A million thanks to my acquisition editor, Norm Hirschy, who guided me through the book proposal process back in 2023, and then offered to include my book in an open-access initiative.
Long-time readers of my work will recognize parts of Chapters 5, 8, 9, and 10, but they have all been updated and expanded with new material and ideas to match this book’s broader context and arguments about heaviness as a participatory experience, its origins within the blues, and how it shaped the emergence and evolution of metal.
On February 6, 2026, I was honored to give a talk at the University of Iowa as part of their Musicology/Music Theory Colloquium series, hosted by Prof. Joshua Albrecht. I gave an hour-long lecture about the Swedish extreme metal band Meshuggah, consisting of material from my second book project, which I’m currently drafting.
My work on Meshuggah is building very directly on my first book, which is now available open-access through Oxford University Press!
Please feel free to reach out if you’d like to know more about this project! You can always find my contact information at my faculty bio page for my job at Occidental College.
Here’s a short description of my talk:
The Swedish extreme metal band Meshuggah has already been the subject of extensive music analysis research. My first intervention is to retheorize Meshuggah’s distinctive complex rhythms as “overlays,” a groove-based construction which repeats a short unit of odd length to create a rival accent pattern over 4/4—which has been previously studied in jazz, soul, and EDM by Pressing (2002), Cohn (2016), and Butler (2006). This retheorization connects existing Meshuggah research with numerous concepts to better explain the physical experiences that their rhythms create (groove and perceptual rivalry, cycles of release and relock, metrical displacement, etc.). My second intervention is to highlight Meshuggah’s connection to previous thrash/groove metal (which also frequently used overlay riffs), helping to explain their music’s brutal physicality in terms of new research on previous metal practices of heaviness, headbanging, etc. This reverses a trend in existing research which mostly highlights Meshuggah’s “deviance” from mainstream metal (Capuzzo 2018). Overlay analysis shows how even Meshuggah’s most complex, “mathematical” riffs emerge from recursive recombination of physical, groove-oriented riff techniques from previous metal. These two interventions connect analysis of Meshuggah’s music directly to ideas about groove and physicality from studies of African diaspora popular music traditions, troubling common assumptions about complexity, detachment, and race in popular music—and especially in the context of thrash metal, a genre which is often described as “leaving the blues behind” through increased complexity, detachment, and control (Pillsbury 2006). I end with broader thoughts about musical complexity: problematizing the association of certain kinds of complexity with whiteness or embodied detachment, questioning the status of complexity in music theory, and riffing on old questions about mind-body dualism.
If you’re interested, I’d be happy to share my slides and script! Feel free to email me to ask. You can always find my contact information at my faculty bio page for my job at Occidental College.
Here’s the official title and 350-word abstract for my talk, which I’m planning to write up as a chapter in my second book.
“Corpus of Chaos: Headbanging to Conventional Form Cues in Meshuggah’s Unconventional Songs”
Meshuggah’s extreme metal songs often have disorienting forms, which eschew conventional verse-chorus teleology (Nobile 2022), instead staging a progression of static sections, creating seemingly intractable expanses of time. And yet, their audiences all seem to know when to start moshing, and when their song forms are written down, their proportions often strongly resemble metal’s normative song form, compound AABA (Hudson 2021). How is it that song form which look so conventional on paper can feel so disorienting in listening?
To answer this question, I build on theories of metal drumming and song form—which often foreground affordances for physical participation. Traditional theories of pop song form focus on section types determined by lyrics (“verse,” “chorus,” etc.) but metal fans experience also experience form implicitly through embodied feeling and active motion, such as headbanging and moshing. Metal’s riff-based version of compound AABA structures this participatory listening by offering fans both specific formal cues, especially drum patterns (Kozak 2021; Garza 2021; Hudson 2022), and familiar patterns of song form that organize physical engagement, especially buildup intros, verse-chorus “energy cycles” (Pillsbury 2006), transforming or transporting bridges (Hudson 2023), half-time breakdowns (Gamble 2019), and vamps. In this way metal song forms create ritual spaces for heaviness, by implicitly choreographing participatory dance to create shared moments of physical impact (Hudson 2026, Chapter 9).
I use this conventional framework to analyze Meshuggah’s unconventional song forms, showing how they retain some familiar cues and patterns while also departing from these norms. Several of Meshuggah’s most well-known songs follow a pattern of two verse cycles followed by a bridge, with a guitar solo occurring roughly two-thirds of the way through the song’s duration—just like compound AABA (Example 1). However, most of Meshuggah’s songs do not have the conventional teleology of a quieter verse leading up to a louder chorus; instead they alternate, without a sense of directionality or hierarchy, between verses and what I call “pseudo-choruses.” I show how even Meshuggah’s most experimental songs often retain some conventional formal cues (especially drum pattern shifts and guitar solos) which guide listeners’ participatory movement, shaping shared experiences of heaviness.
I got something really exciting in the mail recently: my complimentary copy of The Routledge Handbook to Metal Music Composition, which features my latest publication about metal, a chapter about metal’s tonal roots in the blues and the evolution of a common musical structure I call a “riff turnaround.” This new edited volume is really an important moment for the musicological study of metal, featuring a who’s-who of folks currently writing on the topic.
