I'm not a true metal man. More of an academic interest. Convince me on which subgenre will rule them all.

Due to my age and friend group/bands I played in for a while, metalcore made the most impact on me. From about 1996-2002 there seemed to be a healthy competition to push things forward, but still keeping things firmly in the punk/DIY world. Hydra Head Records was probably the best distillation of that, even if they took themselves a bit too seriously at times. Occasionally I'd venture into the more purist Metal scene or shows and found it entirely unpleasant: way more closed-off to outside influences, even more male dominated, politically boneheaded, so much long hair and camo, etc.

From that point on I mostly liked heavy bands that 'true' metalheads wouldn't take seriously. And I'm fine with that.

I have what can loosely be described as a frenemy. I like him, but whenever we get together we're like two screaming bottle rockets with the sticks broken off. Personally, I feel this is sexual tension, but whatever. Anyway, he plays in a band which he thinks makes him cool or whatever. So, at this time he was living in a different country and he was coming back to America for a visit. He contacts me (outside of anyone fucking else that he knows more intimately) and asks if I could put him up for a while. I already had plans for the weekend but figured that maybe we were finally gonna bang it out, so I acquiesced.

So, we're catching-up and start talking about High on Fire which leads to a general discussion about metal. I get on a NWOBHM kick and this bitch tells me those bands aren't metal. What makes it worse is the way he says "meTal," putting a hard accent on the "T." Maiden? They ain't meTal The fuck? Like, are you putting me on or something? You're in a good band, you know music, what the fuck are you talking about? He then claims - while repeatedly saying "meTal" - that melodic bands can't be meTal. I hate him, but I also want action.

Anyways, overall I like music played with traditional instruments creating hooks and melody. Blast it with noise or make it heavy, if it has a certain musicality about it I'm taking notes. I dig metal. Heavy metal. Hard rock. Thrash. Speed. Sleaze. Whatever was happening in the 70's & 80's underground or on the streets I gave it a sit down.

Had to google white metal. Voted proto/hard rock.

I don’t listen to a lot of metal, so the inclusion of “proto/hard rock” in the poll options makes the answer obvious for me.

Of what I would consider true metal subgenres up there, thrash and doom would probably be next, in that order.

Is Tommy Bolin metal? Whatever Tommy Bolin was.

^ Since we are asking questions, how about including these in the poll options?

- Hair
- Pat Boone

kvlt guys have the worst sense of humor but are profoundly bangworthy. Looking for weird? Find you a longhaired, denim-wearing, blackout tattoo-having, Burning Witch-listening man. A man's man.

I'm going thrash because you can't fuck with Artillery's Fear of Tomorrow. I agree that gatekeepers can piss up a rope.

I came to like the metal that I like the long way. I'm 48, so there was a LOT of metal around when I was a kid in Junior high and high school, but it never connected with me, and most of the kids who were into it seemed like they were playing dress up more than anything. They all had the same jeans, the same black high tops, etc. There was a conformity about it that also put me off - I thought of myself as a non conformist punk rock kid and where I went to school there was a division between the metal kids, the punk rock kids, the comic kids, etc. HS is like that tho, and now I see that a lot of us were really coming from the same place - I think kids are better about that these days.

I've always liked some of the proto bands (if that's where they belong) like Sabbath and Zep and AC/DC, but even that was kind of at a distance - except for Zeppelin, who I loved from the beginning.

FF to 2014 and I go see Swans for the first time, and they blew my absolute mind. Super heavy without being metal, loud and punishing, but without all the tropes and cliches of metal that had put me off for so long. That show re-invigorated my love for music that had been waning, and I sought out to find more stuff like it.

From there, I started checking out Swans adjacent and inspired stuff that led me to Neurosis, Godflesh, ISIS , Sleep/OM/High on Fire, SUMAC, and I started to really gravitate to it - I found that for guitar based music, they were doing more inventive and exploratory things than I'd heard in a long time and I was really taken with that. I worked kind of backwards from there and the branches on my metal tree keep growing, but I feel like I'm still a newb to the whole thing still almost 10 years later.

I don't care about the wanky technical stuff, but I feel like there's an absolute ton out there I still need to see whether I like or not - this place is great for that.

I personally see a connecting lineage between the DIY mindset of the 80's underground and a lot the modern metal bands that are still out there grinding out a living. There's a lot of overlap in that venn diagram.

I'm adding post-metal and metalgaze cause everyone loves a hybrid.