In 2015, metal wasn’t slavishly reverent of its elders, and it didn’t overly fetishize novelty or newness. That alone indicates an unusually high level of artistic vibrancy, not to mention audience engagement. They tied a record set by Metallica! The Wall Street Journal did a story about it! And that demographic-spanning prosperity is represented in the list below, which includes bands like Satan (formed in 1979), Blind Guardian (formed in 1984), Paradise Lost (formed in 1988), Nile (formed in 1993), High On Fire (formed in 1998), Baroness (formed in 2003), Krallice (formed in 2008), and Myrkur (formed in 2014). An American black metal band! It didn’t stop there, though: Ghost’s Meliora debuted at #8 on the Hot 200 Five Finger Death Punch’s Got Your Six debuted at #2 Disturbed had their fifth straight #1 debut. In 2015! Less than a month later, Deafheaven dropped their third LP, New Bermuda, which debuted at #8 on Billboard’s Independent Albums chart. In September, Iron Maiden released The Book Of Souls - a double LP that arrived 35 years after the band’s first album - and it came in at #4 on the Billboard Hot 200, with first-week sales of 74,000, marking the band’s best domestic debut ever. We’re now seeing four or five generations of metal bands delivering career-best work - and perhaps more impressively, being recognized for that work. The genre (to the the extent we can call this vast, ever-expanding universe a “genre”) has enjoyed a prolonged period of outstanding health and continued revitalization over the last decade or so. If we’re just talking about the music - and isn’t that, like, the thing we’re talking about here? - then 2015 was a great year for metal.
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