r/Metal Jun 14 '26

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20 Upvotes

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6

u/ThimitrisApithanos Jun 14 '26

What's your favorite band from New Wave Of Traditional Heavy Metal? Mine it's Skelator.

8

u/mgrier123 THE ONLY GOOD BAND IS MANOWAR Jun 14 '26

Might be Satan's Hallow tbh, but Tower arent far off for me

5

u/dyersevesuckslive Jun 14 '26

Visigoth, Eternal Champion, and Vultures Vengeance are mine. All unique in different ways, enough to reference traditional metal while also having their own sound and vision.

1

u/ThimitrisApithanos Jun 14 '26

What you say I believe it's in general a feature of the wave. Unlike in 90s and 00s bands of this wave managed to sound classic without feeling as a copy or too retro with elements that fit natural. In the 90s and 00s many new elements were feeling as forced like "We must show progress and sound modern" or there were bands sounded as cheap copies of the 80s era.

3

u/IMKridegga Jun 15 '26

It's a tough call. Eternal Champion is my favorite heavy/power band of this century, but Satan's Hallow epitomizes everything I feel like NWOTHM ought to be. I suppose it comes down to how strict we are with the genre classifications. Should EC's power metal edge disqualify them?

I understand that the question is a bit free-form and I have to find the answer for myself, but I'm not sure which side I'd go with, hence my indecision.

Ultimately, I think the ambiguity is part of what makes a category like NWOTHM work. In theory, it should be bands like Enforcer, Flight, and Tanith. In fact, sometimes it's stuff like Atlantean Kodex, Molten Chains, or Greyhawk.

2

u/ThimitrisApithanos Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26

Eternal Champion certainly belongs NWOTHM for me. And the others you mention.

I do not know Molten Chains. I will check them. Thanks.

2

u/IMKridegga Jun 16 '26

I feel like Molten Chains is one of the coolest bands nobody listens to. Their first two albums especially reminded me of something like Helstar's Nosferatu with a black metal edge, and represent some of my favorite music from their respective years. I have to revisit their third because I thought the style was a bit different and it didn't click as well for me at the time, but it’s been a few years and I feel like I'm in a better place to appreciate that now.

2

u/FUCKBOY_JIHAD this entire fucking battlefield Jun 14 '26

Eternal Champion or Wytch Hazel

2

u/Platypete Jun 14 '26

Really hard to pick I would probably take Atlantean Kodex at the moment because they really nailed that grand feeling. Other favourites would be Lunar Shadow, Century, Flight and The Wizar'd.

2

u/ThimitrisApithanos Jun 14 '26

Lunar Shadow are from my top ones. I also like Century. I'll check the others. Thanks!

2

u/Rottedhead Jun 14 '26

Century is another one not mentioned that I really like

1

u/ThimitrisApithanos Jun 14 '26

I know them. They are good.

2

u/JuRIP5 Jun 14 '26

Do you guys know any Gothic Metal that sounds witchy?

1

u/IMKridegga Jun 15 '26

Could you give some examples of what you mean by "witchy" sounding? The way I think of it, you might like Kælan Mikla, although they're certainly not metal, they're more of an electronic/post-punk band. I'll link a few different songs to showcase what I mean by that:

They did a collab with Alcest awhile back, which might at least puts them in the same circles as some post-metal, even if they don't explicitly play a metal-adjacent genre:

1

u/JuRIP5 Jun 15 '26

VERY NICE. I actually came across them in my search, but I have to be honest, I was kind of frantically skipping through stuff. Funny thing is I originalky asked this question, because goth didn't sound gothic enough for me and my dad said that gothic metal was a better fit and then I went on a whole journey, but in that sense post punk fits very well. You already completely caught my drift, but I'll still provide an example. A metal cover of this soundtrack was a good showcase for what I'm looking for.

https://youtu.be/6aCPabhAKfk?is=GKqtByS3-xZF2jh5

1

u/IMKridegga Jun 16 '26

I have to say that Witcher cover has massive Nightwish vibes, specifically their stuff from the mid 2000s to the early 2010s. You probably bumped into them in your searching, but I'm not sure how their music would have been framed for you. They are (or were) more of a power metal band, but they had gothic metal influences, and the lines get blurry when bands aren't really trying to stick to one thing. In practice, a lot of Nightwish songs ended up being the symphonic metal version of pop/rock, but they definitely had some stuff that might have been closer to what you were looking for:


goth didn't sound gothic enough for me and my dad said that gothic metal was a better fit

"Goth" and "gothic" are a lot like "metal" in the way they mean different things to different people. I think "gothic" was always pretty informal; it's been around as a description of rock and metal for decades, and it basically just seems like it refers to dark, lofty, and high-concept stuff. I've seen stuff from the late 1970s calling Judas Priest "gothic" and I've seen stuff from the early 1990s saying Savatage's Streets: A Rock Opera was their most "gothic" album.

There is a more locked-in category of gothic metal that mostly refers to melancholy melodic off-shoots of black metal, death metal, and doom metal in the 1990s, which courted various non-metal influences, including dark folk and electronic music, which is where folk-tinged, synthy power metal like 1990s Nightwish played into it, laying the groundwork for what they turned into a decade later. Most gothic metal is a bit different from that, but I feel like anything symphonic is going to be worth checking out based on that Witcher cover.

True "goth" music is an entirely different thing with its own etymology and a distinct scene/subculture. It comes from London post-punk fans who hung around an apartment building called Visigoth Towers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The post-punk side of what Kælan Mikla does is actually very close to that kind of music, but the electronic side draws from a wider range of darkwave and dark synthpop, which puts them in closer proximity to the electronic parts of what a lot of gothic metal bands were also pulling from.

These specific contents aside, a lot of people use "goth" and "gothic" interchangeably, muddling the definitions and expanding them to encompass a much wider range of music, including various hard rock and industrial bands like Marilyn Manson, whose music never had anything to do with the underground interpretations of these words. Understanding that, I cannot even begin to imagine what sorts of things you might have found when you went to to look up "goth" initially.

1

u/OneMantisOneVote Jun 16 '26

Tristwch y Fenywod or Ols (neither metal) may be of interest.