How heavy do you get? How heavy is ‘heavy’ for you?
I’m just asking, because this blog may end up being too much for you. I’m serious. The levels of sonic violence and doom unleashed within this article are unapologetically intense, and I will be making no concessions for decorum. I’m not tracing the origins of metal here, nor putting these into some sort of cohesive order or progression.
No, consider this article instead to be the repeated lashings of a sonic whip upon your very soul, and with each connection, you absolve yourself in the twisted mercy of the mosh. Surrender to the molten, crackling, pummelling music and emerge mightier than ever.
The 13 Heaviest Songs Ever Written, at a Glance
Shitstorm - Strapping Young Lad
Where Strides the Behemoth - Mastodon
Bleed (20% Slower) - Meshuggah
Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel - Behemoth
Roots Bloody Roots - Sepultura
Return Trip - Electric Wizard
I’ve begun today’s ordeal with the true spiritual successors to Black Sabbath: Electric Wizard. I was stuck between a couple of their songs for inclusion today - mainly Dope Throne and Funeralopolis - but the bassline in Return Trip sealed the unholy deal for me. We are going heavier than this, but it’s not a bad start…
Shitstorm - Strapping Young Lad
When Devin Townsend fans cry about him not playing SYL stuff live any more, it’s songs like this that make me want to join in with the whining. I mean, this is just monstrously heavy, and super-accomplished too, which makes it even more sickening. Good metal generally requires a high level of musical dexterity, but this lot are like Olympians of brutality.
Also, is it just me or is Devin’s guitar sound the PERFECT metal tone?
Dopesmoker - Sleep
No particular point of this epic song/album counts as being the heaviest ever. It’s the accumulation of riff after unrelenting riff for a total of 62 minutes FOR A SINGLE SONG that marks this out as a subversive metal masterpiece. Lean into the Dune vibes, understand the relentless hypnotism of the music, and just go with it.
Where Strides the Behemoth - Mastodon
Mastodon have such a wide crossover appeal, that it’s easy to forget how frightening they can sound when they really go for it. This cut is from Remission, their feral, sludge metal early days debut album. This song is as raw as tree bark, and has possibly the greatest riff the band ever wrote towards the end of the track.
13 Globes - Portal
If the denizens of Mordor listen to metal - and of course they do - then I have a feeling that Portal would do well to focus some touring energy that way. On the one hand, this is classic blackened death metal with one foot dipped in the swamp and the other in the grave. On the other hand, the riffs are so strange and anachronistic - with just the right amount of syncing and falling apart - to sound like the end of the world in slow motion.
Your Property - Swans
There are a great many ways to be impossibly heavy, and in my book, Swans are about as heavy as it gets. This near-impenitrable track is from a terrifying album called Cop, and for me, this slice of sheer brutalism sums up the album’s overall mood pretty succinctly.
Vocalist Michael Gira sounds like he is quite earnestly trying to self-exorcise demons from his body throughout the song. The wall of atonal guitars is itself a thing of beauty: it’s like they have no particular pitch at all, and also contain every pitch ever.
It’s not exactly first-dance stuff at your uncle’s wedding, but for uncompromisingly heavy music - that relies on no metal genre tropes - this is the real deal. And then some.
Bleed (20% Slower) - Meshuggah
I find myself including Meshuggah in a lot of blogs, but it’s because they are genuinely game-changing musicians in the world of metal. That said, this doesn’t mean that their immensity cannot be improved upon, and this cheeky video is proof.
Some absolute legend has taken the relentlessly crushing Bleed and simply slowed it down by 20%. Honestly, nothing is lost here at all: it simply gets even more savage. If you think you know this tune well, give this version a go, and then start a petition to get ALL of Meshuggah’s music slowed down!
Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel - Behemoth
Polish blackened death metallers Behemoth are always an intense proposition. They’ve done faster songs than this, and they’ve done louder songs than this. But have you ever heard vocalist Nergal sounding quite as incensed? This song’s combination of vocal and drum performance are what make it such a heavy-ass song. Add in some very unholy sounding choral elements and blasts of brass (presumably invoking the titular trumpet) and you have a tune of such menace, that it’s quite singular.
Sarcophagus - Nile
Wow. The second half of this song sounds like a musical interpretation of all of the plagues of Egypt happening at once. This is some truly pulverising stuff, with a vocal that I can only describe as ‘subterranean’. The slower this song gets, the heavier it goes. Never has a tune better suited its title.
Everlasting - Thergothon
This one is all about the vocals. The first thing you hear is a loud and eerie death rattle, as if we’ve disturbed some grouchy corpse who just wanted to be left to rot in peace. Then, as the momentously dirge-like music stomps onward, the verses begin. Alongside the clean vocals are a track of these ‘dead guy’ vocals too, as funereal and caked in mud as a voice performance can reasonably be. There’s a wonderful sense of dark theatre to it all, and the slow pace of it just makes the whole experience indescribably heavy.
Roots Bloody Roots - Sepultura
There are many ways in which a song can be heavy, we know this already. Well, this tune manages it in a number of ways. It starts off angry and heavy, with buzzing, detuned guitars, and then it’s like a hinge in the floor drops and we fall onto a groove that’s the same but ten times heavier.
Max Cavalera has one of the heaviest voices in music, and on this tune he is talking about the idea of staying close to your cultural roots and honouring where you come from. This is a proudly defiant message of course, and only adds to the heaviness. Then, we have the coup de grace: an ending in half-time, which completely doubles down on how heavy this tune is.
Cut Hands - Deftones
I’m the first to admit that I lean on the Deftones magisterial song Diamond Eyes for articles like this. It happens to have one of the most crushing, dinosaur-like riffs in history, along with yet another example of how going half-time at the end of a song just destroys the world in terms of heaviness.
But even I get tired of repeating the same thing over and over, so I’m super-happy to report on this tune instead. Cut Hands comes from their most recent album, Private Music. It’s a variation on the same stomping theme, and goes to prove that Deftones are still one of the mightiest propositions around.
Angel of Death - Slayer
Sonically, Angel of Death is obviously one pissed-off slice of 80s thrash metal. Listening in retrospect, it’s easy to forget in these 8-string guitar days that a standard instrument in Eb can still sound brutal. Crushing! Add the air raid siren solo and we’re talking about some intense heaviness.
But Angel of Death goes far further in the heavy stakes, due to its notorious subject matter. The song is about the objectively evil Nazi ‘doctor’ Josef Mengele, whose crimes against humanity I’m sure do not need recounted here. The lyrics don’t mess around, and add an unbelievable heaviness to the already savage sound.
It’s all Good, Clean Fun
Those were my picks. I decided early on that the likes of Slipknot and Metallica were nothing like heavy enough for this blog. Get real. And I love Metallica.
Were these choices heavy enough for you? Obviously, there’s a whole catacomb of heavy music that I didn’t have space to represent, but did I touch on some acceptable choices? I wanted to pay service to some more underground acts, as well as share the point that heaviness can be found in different sources.
Regardless, if you made it through all of that, then there is obviously something deeply wrong with you, I mean, you are obviously a TRVE METAL fan. I salute you.
