two’, while the Québécois Metis musician Ifernach has written of his first exposure to metal as the trigger for an environmental awakening:

When I found Bathory, I felt the Scandinavian landscape screaming through the music.

This is what I try to achieve with Ifernach: allowing my own land to speak through me.

Revelation and self-discovery have long been central to the language with which listeners describe their introduction to metal music: sociological studies, such as those by Cynthia Wong, are full of phrases like ‘it felt like waking from a dream’. But the idea that these music-inspired awakenings are primarily about the realities of environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate collapse is a relatively new one. I’m really interested in the ways the aesthetics and ethics of black metal have been preserved while previous (extremely problematic) politics have been marginalised by an environmentalism that often celebrates everything early black metal was most prejudiced against.

In musical terms, black metal was once defined in opposition to death metal, but in subgenres such as EVDM (Environmentalist Vegan/Vegetarian Death Metal) death metal musicians have also been taking increasingly environmentalist stances. Bands like Cattle Decapitation, on albums with titles like The Anthropocene Extinction, add new elements to an anti-vivisectionist, pro-vegan/vegetarian, politics that has existed in death metal since Carcass and their peers in the 1980s. Many interviews with these older bands feature questions along the lines of this:

obviously you’re a vegetarian and have been for a long time, and I’m a vegetarian pretty much because of Carcass and Napalm Death and I have a dozen friends who have the same story – what is that like to be this weirdly influential person because of your dietary choices?

One of death metal’s leading bass players, Jason Netherton, celebrates the more-than-human orientation of this music and its potential to reject human exceptionalism. He sees this as following Donna Haraway’s instigation to ‘stay with the trouble’, since the music dwells

with loss, decay, violence and death in ways that modern societies have not, and this difference may – given contemporary geopolitics and ecological catastrophe – make all the difference in the world.

The most dramatic recent illustration of the growing influence of ‘ecometal’ was seen in the Olympic opening ceremony. Gojira, who performed with the metal-loving opera singer Marina Viotti, are perhaps the most prominent environmental extreme metal band in the world. They’ve raised large sums of money for environmental causes, appeared on stage with famous environmentalists, and bound environmentalism into their music to the extent that many label them and their peers ‘whalecore’. Inflatable whales are thrown about at their gigs and whales are symbols on lots of their merch. As in the case of black metal, the ways in which traditional death metal aesthetics and attitudes have proved so seamlessly adaptable to environmentalist purposes is really interesting to me.

All of this is driving me to write. There’ll be a few short articles of various kinds first, then, hopefully, a bigger project I’m currently planning out. Given that music was where things began for me - I was playing on albums long before I was writing in books (my 7 string Schechter Hellraiser is still among my most loved possessions) and music was my intended career and initial undergrad degree - this feels like a return to roots. So I’ve refreshed my trusty old patch-covered jacket with lots of my favourite metal (and related genres) bands – from the Roughneck Riot, Green Lung, and Pallbearer, to Ulcerate, Gorguts, and Napalm Death.

The intensive research begins this weekend, at the UK’s biggest and best independent metal festival: Bloodstock. I’ll be there with a media pass, camera and notebook. There are lots of bands on the lineup that I want to photograph and write about, including Carcass, Architects and Green Lung. But I’m also hoping for plenty of metal and environmentalism chat. So if you’re there and want to talk about your favourite ecometal, please do come and say hello to this person, in the jacket with these patches…