The editors put in a fanatical amount of work to put this collection together—especially Lori Burns, who has severalsuchcollections that have either just come out or are in process. This one is really a huge service to metal studies, giving tons of early-career scholars a chance to get their work published and helping those of us who are already published get a boost to our citation counts. And the collaboration between the editors and the individual chapter authors are drawing a huge web of scholarship into coherent field rather than a bunch of disconnected one-shot publications. I can’t wait to read the other chapters!
Here’s some more information about my chapter:
Title: “Recognizing Tonal Momentum and Echoes of Past Styles in Riff Turnarounds”
Abstract: Riffs are often described in terms of their propulsive rhythm, but they also create a sense of forward motion through tonal momentum. This is especially true in “riff turnarounds,” figures added after multiple repetitions of a riff to create additional momentum, which often demarcate sections within a song’s form. One factor that contributes to this impression of momentum is when a listener recognizes a riff turnaround as a recurrence of a melodic motion they have heard before. This recognition of similarity allows a “transference” (Scotto 2019) of scale degree functions and tonal momentum from one song to another. Through this recognition and transference, each listener can hear echoes of older styles of blues, rock, and metal in newer music-even in styles like progressive metal which substantially depart from those traditions.
Here are some of the songs I discuss in this chapter. You might recognize a few of them from previous posts on this blog (linked).
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 in the works that I hope to be able to announce soon.
“Headbanging and Heaviness in Metal Music, and their Origins in ‘White Blues’ (Mis)Understandings of Blackness”
Abstract
Metal’s roots in the blues are often invoked at the beginning of genre histories, but this invocation often seems to isolate Blackness in a separated past. I argue, however, that heavy metal’s initial and present conditions are shaped by White (mis)understandings of Blackness, with continuing legacies including two central aesthetic practices, heaviness and headbanging.
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.
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 what difference does it make if one is long or short?
Some others of you might ask, what were you drinking? Did you really snort it out your nose? Did that hurt? I’m not answering those questions, but I will tell you what a riff turnaround is.
“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 back to explain what I mean by “a note which isn’t supposed to exist.” This note doesn’t exist in a classical music theory system called “solfege.” Solfege is a system where you label each note with a special syllable to track what role it plays in a song’s key or scale. ((This is a system called “movable-do” solfege. There is also a system of “fixed-do” solfege, in which C is always Do, and D is always Re, no matter what key you’re in.)) The home note of a scale, the note that the scale or key is named after, is called “Do.” So if a song is in F major, F is Do; if a song is in G major, G is Do. In a regular major scale, the next note above Do is Re, and the next is Mi, and so on.
On a more personal note, I’ll be back in California where I grew up, and where my parents still live. Which is pretty cool! Although I grew up in Northern California so I’m in for lots of new adventures learning about the south end of the state.
I’ll have some research news to share soon too! And, maybe, I’ll get around to writing a normal blog post again some day. 😎
One of my favorite views of Occidental College so far, from the top of nearby Fiji Hill
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).
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 “Rough.” While these are not identical metaphors, most instances of “Heavy” arguably also draw on one or more of the other three metaphors. Additionally, in Walther-Hansen’s definitions, these four cognitive metaphors share many overlapping entailments, as I’ve mapped out in Figure 1. For example, “Heavy,” “Hard,” and “Rough” sounds all entail apparent force or effort; “Heavy” and “Dark” sounds are both low in pitch; etc.
Figure 1. Four cognitive metaphors with their overlapping entailments. Top row: cognitive metaphors for sound quality; Bottom row: entailments / characteristics from other domains of experience. Based on Walther-Hansen’s encyclopedia definitions (Chapter 4). Dotted lines represent two additional entailments I added: rough sounds are often literally loud or imply loudness, and heaviness is often associated with badness or evil.
Additionally, a single metaphor like HEAVY operates in the background for a large network of related sound qualities with distinct connotations and associations, which often are not entirely represented within a single definition or term. Figure 2 takes a few of the large number of senses for HEAVY used within the metal genre, grouped into two categories by speed. The Heavy & Fast category is also closely related to another background metaphor, HARD. The broad metaphor of HEAVY could be described as a kind of schema which passes on many entailments (like size, weight, impact, etc.) to each of the more specific senses (such as brutal, thunderous, adrenalized, etc.). But many of these individual senses resonate with other metaphors as well, and those other metaphors could be viewed as schematic for these individual terms. For example, “funereal” could be described as a finer sense of both HEAVY and DARK. This network represents a diverse and multidimensional space of interrelated senses, which cannot be reduced to a single definition for HEAVY; for example, “funereal” and “adrenalized” are practically opposite in meaning, but both are senses of HEAVY which apply this metaphor in divergent ways to create their distinct qualities of physical impact.
Figure 2. Network of senses of the cognitive metaphor HEAVY. Square boxes contain cognitive metaphors. Shaded circles provide two distinct senses of “heavy” categorized by the characteristic of speed. Individual descriptive terms are in normal text. Dotted lines show that a term draws on a specific metaphor. Double-dashed line indicates that HEAVY and HARD are closely related metaphors; both metaphors are activated by the sense “Heavy & Fast.”
[…]
…for the rest of the review, please navigate to Integral’s website at the link above.
