For a little while now, I have been wanting to apply fancy data analysis methods to heavy metal lyrics. Most metal lyrics have a very specific focus on some topic not usually considered in songs you might hear on the radio (e.g., fantasy, rebellion, violence, or blasphemy).

Websites like DarkLyrics and The Metal Archives: Encyclopaedia Metallum have lyrics from thousands of artists and even more thousands of albums. “Extreme” subgenres (like Death or Black metal) have existed for 30 years, meaning there have been tons and tons of bands writing really crazy (awesome) stuff.

Well, the wait is over! Over the past few days, I put together a simple web scraper and downloaded millions of words’ worth of lyrics from thousands of bands. The final count for this post includes 17.2 million words from 7,000 bands and 23,000 albums. It’s not as comprehensive as Metal Archives’ list but it’s pretty good for a start.

And now we can generate rankings for the categories of lyrical content that really matter: Judas Priest, Highlander, Spooky, Violence, and Blasphemy. I’ll explain a little more about the categories below.

Special Thanks

Thanks to Matt O. for his encouragement and creativity. He defined the categories and had lots of great ideas (as he always does)!

Scoring

The metric in this case was simple:

1. For a given category, hand-pick some key words that are most representative of the themes in that category.

2. Count the total number of times any of those words appear in a band’s lyrics. This will bias towards bands that write long songs or have been around for a long time.

3. Optionally normalize to the total number of words (excluding common words) totaled across all the band’s songs. This will emphasize bands that focus more on the themes.

In this post I’ll present the total scores first and update it to represent the normalized scores once I’ve finished debugging.

Categories

Judas Priest —- The “Judas Priest” category is one of my favorites. With songs like “Painkiller,” “Leather Rebel,” and “Metal Gods,” their lyrical themes include superlatives and strong characters.

Key words in this category include: leather, hard, iron, fastest, blazing, bullet, thunder, etc.

Top 10 Judas Priest bands:

1. Saxon
2. Manowar
3. Virgin Steele
4. Hammerfall
5. Bathory
6. Running Wild
7. Venom
8. Riot
9. Majesty
10. Accept

Top 10 Judas Priest albums:

1. Steel Meets Steel: 10 Years Of Glory by Hammerfall
2. Hell On Wheels Live by Manowar
3. Prayers Of Steel by Avenger
4. Steelcrusher by Hammercult
5. Heavy Metal Thunder by Saxon
6. Heading For The Top by Bullet (Sweden)
7. Bound By Metal by Wizard
8. Own The Crown by Majesty
9. Hell Is by Alice Cooper
10. Rise Of The Hero by Iron Savior

Highlander

The “Highlander” category is a colorful name for describing the most over-the-top power metal themes: battle, glory, and high fantasy.

Words in this category include: steel, swords, steeds, lords, honored, majestic, noble, etc.

Top 10 Highlander bands:

1. Rhapsody
2. Manowar
3. Majesty
4. Saxon
5. Virgin Steele
6. Kaledon
7. Bal-Sagoth
8. Bathory
9. Sacred Steel
10. Folkearth

Top 10 Highlander albums:

1. Own the Crown by Majesty
2. Blade of Triumph by Iron Fire
3. King of Kings by Leaves’ Eyes
4. Kings of The Nordic Twilight by Luca Turilli
5. Bound by Metal by Wizard
6. Dawn of Victory by Rhapsody
7. The Alliance of the Kings by Ancient Bards
8. Heavy Metal Thunder by Saxon
9. Starfire Burning Upon the Ice-Veiled Throne of Ultima Thule by Bal-Sagoth
10. Battle Magic by Bal-Sagoth

Spooky

Ah, Spooky…what a great category. This one focuses on themes that are supernaturally scary. Perhaps this category is better described by its non-inclusion in the other horror themes of Violence and Blasphemy. Key words include: ghosts, ghastly, haunted, castle, basement, cathedral, screaming, etc.

Top 10 Spooky bands:

1. Cradle Of Filth
2. Venom
3. Slayer
4. Grave Digger
5. Satan’s Host
6. Six Feet Under
7. King Diamond
8. Inkubus Sukkubus
9. W.A.S.P.
10. Mercyful Fate

Top 10 Spooky albums:

1. Cabinet by Spawn of Possession
2. Karmagmassacre by Sabbat (Japan)
3. Feed The Demons by Ungrace
4. Mysteries Of The Ancient Charnel by Arcane Grail
5. Metal Revolution by Living Death
6. Mother Moon by Inkubus Sukkubus
7. Demonic Electronic by Bile
8. Godspeed On The Devil’s Thunder by Cradle Of Filth
9. Ghetto Machine by Loudness
10. Bury The Hatchet by October 31

Blasphemy

This is essentially the Black Metal category. The vocabulary here includes domonology and the occult. Key words: Satanic, pestilence, Elysium, legion, grimoire, Baal, Azazel, Behemoth, ritualistic, ov, etc.

Top 10 Blasphemy bands:

1. Satan’s Host
2. Venom
3. Behemoth
4. Mortification
5. Slayer
6. The Project Hate MCMXCIX
7. Cradle of Filth
8. Nunslaughter
9. Sabbat (Japan)
10. Virgin Steele

Top 10 Blasphemy albums:

1. Celebration for the Love of Satan by Satan’s Host
2. Hell Destroyer by Cage
3. Eve of Desecration by Ezurate
4. Bleeding the False by Aeon (Sweden)
5. Symphony of War by Magic Kingdom
6. The Final Sign of Evil by Sodom
7. Gloria Diaboli by Blackmass
8. Satanic Armageddon by Horncrowned
9. The Nocturnal Silence by Necrophobic
10. Infernal Satanic Verses by Mystic Circle

Violence

Where would metal lyrics be without violence and gore? Here we’d expect trash and death bands to top the list. Key words include: scream, burning, dying, genocide, pain, merciless, etc.

Top 10 Violence bands:

1. Samsas Traum
2. Six Feet Under
3. Slayer
4. Mantus
5. Eisregen
6. Cannibal Corpse
7. Asp
8. Manowar
9. Kreator
10. Schandmaul

Top 10 Violence albums:

1. Decade of Aggression by Slayer
2. Sign of Chaos by Cephalectomy
3. The Greater of Two Evils by Anthrax
4. Slit Throat Andromeda by Of Graves And Gods
5. Silent Screams by Halford
6. Imaginary Sonicscape by Sigh
7. Hell on Wheels Live by Manowar
8. Eternal Death by Crown of Thorns
9. God Hates Us All by Slayer
10. Own the Crown by Majesty

Comments: I had to exclude the word “die” because of all the German-language lyrics. This was also a problem for “war.”

Conclusion

I hope you found this post entertaining and educating. I have some more plans for more un-useless analysis using this data, and I hope to post about it soon. I’ll also post the Jupyter notebook for this analysis when I clean it up a bit.