Metal Nerdery Podcast

“There were some heroes and there were some zeroes…”   BACK TO THE BEGINNING, the final concert performance by the O.G. lineup of BLACK SABBATH featuring Bill Ward, Geezer Butler, Tony Iommi, and Ozzy Osbourne (along with an all-star roster of top shelf rock & metal artists) was held at Villa Park in Aston, Birmingham, England on 05/07/2025 (that’s July 5th, 2025 for people in the United State...

“If you’ve got a whole room full of 10’s, that’s the 5…”   We’ve all been there. Every one of us have experienced an album where it was “almost perfect” front to back, yet there was that one song that blemished its perfection and brought it down a notch.  Granted, some songs may not fit relative to the context of an album and should have never been included to begin with, while others may have bee...

“I thought it was gonna be tight…” 1982 –Michael Jackson releases what would become the biggest selling album in music history with Thriller, Survivor and Olivia Newton John are locked in their own HEAD-TO-HEAD DEATH MATCH on the Billboard Charts with Eye of the Tiger & Let’s Get Physical, and IRON MAIDEN and JUDAS PRIEST, two of the greatest twin guitar attacks in all of  metal, both release...

“I’ll take your ‘Lord of This World’ and raise you ‘After Forever’…”   From “The Moses story” to “the shortest verse in The Good Book” to one of the creepiest spoken word intros in all of metal which references end time prophecy, the impact of GOD IN METAL can be found everywhere, no matter how subtle or obvious, positive or negative.   Whether it’s an album cover, a band’s name, a song, or even d...

“If they’re not fat, they’re soft…” Think back to The Sunset Strip and the emerging metal scene of the early 80’s, full of sleaze, shred, and riffs, long before the emergence of the “serious glam” and “serious thrash” of the mid to late 80’s. METAL HEALTH and OUT OF THE CELLAR, released in 1983 and 1984, by QUIET RIOT and RATT (respectively) both preceded the hair metal movement of the late 80’s a...

“It was almost too big…” Get ready for a rebuttal from “Captain Backpedal” after being challenged to a fight on a “goat farm”, discover the “magic number” required to transform your twanglification levels “from sea level to skyrocket”, remember that “four fingers is all it takes”, understand that “convenience can be creepy”, and prepare to “plug it into the house backline” and park it in “The Red...

“It’s like the Sam Kinison meets Bobcat Goldthwait of dogs…”   Bridging the gap between the thrash metal of the late 80’s and early 90’s and the tidal wave of groove metal that made landfall in the metal community during the early 90’s (courtesy of Pantera), MACHINE HEAD came screaming out of the gate on August 9th, 1994, with their blisteringly crushing debut, BURN MY EYES.    Filled with brutall...

“Wait, the reason you cut your hair was for 2 dudes?”   It’s officially our 6th anniversary! That’s right, 6 years of metal discussions, ludicrous nonsense, and beers of the episode, and what better way to wrap up our 6th year in podcasting excellence than with STEEL PANTHER, the parody band that helped make 80’s hair metal FUN again, with every hyperbolic metal cliché you can think of that makes...

“You’ll be divorced, alone, and flaccid…” Let’s go back a few years, back to a time when we were young and impressionable and just starting out on our respective metal odysseys as fans and purveyors of all things metal, including (but not limited to) the hard rock of our childhood years in the late 70’s to the plethora of NWOBHM, thrash, and other classic metal bands we discovered during our teen...

“If anything, it’s three 7’s…and one of them has a line in the middle…”   This episode is effectively “nonverbal” in that it contains zero lyrics and is truly beyond words (so to speak). That’s right, it’s all about INSTRUMENTALS and it just so happens that they come in a wide variety of styles and options.  On a studio album, INSTRUMENTALS are 7enerally either lon7er, extended, standalone musical...

“You’re not supposed to swallow it…but it’s fine to have it in your mouth.”   Whether it’s the debut from Metal Church or Dream Theater, or the swansong from Slayer or Pantera, TERRY DATE is undoubtedly one of the most prominent and prolific producers, engineers, and mixers of metal music to have blessed the ears of metal fans for more than 40 years.   Get ready for “a little origami”, remember th...

“I know who you’re talking about!”   So, we did a thing… After almost 6 years into this podcast, this is the first time we’ve ever done a BREAKDOWN of a single track, and what better way to kick things off than SLAYER’s ANGEL OF DEATH, which is without question “one of the most perfect thrash metal songs EVER written” and also just happens to be the killer opener on one of the most perfect thrash...

