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I've developed a growing fascination with the sheer number of extant and defunct metal bands. Since I spend a few hours every day parsing promotional e-mails and other types of band recommendation, my relationship with this ever-growing quantity is quite active. It mostly consists of rejection — practiced by me, perpetrated against bands. As time has gone on, my criteria for not listening to stuff have grown ever more numerous and fine-grained in their own right. (It's a self-defense tactic, applied to the issues we talked about here.)

My fascination with this subject has gotten a little unhealthy as of late. While going about my business of not listening to every promo I get, I've noticed myself rejecting possibilities based on their utterly generic names. Moongoat. Blood Hand. Nuclear Torment. Hate Storm. (There are two real Hate Storms, but I haven't listened to them.) You shall not pass, generically-named bands!

Eventually, I decided to start compiling a list of words that comprise generic metal band names. To do so, I turned to Metal Archives' band name search function, naturally. Metal Archives is perhaps the most powerful symbol of the effect that information technology has had on the metal world. The push-button access it provides to virtually every metal band that has ever existed bears considerable responsibility for demystifying the genre, which many metal publications (including this one) have lamented at times. But to me, it is an indispensable tool. Plus, it allows me to do ridiculous stuff like this.

When I initially started compiling this list, I initially intended to put together a set of 20 or 30 words that merely appeared over 100 times in Metal Archives's band name database. After reaching that target, I brought the list to the IO staff and half-jokingly suggested that we might be able to find 100 such words. We reached that target in less than two hours; I actually had to eliminate a number of lower-scoring words from contention.

Before we get to the list itself, a few notes on methodology:



—The most basic criterion was that a word had to return at least 100 entries for consideration. All of the words on the list do.

—Since many metal band names use combined words, like "Goatwhore," we used asterisk wildcards before and after each search term, as in *death*. This method produces a fair amount of data noise; for instance, searching for *fall* will turn up Fallujah, who don't really have the word 'fall' in their name. I opted for this method because it produces bigger numbers, which is fun, and it excludes fewer true hits.*

—I mostly tried to avoid three-letter words, since three-letter sequences are too common as ingredients of other words. I made exceptions for four words that I consider indispensably metal: "god," "war," "rot," and "ash." For these words, I attempted to even the playing field by removing the first wildcard — I searched for "god*" instead of "*god*", and so forth.

—For time/sanity's sake, I chose to eliminate words that only made it above the 100-entry mark if you searched for more than one variant of them. This removed combinations like "grey + gray" and "nuclear + nuke" from consideration.

—We stuck to words that can stand alone, grammatically speaking. The sole exception is "necro," which got a dispensation for the same reason that "war" and the other three-letter words listed above did.

This list also isn't remotely scientific or comprehensive; we just searched for the words that came to mind. For all I know, there's a word that appears even more often than "death," which 'won' the list with its 1,184 entries. But if there is, I'll be surprised and a little freaked out.

If you're curious, I compiled this post while listening to the new Jute Gyte album several times. I've known about Jute Gyte for a while, but Vast Chains is the first of his efforts that I've really focused on. It's some of the most insane-sounding black metal I've ever heard, thanks largely to Adam Kalmbach's use of microtonal guitars. Deathspell Omega and Gorguts's harmonies sound like the Beatles next to this stuff. (Note that both "Jute" and "Gyte" return only one entry on the Metal Archives band search function.)

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Now, on to the list. "Death," "black," and "dark" are our winners, with each returning over a thousand hits. A handful of observations follow the list proper. What words did we miss?

— Doug Moore

*Special thanks to Ian Chainey for pointing out the wildcard technique.

Thanks also to Wyatt Marshall, Vanessa Salvia, Joseph Schafer, Rhys Williams, and Matt Schmall for their contributions to the list.

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I compiled this list in large part so that other people could look at it and share anything interesting they notice, so I didn't spend much time analyzing it myself. (I'd love to see what a practiced Excel hand could come up with from this data.) The chief takeaways are obviously that there are so many metal bands, and that metal bands are so unoriginal. But here are a few other stray thoughts that came to mind while I put it together:



—This list is a forceful illustration of the English language's centrality to metal, despite its thoroughly international nature. How many words in other languages would return so many results? The British empire has declined and the American one is on its way, but their soft power remains potent.

—The words that did best were generally shorter words that appear in many different subgenre contexts. No word in the top 25 has more than 5 letters; at #26, "shadow" is the highest-ranking six-letter word.

—None of the words we searched for turned up 666 results. Lame!

—More than a hundred bands thought that their names should involve "psycho," "anger," or "noise." Sigh.

—A lot of seemingly unmetal words made the list: "child," "light," "white," "dream," "wind," "face." Sounds pretty relaxing!

—I was kind of relieved to find that none of the sexuality-based slurs I checked for ("slut," "whore," "bitch," "cunt," etc.) made the cut. Neither did any of the words commonly associated with Nazism, though I wasn't nearly as thorough about those.

Again, this list isn't comprehensive by any means. We almost certainly missed a lot of good examples. If you guys come up with enough high-ranking words that we didn't include, I'll update the list. Go!

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