The aim of the study is to describe metal music albums of the year 2018 from the genre, textual and artistic aspects, looking for the common and diverse in the Latvian metal music world.
It is recognised that there is still no unified collection of Latvian rock and metal music resources, and that makes the researcher’s work more interesting.
Even though only ten metal albums came out in 2018, their metal styles are quite wide-ranging from symphonic metal and through thrash, groove, industrial metal to classic heavy metal, which is also played in an acoustic format.
Album designs, in the author’s opinion, are classic but qualitative and do not damage the first impression, especially designs of those albums that were released on physical media.
Because physical media is becoming an exclusive case, the trend continues to sell albums only in digital format (at least at first); this has been done by the bands “Revelation Attic”, “Yomi”, “Seira”, “NUVO”.
Perhaps knowing that Latvia is too small to live on music only, as well as wishing to expand their audience and be noticed abroad, the 5 of the albums in question are recorded in English.
The debuts of several newly formed bands (“Seira”, “Revelation Attic”, “Māra”) confirm the unlost interest in metal music and also show the attempts of these groups to build their way to Latvian and the world metal music scene, which manifests in their search for a strange sound (“NUVO”) or a strong female vocal use (“Oceanpath”, “Seira”, “Māra”).
In general, Latvian metal music representatives continue the world’s metal music traditions, where it is extremely difficult to surprise because the number of existing bands is so large that it is almost impossible to be original, while the population of the planet is so big that many bands can access the listener so that each band also searches for its audience, both online and in concerts.
Jeremy Wallach, Harris M. Berger and Paul D. Greene, eds. 2011. Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 381pp. ISBN 978-0-8223-4733-0 (pbk)