chantel nouseforaname’s Reviews > For The Sake of Heaviness: The History of Metal Blade Records > Status Update

“Granted, we haven’t always been at the point of the arrow of change. After all, a diehard like me is going to be a little resistant sometimes (as illustrated by my reluctance to flush vinyl in the late 1980s), but Metal Blade has always made changes when necessary. We’ve been open to new partnerships, alliances, and ideas, all in the spirit of selling records and championing the heavy metal genre.”

This segment really explodes the boys club and making the men in your life rich. The more you read this— the more you realize just how little women are involved in this book, unless they’re someone’s girlfriend or wife. I guess y’all weren’t even checking for women in metal?? Notably, there’s not a TON of women in metal, but there’s enough and they never seem to intersect with Metal Blade in this book.

Hardcore brought with it a “We’re in this together” mentality of brotherhood, while metal had the music to fuse with that spirit. The rumblings started in 2000 …
When we signed acts like As I Lay Dying (2003), The Black Dahlia Murder (2003), and Unearth (2004), I was as excited about metal as I’d ever been in the past.

My gripe is the misogyny and white supremacy in the hardcore scene 🤷🏽‍♀️

..bands like Lamb of God, Unearth, and As I Lay Dying—two of which we signed—you could tell there was a groundswell of something new on the way. There was a mix of metal and hardcore at play, and the reason it all worked, sparking a major resurgence in the 2000s, was that you had bands that were influenced on a sociological level by hardcore, but at the same time were shaped by a lot of the early metal stuff.

We saw that coming, and we didn’t want to do it. We wanted to dictate our terms and our art. Brian went to bat for Gwar and said, “Screw our distribution deal with Time Warner. We’ll find another distributor.” And then they put out the record, with the song on it. That says everything about what kind of label Metal Blade is.

Talk about no gatekeeping! Just pure shameless promotion for the love of it, to help the thing you love grow. I love the discussion about how Brian Slagel signed death metal band Cannibal Corpse. Pretty awesome.

When Metallica released Master of Puppets in 1986 and went on the road opening for Ozzy, you could tell they were going to be a monstrous band. … It absolutely exploded. It was no longer a case of there being a bunch of struggling bands playing in their own private underground echo chamber. The metal scene had become something very significant.

Metal Blade was kicking ass and taking names in the metal scene and had no budget. I respect the hustle. I feel like there’s a lot of quiet subtext present on how much of an influence Latin Americans had on various forms of metal coming out of Cali in the 80s/90s Tom Araya & Slayer being one of the best selling, most discussed & most innovative. Brian Slagel is humble and realistic about the reach of small labels.

Really cool, all about these early days of Metal Blade Records 🤘🏽