Metal Music Studies - Volume 11, Issue 3, 2025

This article examines how the heaviness of metal music serves as a key aesthetic tool to evoke the sublime, a concept that captures encounters with overwhelming greatness or power, provoking awe, fear and admiration. Referencing the theories of Immanuel Kant, Jean-François Lyotard and Philip Shaw, the article demonstrates how metal’s intensity mirrors both the mathematically and dynamically sublime, creating an overwhelming auditory experience that challenges the listener’s cognitive limits. The article also explores the parallels between metal music and religious experience, arguing that metal’s use of the sublime reflects the emotions felt during the contemplation of divine power. By doing so, metal provides a secular form of religious awe, offering listeners an experience akin to confronting something vastly greater than themselves. Ultimately, the article highlights how metal’s engagement with the sublime transcends traditional boundaries between aesthetics, art and spiritual experience.

This article explores the unique interplay between geography, culture and aesthetics within the Chilean doom metal scene, focusing on the concepts of australness, Chilean sadness and the metaphor of the end of the world. It examines how these elements articulate discourses and sonic productions that are deeply embedded in doom metal’s aesthetic lexicon. The article is structured into four main sections. First, it offers a general characterization of Chilean doom, addressing the history of the scene and the discourses that position its sound within an international context. The second section introduces the concept of australness and its thematic corollaries – such as isolation and sadness – as culturally embedded features of Chilean doom metal. The third section analyses the metaphor of the end of the world, situating it within geographical, but also historical and eschatological frameworks. Finally, the article explores the role of Chilean doom’s Indigenous imaginaries from the Southern Cone, considering their incorporation into the music as a reflection on the end of the world through the lenses of genocide and cultural erasure. The Chilean doom metal scene weaves the notions of australness, sadness, and the end of the world into a distinctive framework, in which isolation and grief are not merely geographical, but above all cultural and experiential concerns.

Metal music has long been associated with societal outcasts, providing a community and an outlet for individuals disenfranchised by the mainstream. Often considered in terms of cisgender and heterosexual men, metal has notably appropriated queer culture as well as platformed queer performers, including transgender ones. Nevertheless, in metal music studies, trans performers have received minimal acknowledgement and, in instances of their inclusion, only high-profile examples are used to form overarching judgements for all trans experiences within the genre. In this article, I draw on an interpretative phenomenological analysis study of Australia’s metal scenes, highlighting two trans women musicians, to examine the current status of trans participation in metal. Additionally, I trace each performer’s process of becoming a metal performer and capture each contributor’s gender exploration and process of coming out within the metal subculture. Each narrative demonstrates a complex intermingling of one’s transness and their metalhead status, as well as the codes underpinning scene construction in Australian metal, resulting in either the facilitation of free expression of trans performers or blatant discrimination against them.