I was recently invited by the music department of UC Riverside to give a distinguished lecture as part of their Florence Bayz lecture/concert series. The talk I gave, on December 6, 2023, drew on two chapters of my ongoing book project, titled Heaviness in Metal Music, which is currently under contract with Oxford University Press. I’m posting the abstract below for anyone who is interested in getting a preview of what I’m working on! The parts of this talk that were about headbanging are an expanded version of one of my first conference papers, and I’ve got an article version of this chapter ..read more

I’m happy to announce that my latest article “Song Form and Storytelling in Mainstream Metal” has just been published by Metal Music Studies! I’m especially proud of this publication because I think it represents some of my most vivid and accessible writing to date. It’s also the first time I’ve contributed my original research to Metal Music Studies, although I’ve written one or two reviews there before. You can read the full version of this article at the journal’s website: https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/mms_00092_1 You can read a pre-print version on my Academia.edu ..read more

I was listening to a Spotify-generated power metal playlist recently, and a song by the Italian band Temperance made me do a double take. And by double take, I mean, imagine me snorting my drink out of my nose, making the widest eyes I can make, and saying to myself, “Did that really just happen? Holy shit.” What was it that caught my attention? Nothing less than the most audaciously prolonged riff turnaround I think I’ve ever heard in my two decades of listening to metal music. Some of you might ask, what’s a riff turnaround? And why does it matter if one is long or short? Some others of you ..read more

“The Rumbling” by SiM is the latest opening/credits song to the shockingly bloody hit anime Attack on Titan, and judging by its Spotify streaming numbers (65 million, and the song’s only been out for 8 months) it’s one of the most-listened-to metal songs of 2022. It’s the most brutal metal song I’ve ever heard used as the theme for a Japanese anime, which makes sense because the show is so unrelentingly violent. It also has a flattened tonic (Do-flat or De in movable solfege), a note which isn’t supposed to exist. Why Do-Flat Doesn’t Exist in Traditional Music Theory… I’ve got to take a step ..read more

I’ve got big news! I’m starting a new job this Fall as an Assistant Professor teaching music theory at Occidental College in Los Angeles. I’ll be joining a department that has been named one of the country’s top music business programs by Billboard magazine. Occidental is close to the center of America’s entertainment industry, and through its faculty and alumni has a lot of connections to the music business. It’s also one of the oldest liberal arts colleges on the West Coast, and word is a certain president spent some time there. Plus they’ve got beautiful weather! On a more personal note, I ..read more

I’m thrilled to share my latest publication, a review of the book Making Sense of Recordings: How Cognitive Processing of Recorded Sound Works by Mads Walther-Hansen (Oxford University Press, 2020). This review appears in the open-access music theory journal Intégral vol. 35 (2022). https://www.esm.rochester.edu/integral/35-2022/hudson/ Below is an excerpt from the review that is especially relevant to metal and heavy rock music. Please click the link above to view my review in full (for free!). […] For example, the cognitive metaphor for “Heavy” overlaps considerably with “Dark,” “Hard,” and ..read more

I’m thrilled to announce that my article about headbanging has just been published in the journal Music Theory Spectrum! Here are the details. You can access the article for free at the link at the end of this post. Bang your Head: Construing Beat through Familiar Drum Patterns in Metal Music Stephen S. Hudson Music Theory Spectrum, Volume 44, Issue 1, Spring 2022, Pages 121–140, https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtab014 Published: 28 November 2021 Abstract This article presents a theoretical framework for understanding headbanging to metal music as an embodied practice of perception and offers seve ..read more

My latest metal-related research is a short review article about Metallica’s 1991 self-titled album (aka. the “Black Album”) which has been published in the latest issue of the journal Metal Music Studies, vol. 7 no. 3. This piece examines the impact that the Black Album has had over the last 31 years. Specifically, I look at how the Black Album inspired and influenced alternative metal music, and how images and ideas from the Black Album made their way into American alt-right politics/culture after the millennium. Click the link below to read more about it and get a link to the article: http ..read more

My latest conference paper traces the use of the b2 scale degree (like Db in the key of C) through 1980s extreme metal and industrial music, 1990s nu metal, and millennial blockbuster films like Queen of the Damned and The Matrix, before this line of influence finally crossed into mainstream pop music through songs like Benny Benassi’s “Satisfaction” and Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack.” This paper was presented at the American Musicological Society national conference. You can watch the video version here, in full and for free: https://www.academia.edu/video/k7BNYl Abstract: Topic theory has e ..read more

As promised, this is the sequel to my paper at SMT 2020! This second half is part of the Progect 2021 conference organized by Lori Burns at the University of Ottawa, which will be happening online May 18-29, 2021. In this paper I show how Meshuggah’s style evolved gradually from more mainstream thrash metal and groove metal from the 1980s and early 1990s. Their famously complex rhythms are not a completely radical new thing in metal, but are a recursive recombination of existing riff techniques including overlay, syncopation, 332 rhythms, and camoflauged alterations. I also argue that part of ..read more