Metal

Bring Me the Horizon

Twenty years to get back to the scream

Bring Me the Horizon started in 2006 with a deathcore record and their turn did not happen in 2013: the leap to metalcore was in September 2008 and the synthesisers and clean vocals arrived in October 2010. Jordan Fish, eleven years in the band, was the one who put in the electronics. On 10 July 2026 they re-recorded that first record for its twentieth anniversary, with Oli Sykes back on the guttural scream.

Staind

The sleeve that nearly cost them everything

In October 1997, Fred Durst tried to pull Staind off the bill at the Webster Theatre in Hartford over the sleeve of their home-made record; then he listened to them and signed them. In 2001, Break the Cycle debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and "It's Been Awhile" spent sixteen weeks at number one on the Modern Rock. Jon Wysocki, founding drummer, died on 18 May 2024.

Marilyn Manson

The lawsuit he withdrew while paying

The triad of Antichrist Superstar, Mechanical Animals and Holy Wood, and a file that is still open: two out-of-court settlements, one sworn retraction, the prosecutor's office that ruled out charges in January 2025 on statute-of-limitations grounds, the defamation suit he withdrew while paying 327,000 dollars and a jury trial set for November 2027.

Deftones

The record they left in the drawer

Formed in Sacramento in 1988, years before nu-metal, it won its only Grammy with White Pony in 2001, for "Elite". When Chi Cheng showed signs of consciousness after the 2008 accident, the band shelved Eros and recorded Diamond Eyes in its place. Cheng died of a cardiac arrest on 13 April 2013.

Sinergia

The song everyone misread

Almost all of Chile heard "Mujer Robusta" as a joke. The band says the opposite: it is a vindication, and they have stopped radio stations using it mockingly. Even the name of their genre was given to them from outside.

Slayer

Half an hour without concessions

"Reign in Blood" runs twenty-eight minutes and fifty-five seconds, fits on one side of a cassette and changed metal for good. When the producer questioned its brevity, the band shrugged. And its bassist and singer was born in Viña del Mar.

Twisted Sister

The most sensible man in the room

The PMRC put "We're Not Gonna Take It" on its list of fifteen flagged songs, marked with a "V" for violence. On 19 September 1985 Dee Snider walked into the Senate in his usual hair and clothes, testified that he did not smoke, drink or take drugs, and dismantled the accusation. Six weeks later the "Parental Advisory" sticker arrived anyway.

Metallica

The card that chose

They drew cards to divide up the tour bus bunks. Cliff Burton won, took Kirk Hammett's bed, and that morning the bus went off a Swedish road.

Tom Morello

Six strings and a cause

The son of a Kenyan insurgent and an American activist, a Harvard graduate, he chose the guitar over politics because it spoke to more people. And he carries Víctor Jara wherever he goes.

Rage Against the Machine

Intelligent rage

They turned political fury into a mass phenomenon without diluting a drop of it, and faced head-on the contradiction of shouting against the system from the system's biggest label.

Rammstein

The art of provocation

Six East Germans fill stadiums across five continents singing in a language almost none of their fans understand. And they make an art of provoking while knowing almost nobody will understand them.

Mägo de Oz

Tilting at windmills

They crossed heavy metal with the Celtic fiddle and put Don Quixote into a song that a whole stadium sings back. A mixture that on paper should not work, and that half of Latin America took as its own.

Tool

In praise of patience

They make fifteen-minute labyrinths, give barely any interviews and take thirteen years between albums. And they still fill stadiums, because they decided the audience would come to them and not the other way round.

Limp Bizkit

The heartbeat that arrived eleven days late

«Break Stuff» never entered the US singles chart. Twenty-five years later it topped the hard rock chart, eleven days after the death of the bassist who played it — and no academy put it there. People did.

Limp Bizkit

The barrier the band asked for and was refused

Jessica Michalik was sixteen. A coroner spent twenty-one months finding out why she died, and her report points at the organisers: they had ignored a safety recommendation and refused the band the barrier it requested in writing.

Ozzy Osbourne

The throne and the farewell

He sang his last concert seated on a throne, in the city where he had invented heavy metal, while half the scene came to bow before him. Seventeen days later he died. Beneath the Prince of Darkness there was a sweet, funny, broken man.

Evanescence

The voice the label imposed on her

The male voice on «Bring Me to Life» was not an artistic idea: it was a commercial condition. Amy Lee wrote the words that man sings, and he is not among the song's writers.

System of a Down

They only sing when there is something to say

«Chop Suey!» was called «Suicide». The label said no, and the band split the word in two without changing a comma of the truth. They have gone twenty-one years without an album, and the silence is also a way of speaking.

Korn

A failed guitar and a brand-new genre

The seven-string guitar was designed for playing higher and sold so badly they stopped making it. Korn tuned it down, stayed on the low string, and founded nu metal with it.

Motörhead

A pity prize and a fruit machine

Motörhead won one Grammy in forty years, and it was for a cover of a Metallica song. Lemmy called it a pity prize. Today his ashes travel in urns, and one of them ended up inside a fruit machine.

Slipknot

They erased their faces so you would look at the music

For twenty-five years people hunted for the secret system behind Slipknot's numbers. There is no system: they handed them out arguing, out of superstition, a joke about infinity and self-deprecation.

Pantera

They burned what was already working

Pantera have nine albums and the platforms carry five. The four missing ones are glam, with spandex and hairspray, and they did not vanish out of shame: the band stopped caring once it found out who it was.

Chester Bennington

So that no one would be alone

He screamed his pain and then whispered it, in the same song. Chester Bennington sang abuse, addiction and depression from the inside, and a whole generation felt that someone understood them. He helped many to keep going; he could not do it for himself.

Iron Maiden

The show a bishop stopped

In June 1992 a bishop called them a satanic group on Chilean national television. Nineteen days later the concert was cancelled. Thirty years on they are the foreign band with the largest audience in Chile.

Metal: From the Underground to the Stadium

From cassettes traded by post to a Moscow airfield in 1991: how metal built its empire without radio or permission. NWOBHM, tape trading, the thrash Big Four and a crowd figure nobody managed to count.