Metal Today

Metal is one of rock's most enduring genres — built on the core values of power, virtuosity and showmanship, it has nonetheless nurtured an exceptional talent for adaptability, as if ingrained with a fail-safe Darwinian survival mechanism. So, as the 21st Century starts to pick up an awesome head of steam, we find metal as robust as ever, thanks to trail-blazers like Australian hard/stoner rockers Wolfmother who, with the exception of founder member Andrew Stockdale, took an all-new line-up into second album Cosmic Egg (2009), featuring "New Moon Rising", Yorkshire doom metal merchants My Dying Bride ("Bring Me Victory") and tongue-in-cheeky Steel Panther ("Death to All But Metal").

Step into our Next Steps dungeon for a blast of Devildriver, and a confrontation with HIM.

One of the great facets of metal is the level of invention that can unite multiple styles into one distinctive sound — and in the case of Devildriver, who stir elements of groove metal, thrash metal and melodic death metal into their brew, that sound gets progressively heavier with every new release: check out the relentless title track from 2009's pummel-package, Pray for Villains. With eighth album Venus Doom (2007) Helsinki's HIM expressly set out to combine elements of My Bloody Valentine and Metallica, producing such splendid fare as "Bleed Well", while New Found Glory fuse emo with spirited pop-punk on "I'm the Fool" from the Bonus Track Version of 2009's Not Without a Fight.

There's some Scandinavian operatic heft, and a Tsarist head-trip, among our modern metal Deep Cuts.

There's no place for trepidation here, among our current metal Deep Cuts . . . for you will find Swedish power metal specialists HammerFall, adding extra heft to their heaviness with blasts of operatic choral magnificence on "By Any Means Necessary", and sludge/stoner specialists Mastodon, who emerged as a force during the New Wave of American Heavy Metal during the mid-'90s then pressed on hard into the 21st Century, mixing melodic complexity and conceptual ambition in equal measure: the incredible "Divinations" comes from 2009's Crack the Skye, which takes its thematic cues from Tsarist Russia. Boston-based post-hardcore crew Vanna keeps its maelstrom bubbling with "Like Changing Seasons".

Metal remains as permanent and massive as a tectonic plate . . . but like a tectonic plate, the genre has shifted over the years, causing a series of powerful seismic ripples through the rock landscape, and this selection of current artists brings us bang up to speed, spanning the granite-lined abyss that contains an ever-churning lava flow of sub-genres. The groundwork laid down by metal gods Led Zep, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath has led us, inexorably, to the fiery pastures where now graze fully paid-up members of the devil's own horn-flashing, satanic herd. All of these bands will bend your brains, rupture your ears, blast your bones, and when you've recovered, you'll ask them to do it all over again. And again. In this space, everyone can hear you scream.