Mapping the underground: An ethnographic cartography of the Leeds extreme metal scene

This article centralizes changes within Leeds’ popular ‘musicscape’, i.e., the relations between popular music and urban landscape. Focusing on Leeds’ extreme heavy metal musicscape, we map sites of the Leeds metal scene (past and present) in order to understand the shifting social relationships, effects of city centre regeneration, and the ways in which heavy metal music scenes have the ability to adapt and respond to continual modifications within the urban city. To address these concerns, we draw upon scholarship from popular music and place, heavy metal and human geography. Heavy metal scenes are a significant, yet often invisible and under-acknowledged, part of the urban cultural landscape. Mapping the metal musicscape, then, becomes an important way to understand broader physical, social, political, and cultural changes that occur to, and within, the postmodern city.