“Let me see your mouth…”    Prepare to learn the proper “order of operations” with regard to relaxers and hear some hilarious post 4/20 tales that will force you to make some “executive decisions” about the rest of your day. Understand the reason a “jigger” needs to be rinsed out after every use, why you should never utter that word near the hearing impaired, and why “Black Power Metal” isn’t what...

“One’s a dude, right? I want the one that’s NOT the dude…”   DOWN III: OVER THE UNDER, the 3rd studio offering from southern fried doom lords DOWN, has a very 70’s centric feel from start to finish. From the songs and the production to the album cover, OVER THE UNDER might just be the most 70’s influenced and 70’s sounding DOWN album ever recorded.    Time to fire up the “bowrider” and begin prepa...

Summary: “I’m sorry, what was that? No, the second part…the part that came after that…”   METALCORE seems to be all over the place, in that its components are quite varied and cover a broad spectrum of everything that has historically made metal awesome: double bass drumming, guitar shred, breakdowns and mosh parts, and sometimes even some emo screaming and heartfelt vocals sung straight from the...

WE SOLD OUR SOUL FOR BON SCOTT (a continuation of our AC/DC Side 1: The Bon Scott Years episode from way back in 2020) is OUR greatest hits package from the iconic Bon Scott Years of AC/DC. And because we couldn’t include ALL of the tracks from this legendary era, there were quite a few that unfortunately got “Shot Down In Flames”. Having said that, we still managed to include everything we felt S...

“If this is their 9th studio album, where does it rank?”  DEATH MAGNETIC, the Rick Rubin produced 9th studio album from Bay Area metal titans METALLICA (and the first studio album featuring Robert Trujillo on bass) is chock full of riffs, tons of ugly chords, a boatload of guitar solos, and loads of twin guitar harmonies that harken back to the thrash metal veterans legendary 80’s output, with a s...

In 1995, Los del Rio infected popular dance culture with their one-hit wonder, “The Macarena”, the U.S. national debt was only $5,000,000,000,000 (five trillion), both eBay and Craigslist were birthed into popular culture, Taco Bell offered The Volcano Burrito and The Double Decker Taco menu items for a limited time (each for less than $1.00, btw), and O.J. Simpson was acquitted thanks (in no smal...

After 50 years, it’s great to see PENTAGRAM finally getting the attention they deserve from all across the world wide web. LIGHTNING IN A BOTTLE, the band’s latest offering and their first album in nearly a decade, arrived on the scene mere weeks before a video surfaced that went viral, showing founding member and frontman Bobby Liebling (wide-eyed and seemingly possessed) powering through “The Gh...

Formed in 1981 and hailing from Downey, California (the birthplace of the mighty Hetfield), thrash masters DARK ANGEL unleashed a darker, faster, more aggressive sounding brand of thrash, with a sound initially reminiscent of the death metal aesthetic present in Slayer’s early work and later evolving into a more progressive, technical thrash sound resembling the latter part of Death’s catalog.   ...

SAILING THE SEAS OF CHEESE, the 2nd beautifully bizarre edition of “the Sunday funny papers of metal”, brought to you by El Sobrante, California’s genius weirdo trio, PRIMUS, is the gold standard of the eccentric sound of “boxless” progressive, funk metal overtones filtered through a heroic dose of psychedelic infused absurdity and combined with an ample sized bowl of surreal silliness.   With dru...

“Don’t make it weird…”   “They all wear jumpsuits, they’re kinda like KISS because you don’t know what they look like, but they kinda look like serial killers because they all have masks on, and you kinda get Purge vibes when you look at it (the album cover), and then you LISTEN to it…”   SLIPKNOT as a band is extremely off-putting, exhausting, and quite frankly, disturbing, and their self-titled...

As with life, “ Left Turns ” and WTF MOMENTS occur constantly in the world of metal. Whether it’s a radical, stylistic change to a band’s sound, any sort of unforeseen tragedy, or “Ozzy just being Ozzy” in the presence of winged, flying creatures, there is certainly no shortage of WTF MOMENTS lurking around every corner throughout the metal community.   It’s time to find out why some “poon juice”...

DOOMSDAY FOR THE DECEIVER, the debut album from FLOTSAM & JETSAM, was released on July 4, 1986, after being recorded in just a mere 2 weeks with a paltry $12,000 budget. In short, it is a bona fide, legendary, thrash masterpiece. And if you’re reading this and thinking “Okay, FLOTSAM & JETSAM…why does that sound familiar?”, the reason is because the bass player for that band would later be...

For the longest time, metal has been predominantly a “dude game”, dominated by men. Thankfully, more and more female fronted metal bands (particularly over the last couple of decades) have been expanding their presence and growing into a formidable force throughout the metal community, covering a variety of styles and a multitude of subgenres from all across the metal spectrum.    Get ready to fin...