Bad Boys, Ballads, and the Blues: When Heavy Bands Took the Long Way Home Rock history loves its bad boys. The volume merchants. The chaos-makers. The bands that built their reputations on aggression, speed, and noise. But scratch beneath the surface — flip the record over — and you’ll often find something else entirely. A ballad. A blues-soaked lament. A B-side that whispers where the A-side screams. This is the quiet truth of heavy music: even the hardest bands bleed. The Myth of the One-Dimensional Heavy Band There’s a lazy assumption that bands known for brutality can only operate in one emotional register. Loud. Fast. Angry. End of story. But that myth falls apart the moment you start digging into B-sides, bonus tracks, and deep cuts — the places where bands stop performing for the pit and start writing for themselves. These songs rarely make radio. They don’t headline playlists. They live in the margins. And that’s exactly why they matter. Slipknot: Beneath the Mask S...
Love Letters in Loud Volume: When Bands Around the World Cover the Songs They Love “ Love isn’t always soft. Sometimes it’s loud, distorted, and played at full volume.” February usually arrives wrapped in clichés — roses, slow dances, predictable playlists. But rock music has always expressed love differently. Not with whispers, but with amplifiers. Not with perfection, but with passion. And sometimes, the purest expression of that love isn’t an original song at all — it’s a cover. When a band chooses to reinterpret a legendary track, they’re doing something brave. They’re stepping into sacred territory. They’re saying: this song shaped us — now let us show you how. To kick off the month of love, here are six bands from around the world paying tribute to the music that raised them — not by copying it, but by rewriting it in their own language. These aren’t novelty covers. These are love letters in loud volume. 1. Nemophila (Japan) – “Master of Puppets” (Metallica) The spark that ...