It’s been a bit of a monumental year for metal, even if some diehard metalheads may argue about the credentials of the artists who have managed to make their mark. Swedish occult rockers Ghost are a prime example. Their latest album “Skeletá” managed to hit their career-high chart position, shifting some 86,000 album-equivalent units in the United States alone during the first week of its release. That sum cemented the band as a power player, netting them their first #1 spot on the Billboard 200.
That impressive bow for a heavier band was just the proverbial toe in the water however, as fellow masked alternative metal stars Sleep Token cannonballed themselves in weeks later, making chart history with the staggering 127,000 album-equivalent units they moved in the United States during the first week of availability of their latest album “Even In Arcadia“. That figure also secured them a #1 slot on the Billboard 200. Since then, melodic hardcore stars Turnstile also had a strong turnout, opening at #9 on the aforementioned chart, with 38,000 album-equivalent units.
These healthy debuts have been particularly encouraging due to the relative age of the artists racking them up. For far too long, much of the commercial success in the metal and rock world has been limited to evergreen artists who made their initial big splashes back in the 90s or prior.
Those bands were often aided by the more singular music industry machine of the time. However, as the advent of the internet, piracy, streaming and the ever-shifting landscape of music promotion and algorithms in general forced the industry to become far more decentralized, there’s been worries of the sustainability of the metal and rock genres. It’s no secret that heavier genres have long been eclipsed commercially by rap and pop artists, just take a look at Spotify‘s billion plays club for proof.
The growing fear of a lack of future headliners to carry the torch when the likes of Metallica, AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses and more are eventually forced to hang it up has been a dark cloud on the horizon for promoters and the scene as a whole. Back in 2023, Iron Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson himself publicly lamented the lack of headliners emerging in the rock and metal.
However, just a few years expressing his worries, the breakout success of the comparatively younger crop of artists such as the ones mentioned above certainly give hope for future generations of metalheads and hard rockers, even if some of the old guard have already declared the genre DOA. One such outspoken individual to do just that was Kiss bassist/vocalist Gene Simmons, who infamously maintains that rock ‘died’ back in 1988.
In a newly published chat with Consequence, Ghost‘s mastermind Tobias Forge (aka Papa V Perpetua) pushed back against that narrative, citing the success of not only his own band’s relatively rapid ascent to arena headliner, but also that of Sleep Token, Måneskin and more. Here’s what he had to say:
“I think it was Gene Simmons that said it most times, but I mean a lot of people have said that rock ‘n’ roll is dead and there will be no new headliners. I understand that it’s been sparse, but I think that with the unfortunate disappearance of a lot of bands that I like — KISS being one of them — I do believe that with time I think that there will be more [headlining rock] bands.”
“There are a few examples of fairly new bands who’ve risen to great statures, faster than we did. I think that there’s this strange time phenomenon that happened somewhere in the 2000s where everything that was sort of old was old, and everything that came after was new, and just keeps on being labeled as new, especially by people who at the time were in their twenties or thirties or forties and now are in their forties, fifties, sixties, which I think is an age thing.
If you ask a lot of our fans who are 15 years old now, just the fact that our band has been around for 15 years, do you think that they think that we are a new band? No. And that’s how it should be. I think they are right in the sense that we’re an old established band. If our first album came out in 1980, and it’s now 1995, that’s an old band.”
Forge went on add:
“Sleep Token or Måneskin or Greta Van Fleet are all new bands. I think they prove that you can absolutely go places. You can form a band tomorrow and theoretically become a big band within a few years. I think you do so by trying to want to create something.”
