Set your TARDIS to go back to the 1980s or early 1990s. There is no public internet; dial-up bulletin boards are not yet widely known. Your only source of news is either the mainstream, or tiny xeroxed magazines published by citizen volunteers.

Zines were the only source of news about underground metal for a long time. Knitted together by a postal network of letter-writers and tape traders, they united bands and fans for a genre that was too small and too alienated for the mainstream press.

We’ve put together an archive of metal zines from the classic period. It’s a free text directory tree, so there’s no fancy navigation, just the raw PDFs and JPGs themselves.