Whilst early metal music may have been fairly one-dimensional, in 2025 I put it to you that there is probably a sub-genre of metal for everyone.
There was a study ‘Charting the Universe of Metal Music Lyrics and Analyzing Their Relation to Perceived Audio Hardness’ by Isabella Czedik-Eysenberg, Oliver Wieczorek, Arthur Flexer and Christoph Reuter published in 2024 which scanned through 124,288 song lyrics and mapped them out. It also charted the perceived heaviness of the songs.
It then plotted the various themes covered by these songs on a grid against the subgenre in Figure 6.
If you were ever wondering what to listen to, but had a psychological itch you needed to scratch, Figure 6 may help you figure it out.
However, the answer is probably going to be Insomnium and their extraordinary album from 2014, ‘Shadows of the Dying Sun’.
All the pain and suffering;
Will dispirit or feed you, dispirit or feed you;
For each and every time your failures will craft you;
When the fear of them is gone, fear is gone.