Genres can be funny, blurry, pointless things — mostly unnecessary boxes that we put shit into just to make them easier to wrap our puny brains around. In 2018, music feels increasingly genreless, as artists like Deafheaven and Ho99o9 put all sorts of sounds, looks and influences through an industrial-strength blender as almost second nature. Metal, in particular, which can get very conservative and stuck in its own past, also has a long history of embracing other styles — from punk, goth, hip-hop, shoegaze, indie, EDM and beyond. It makes sense then that many of the best "metal" bands are barely metal at all, with nary a bullet belt or mullet or pointy logo in sight. With that in mind, we asked you to pick the single best metal band that isn't really a metal band, and below are your top five picks.
5. Death Grips
Since their formation in 2010, trying to hang on and predict what Death Grips will do next has proven to be a fruitless task. The experimental electronic-rap trio spit on the question of whether or not electronic synths are real instruments via writing modular bombs of energy, at times materializing in black metal-adjacent alternate realities like "Giving Bad People Good Ideas" or pitch-shifted acid trips in "More Than the Fairy."
4. Deftones
It's sometimes hard to reconcile the high-testosterone bro-riffs of Adrenaline with what Deftones would become on future albums. Little by little, the band would take pieces of influence from acts like the Cure and Cocteau Twins, slowly incorporating more ethereal atmospheric elements and more nuanced emotionality into their own music until it became a sound all their own. The wide-open roads of "Be Quiet and Drive Away" would lead to meditations on space in music on the likes of "Entombed" or "Riviére."
3. Alice in Chains
Sure, Jerry Cantrell has riffs, but at its core Alice in Chains is far from just a metal band. The overall rock feel to the band is one indication, but also the honest emotional range and the depth and breadth of subject matter and musicianship all indicate something far deeper than any single genre can contain. Alice in Chains is depression music through and through, and while that rears its ugly head within the metal genre, it certainly also does so within twee, rock, electronic and virtually every other musical approach.
2. Tool
Collective penchant for drop-d tuning, heavy distortion and double-time percussion aside, Tool aren't so much lords of the circle-pit as they are the surly, antisocial bastard children of the jam-band world, preaching Pink Floyd's labyrinthine prog by way of iconic grungers the Melvins. Not that that makes songs like "Prison Sex" and "Aenima" any less head-bangable.
1. Ghost
They might present as a foreboding cabal of masked, Satan-obsessed fiends, but the Swedish hard-rock clergy have been, and always will be, Popestars — emphasis on the "pop." If their ABBA covers and sing-along choruses don't persuade you, then a single spin of this year's album Prequelle should do the trick: no blast-beats, no screams, just hooks for days.
