Metal Music Studies - Ten years of Metal Music Studies, Mar 2025

A retrospective of Laina Dawes’s What Are You Doing Here? A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal (2012).

A metal studies retrospective on Rosemary Lucy Hill’s Gender, Metal and the Media: Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music (2016).

A closer look at Dan Franklin’s Heavy: How Metal Changes the Way We See the World (2020) that includes a conversation about our own journey to metal fandom and the debates opened by Franklin’s book.

The book Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America opens multiple epistemic, methodological and ethical dilemmas of importance to metal music studies. This article highlights the transformations that the text introduces in the field.

A reflection on Julie Turley and Joan Jocson-Singh’s Heavy Music Mothers: Extreme Identities, Narrative Disruptions (2023).

This retrospective surveys three recent doctoral dissertations on gender and nu metal, genre and metalcore and transformations of time within progressive/technical styles of metal. It advocates for the utility of dissertations, arguing for their importance as foundational texts within metal studies.