Written By Lucien Drake
Hunting Metal was a bloodsport that only happened in the wild.
Local watering holes. Dive bars. The older guy with the patched vest who handed you a list of bands on a napkin like a sacred scroll. Word of mouth was currency.
Then came FM radio.
Vinyl.
Music magazines.
8-tracks, cassettes, CDs.
You worked to find something new. You didn’t “stumble onto a band.” You pursued one.
The First Digital Mutation
Then the internet kicked the doors wide open with mp3 blogs, message boards, obscure foreign label sites and suddenly music wasn’t regional anymore. It went global overnight.
MTV Was Still a Pilgrimage
And then MTV arrived and for a moment it felt like the future. Music videos became events. Premieres felt like holidays. You still had to show up. You still had to catch it live. There was still anticipation, timing and participation.
MySpace – The Last Time Social Media Was Punk
To be fair, early social media was a gift. MySpace was the first time the underground actually skipped the gatekeepers entirely. you didn’t need a label.
You didn’t need a magazine editor to “approve” you. You slapped three mp3s on your profile and suddenly you were in Sweden, São Paulo, and Kansas City in the same week.
Bands built entire careers off HTML glitter layouts and terrible neon fonts. It was punk as hell. Direct, messy, and weirdly honest.
Reddit – The Last Tavern
And then there’s Reddit. The last stubborn tavern where discovery still happens like it used to. Actual humans arguing over riffs. Links get dropped like contraband on subreddits r/metal. Bandcamp gems passed around like quaaludes in Altoids tins. The kind of thing only the initiated know how to find.
There’s no “viral video” nonsense. If something rises there, it’s because someone actually listened and cared enough to speak up.
Reddit is where discovery still tastes like sweat and risk, not like recycled algorithm syrup.
That’s the bridge because that’s the twist: the original web gave bands freedom the current web gives bands. That’s what real metal discovery feels like.
Exposure without sovereignty.
The death of Discovery
And then one day… discovery died.
Music stopped being hunted, it got sponsored. Effortless. Instant. Automatic. The algorithm spoon-fed what it thought you’d tolerate.
Music didn’t need to be found. It was just there like magic whether you asked for it or not.
The Dark Age – TikTok, IG Reels, Short-Form Hell
Then the dark age began.
TikTok, Facebook and IG Reels, YouTube, content designed for people who don’t actually listen, they just identify the song from a six second snippet like they’re on a game show.
Band discovery turned into: “what riff trends with the girl doing her makeup or lip syncing?”
Labels didn’t have to convince anyone anymore. They just hacked the attention slot machine long enough for you to scroll past and call it “discovered.”
Half of Gen Z thinks they “found” a band because an audio clip was used under a cat video. That’s not curation, that’s algorithmic mulch. And the funniest part? these same platforms pretend they’re the underground now.
It’s as if “hunting metal” happens because someone slapped a sludge riff under a time-lapse of them reorganizing a vinyl shelf they bought for the aesthetic.
The underground didn’t vanish, it just got drowned out by the noise of people mistaking exposure for taste.
And the real fans and crate divers, the ones still running dusty blogspot relics, Discord servers, Bulgarian label Bandcamp lists with forty monthly listeners, they’re the last true librarians.
Everyone else just eats whatever the feed vomits at them.
Labels boosting their own bands isn’t the problem. That’s literally their job, always has been. The rot is when that becomes the only metric.
When platforms flatten discovery into:“If it trends, it deserves to exist. If it doesn’t, it never happened.” So it’s not that promotion is evil. It’s that promotion replaced curation.
Taste used to be the spark. Now it’s whatever already has momentum gets even more and anything that hasn’t gone viral in 14 seconds is treated like a fabrication error.
The algorithm stopped behaving like a compass. It’s a vending machine now. Feed the right shape, get fame. Feed anything weird, get buried.
The Industry Became Beige
The industry loves this new reality because it means they don’t have to risk anything anymore. No more signing outsiders. No more trusting instinct. No more giving the odd kids a budget.
Now it’s, “does this band sound like three other bands that already went viral in 14 seconds? great. sign them. rinse. commodify.” Risk replaced by mimicry.
“Innovation” measured by how well you can replicate the last trend that got 4 million bored passive thumbs.
Facebook’s Context Blindness
Facebook punishes context blindly.
And here’s the part nobody at Meta will ever admit publicly: Their moderation Al cannot tell the difference between violent ideology and a subculture that references dark imagery for art.
So when metal pages post memes or references to controversial musicians, the system doesn’t evaluate intent, it triggers classification.
Context is irrelevant. Nuance is irrelevant and once you’re flagged, you’re not corrected, you’re throttled. Not banned, buried.
Facebook doesn’t publish a list of what triggers these suppressions. You find out the hard way and there is no mechanism to explain the difference between celebrating music vs endorsing crime.
And the saddest part is how many well meaning content creators, fans and bands have been punished simply for not knowing which bands are radioactive.
The Underground Never Needed Permission
Here’s the punchline the feed kids never understood. The underground never needed mainstream permission. The underground never needed MTV. The underground never needed viral clips. The underground never needed the spotlight. It thrived because it didn’t get invited.
The underground is a basement show in 1997 at 1:30 AM when somebody’s cousin hands you a dubbed tape and you hear a riff that rewires your skull.
It’s a dusty distro box in a record shop that smells like mildew and failed marriages.
“back then, hunting metal meant digging through tape trades…”
It’s a forum thread from 2008 where some anonymous Norwegian freak tells you about a demo that only exists on 17 CDRs. That’s discovery. Not the spoon-fed “for you” feed.
That’s the difference between being given music and finding it like treasure. In the end, this was always about hunting metal, not virality.
Prologue:
I’m not the type who waits for the world to tell me where to stand. I go find the weird corner that feels like oxygen and build something real there. The crate digger in the dusty back room looking for long-lost demos.
I’ve always been allergic to fitting in. That’s why all of this hurts so much. It’s not reach or analytics, it’s getting punished for refusing to flatten your taste.
And yet I’m still here, still writing, still excavating and still stubbornly keeping the archive lit.
If there’s an island of misfit toys, I’m not just on it. I’m the one keeping the damn lighthouse burning.
“If you feel this in your bones. You’re one of us.”