Every night is Halloween for me
Like an old scene
You know exactly what I mean!
—King Diamond, “Halloween”
Yes, we really know what you mean, thank you King! In the same spirit (ugh, sorry) of Halloween – and following our hugely successful playlist of dozens of page views and indie rock science songs –Scientific American presents a Spotify playlist of br00tal, scientific heavy metal chaos only for the truest warriors.
Scientific references in heavy music are omnipresent: British grindcore pioneer Godflesh used a photo of a cell growing on a microchip as the cover for his record Selfless, while the German prog metal band The Ocean has made a career out of paleontological concept albums. Our playlist includes astronomy, genetics, climate change, the Cambrian explosion, bloody entrails from medical textbooks, predictive warnings about rampage, Graveyards of lifeless planets, and so much more. It’s all killer, not a filler.
In our bubbly, boiling hell broth we have classics by Judas Priest and Black Sabbath, plus pulverizing Doom, Thrash and Death Metal by Darkthrone, Testament, Carcass and (of course) Death! We made sure to include plenty of lesser-known skull-breakers from the croaking doomsday heralds of Cough, the brain-melting cosmic travelers of Gigan, the grave-sneakers of Tomb Mold, the clumsy Italian mud lords of Ufomammut, and the avant-garde black man, Metal-Dungeon-Synth-Sound of Krallice.
But what, you pedantically ask, has science got to do with the “curse of the pharaohs” of Mercyful Fate? Fountain, Professor, First of all, you should know that archeology is a science. More importantly, every metal playlist released for Halloween necessary showing off a Mercyful Fate song and photo of Fate frontman King Diamond and that’s an oath we’re not going to break!
The playlist is embedded below. Or you can listen to it here on Spotify.
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