From Die Prinzen to Blast Beats: How One MP3 Ruined My Musical Innocence

For years, I was listening to metal without knowing what metal actually was.

I wasn’t studying genres or working my way through a list of essential albums. I just kept stumbling across music I liked. A commercial at the cinema, a burned CD, a random MP3 on somebody else’s computer. If something caught my attention, I’d listen to it until I practically knew it by heart.

That eventually turned into a habit of looking for bands nobody around me had ever heard of. Twenty-some years later, I still haven’t really stopped.

I blame Shadows Fall.

Before the first heavy riff

As a kid growing up in Germany, I had two particular favorites: Die Prinzen and Joachim Witt. Both got played on repeat.

Looking back, I could almost argue that some of Witt’s music was an early introduction to darker sounds. At the time, though, I had no idea where my tastes were heading. I simply liked his music.

Then, in 2003, I went to the cinema.

Christmas 2003: Meteora on repeat

I was eleven when Linkin Park released Meteora. I remember seeing advertisements for it before movies, and being completely blown away by the energy.

I didn’t know what nu metal was. I didn’t know what metal was, period. I just knew I wanted that album.

I got it for Christmas and proceeded to play it an absolutely unreasonable number of times. Five, ten, twenty times a day. For a while, Meteora was practically the only thing I listened to.

My setup consisted of a Discman and a little boombox. I was collecting CDs one at a time, and the ones I had got played to death. We didn’t have convenient internet access yet, so discovering music wasn’t a matter of opening an app and browsing a million other bands.

Eventually, I got Hybrid Theory, Reanimation, and Collision Course. Loved all of them. Still hadn’t learned anything about genres.

And because the next Linkin Park studio album, Minutes to Midnight, didn’t arrive until 2007, I started collecting tribute CDs to fill the gap. A Gothic Acoustic Tribute to Linkin Park, Bluegrass Tribute to Linkin Park, A Tribute, The Ultimate Tribute double CD. Apparently, if someone recorded a Linkin Park song on a banjo, that was relevant to my interests.

To this day, Linkin Park remain one of the two most important bands in my musical life. They were the starting point for pretty much everything that followed.

Racing games and a belated Rammstein obsession

Around those years, video games were doing their share of music discovery, too.

Need for Speed: Underground 2 (2004) and Most Wanted (2005) had fantastic soundtracks. In Underground 2, I heard Rise Against’s “Give It All”, and that song fucking ruled. I liked it so much that I went out and bought Siren Song of the Counter Culture.

Meanwhile, my mom had brought me some burned Rammstein CD-Rs. Somehow, I didn’t immediately fall in love with them. It took Rosenrot, released in 2005, to make things click. After that, I went back through their older albums and discovered plenty of stuff I liked.

Linkin Park and Rammstein were my world at that point. As far as I knew, that was about as heavy as music got.

Then I visited my cousin.

The MP3 that changed everything

I must have been thirteen or fourteen. My cousin and I were at his parents’ computer, going through random files: pictures, videos, music, whatever was sitting on the hard drive.

For reasons I still don’t understand, one of those files was Shadows Fall’s “Thoughts Without Words”.

The double bass, the riffs, the shouted verses followed by a clean chorus, the sheer speed of it. And despite all that heaviness, there were melodies everywhere. I was blown away.

I had the song transferred to my MP3 player immediately. Naturally, I listened to it over and over.

That evening, I showed it to my dad. He listened for a bit and said something along the lines of, “Yeah, that’s essentially heavy metal.”

Well, shit. So that’s what it was called.

My dad handed over his Metallica albums and a metal sampler, and suddenly I had a whole new pile of music to investigate.

The sampler gave me Fear Factory’s “Scapegoat”, which I loved, and a Napalm Death song whose title I’ve completely forgotten. I’m still convinced I’d recognize it if I heard it again.

Metallica took a little more adjusting. I went through my dad’s albums in chronological order, but going from Shadows Fall to early Metallica was quite a change. His collection wasn’t complete: …And Justice for All, the Black Album, and Garage Inc. were missing. It stopped at St. Anger, which was Metallica’s latest studio album at the time. Death Magnetic wouldn’t arrive until 2008.

