Liner Notes
My name is Shaheryar Popalzai. For as long as I've been into metal, I've been just as into its history — the books, the zines, the lineage of who influenced whom. Ian Christe's Sound of the Beast is the kind of thing I mean: a whole world documented, argued over, kept. I read those and wondered why nothing like it existed for us.
I was there for a lot of it. Close to thirty years, one way or another. Running an underground metal label, watching bands form and break up, watching scenes open and close. And I've wanted to archive this history for years. I'm doing it now because the window is closing.
People are forgetting. Some have fallen off the face of the earth entirely. A lot of the music is already gone — tapes, demos, recordings that exist nowhere anymore. And we were never good at keeping records to begin with. What's left is fragmented, scattered across memories and dead hard drives and group chats nobody can find.
The media never covered this. Print and digital both stayed on the surface and missed this side of the scene entirely. So there's no real record to fall back on. There's just what people remember, and what they kept.
This is a stab at putting it somewhere before it's lost for good.
The dispatches are the core of this. I write them myself, from interviews — which is why they roll out slowly. One only goes up when I've actually sat down with someone and have something worth saying. They're the part of this that can't be cross-checked against a database, because in a lot of cases this is the database.
Everything else is built to make this something you explore, not just read: the charts, the timelines, the family trees. A way to wander the scene and see where each band sits in it.
That scaffolding started as a single, slightly chaotic spreadsheet: Band Overview · Discography · Members. Names, years, genres, cities, lineups. The kind of thing somebody types up over a long weekend and forgets about. We pulled it apart, cross-checked what we could against Metal Archives, Bandcamp, Discogs, and the few surviving band pages, and rebuilt it as something a computer can read. Every visualization here is built from that data, nothing is invented to fill a gap.
A word on Metal Archives specifically: it's the backbone, but it's incomplete in places and flat wrong in others. Dates, lineups, relationships — some of it doesn't match what people who were there remember. I'm correcting it as I go, as interviews get conducted and details get verified. So this is a living document. What you see today is the best version so far, not the final one.
Eleven genre families do all the heavy lifting in the visualizations (Death · Black · Thrash · Doom · Prog · Heavy · Gothic · Grind · Core · Groove · Other). The original genre strings are preserved on each band record, so when a band swears they're "atmospheric blackgaze post-doom," we file them under Black in the chart but the long string is still there in the dossier.
Lineage between bands — renames, reformations, sister projects — was inferred from Additional Notes in the source data plus shared-member overlap. Where two band names share members but nobody wrote down a relationship between them, the bond shows up in the Scene Graph but not in Family Trees.