My initial favorites were Load, Reload, and St. Anger.

Yes, those three. I’m aware.

St. Anger in particular came closest to the heaviness I’d been chasing. The older albums grew on me with repeated listens, especially the first four. The Black Album, once I eventually heard it, never became quite as much of a favorite.

My dad also gave me Dio’s Holy Diver at some point. Good stuff, but compared with what I’d just discovered, it was much tamer.

Meanwhile, I was collecting Shadows Fall’s discography and declaring them my favorite band for the rest of my life. Unusually for a teenage declaration, that one stuck. They still are.

Fear Factory and the appeal of a second chance

“Scapegoat” led me to Fear Factory. Two of my first albums by them were Soul of a New Machine and Transgression. The latter had come out in 2005 and was still a recent release when I discovered it.

I loved Soul of a New Machine straight away. Transgression? Not so much.

In fact, I really didn’t like it at first. But I kept coming back to it over the years until something finally clicked. Nowadays I genuinely love it, and “Echo of My Scream” is one of my favorites.

It’s a good reminder that some records need more than one chance. It took me a while to learn that lesson.

By my mid-teens, Linkin Park, Rammstein, Shadows Fall, Metallica, and Fear Factory were the foundation of my collection. That was plenty to keep me busy, but the internet was about to make the whole thing considerably worse.

Eight colors, 512 MB, and Bandliste.de

I got my first mobile phone around 2006, when I was fourteen. It was a Nokia boasting an astonishing eight colors.

Around the same period, give or take a year, I got a 512 MB MP3 player. That was enough space to carry a little music around, but it came with a problem: no shuffle function. It always started at the first song in alphabetical order.

My solution was to rename the files every weekend so I’d get a different running order. Manual shuffle. Cutting-edge technology.

At about fourteen, we also got our first flat-rate internet connection. It wasn’t fast by modern standards, but it gave me something far more dangerous than internet speed: the ability to spend entire nights finding new bands.

I practically lived on Bandliste.de, which, amazingly, is still online and looks beautifully stuck in time. I was especially interested in metal with German lyrics, and I’d stay up until five in the morning going from one discovery to the next.

Abrogation, Seelenschmerz, Nocte Obducta, Adorned Brood, Black Messiah, Eisheilig, Dorn, Dornenreich, Eisregen. Those are just some of the names I remember.

As far as I recall, bands could upload songs to Bandliste for people to download. That was how I ended up with about half an album’s worth of Seelenschmerz songs for the longest time. Some bands also put music on MySpace. I wasn’t particularly active there, but I absolutely made use of the music.

Years later, I finally managed to track down several Seelenschmerz albums, including Blütenphantasie, Der Augen Glanz… Verloren, and Auf Gedeih und Verderb. I bought them directly from the band’s drummer and had a nice little conversation with him. He told me, the band had split and formed a new project. Shoutout to Faland (Bandcamp).

Going from a few stray downloads to owning the actual records was pretty satisfying.

The hunt was part of the fun. Sometimes finding the music was almost as much of an adventure as hearing it.

Harder, louder, faster

Thanks to Shadows Fall and Fear Factory, I’d become comfortable with heavy music pretty quickly. For a while, the next logical step was always to find something harder, louder, and faster.

Cannibal Corpse. Napalm Death. Eventually Anaal Nathrakh and The Berzerker. There always seemed to be another level of absurdity available if I looked hard enough.

It took me a while to remember that melody was pretty cool, too. Which is funny, considering that the melodies were one of the things I loved about Shadows Fall in the first place.

I also loved stumbling across sounds I didn’t yet have a name for. Job for a Cowboy’s Doom was one of those experiences. Deathcore was already developing as a genre, but that label wasn’t something I was familiar with at the time. I just heard the EP and thought it went absolutely fucking crazy.

That feeling of finding something new before everyone had agreed what to call it never really went away.

For a long time, though, my listening policy remained simple: metal or nothing.

Media Markt, concerts, and a very misleading T-shirt

The internet wasn’t my only hunting ground. I also spent hours at the Media Markt in Günthersdorf, browsing CDs and trying albums at those in-store listening stations.

The headphones were worn out and sweaty, with a history I preferred not to think about. Still, they did the job.

That’s how I discovered Dream Theater’s Systematic Chaos in 2007. The opening track, “In the Presence of Enemies, Pt. 1”, runs nine minutes. I was sold about five minutes in.

As I got older, live music became a big part of my life, too. From roughly sixteen to twenty-six, I averaged about one concert a month, depending on what was happening nearby. I didn’t exactly live in a metal stronghold, so sometimes there wasn’t much to choose from.

I also didn’t really have friends who were into metal.

When I started trade school at seventeen, I spotted a guy wearing a Blind Guardian shirt on the first day. Finally, someone to talk music with!

I went over and mentioned that I liked Blind Guardian.

“Oh, that’s a band? I just liked the dragons.”

Oh.

He ended up being one of my best friends for over ten years. So the shirt worked out pretty well, even if not for the reason I’d expected.

I often went to metal shows by myself. Sometimes I’d take my dad, and in exchange I’d go with him to blues rock concerts because he didn’t want to go alone either. A perfectly reasonable father-son trade agreement.

Picking up a guitar

Around sixteen, I decided to learn guitar. I was really into Virgin Black, and their guitar tone and playing made me want to do something like that myself.

Needless to say, I never quite got there.

I did start writing my own songs, though. They were, frankly, pretty shitty. One guitar line panned dead center, programmed drums, no bass, and not a mix or master in sight. All instrumental, and none released.

It took years to learn what went into making an actual finished song. Eventually I figured out fuller arrangements and how to work with vocals. I’ve since released several albums, and I still make music whenever I can find the time.

I even met my now-wife through making music. I’ll leave that story there, but it’s fair to say the hobby ended up having consequences well beyond questionable early guitar recordings.

New sounds, old habits

Another band that made me pay attention was Vildhjarta. Their Måsstaden arrived in 2011, and the sound associated with thall felt like something else entirely.

Fear Factory and Vildhjarta are two examples I keep coming back to when I think about bands developing ideas that other musicians would spend years exploring. It’s fascinating to hear something when it still feels unfamiliar and then watch similar approaches become commonplace.

I was still largely a metal-only listener for years. It wasn’t until I was around twenty-five that I really got into EDM, dubstep, trance, hardstyle, and other electronic music.

Dubstep, especially, always struck me as the metal of electronic music. Getting into those styles also made me more receptive to modern metal where production is a huge part of the sound.

Some of it feels like 89% production, 10% instruments, and 1% something I haven’t figured out how to make a joke about yet.

But that expansion of my tastes made sense in hindsight. I got into this whole thing because something sounded exciting, not because I knew where it belonged on a genre chart.

So why Runagaldr?

A few reasons, really.

I’m a web developer, and building a site about something I actually enjoy seemed like a much better portfolio project than making another website just for the sake of having another website.

I also wanted my own little corner of the internet. Somewhere I could write about whatever music interested me, without having to keep up with every major release or worry about what was popular that week.

Mostly, I wanted somewhere to talk about the obscure albums I’ve spent so much of my life digging up. There are records that barely anyone mentions anymore, bands that disappeared, and releases that took me years to find in full. I’d like some of them to get a little more attention.

And I want to share the music I love. I listen constantly: while I work, in the car, even while holding a sleeping child. I’m going to spend a ridiculous amount of time listening to albums anyway, so I might as well do something with it.

Making music myself has also given me an appreciation for how much work can go into a record. I don’t think everything deserves praise just for existing, but I’d rather spend my time giving interesting music a fair listen than picking apart albums for sport.

That’s what Runagaldr is for. An archive of records I want to talk about, including plenty that might otherwise go unnoticed.

I spent years doing this kind of digging without a website. Now the pile of discoveries finally has somewhere to live.