4 weeks ago
17
Mining Metal is a monthly column from Heavy Consequence contributing writers Langdon Hickman and Colin Dempsey. The focus is on noteworthy new music emerging from the non-mainstream metal scene, highlighting releases from small and independent labels — or even releases from unsigned acts.
In late November 2025, I had another mental breakdown. I was hurled once again into periods of psychosis, cycling OCD fixated on my moral character and whether I could be forgiven, anxiety that would lurch me awake into full fight-or-flight at 3 a.m. and not abate for the entire day, on top of depression so severe that I often could only move, quite literally, at a shuffling pace, so drained of will was I. This happens to me on occasion; the long-tail of PTSD and C-PTSD, along with the social traumas and internality of autism, create a noxious brew that I am often able to keep (mostly) under control, but on the occasions that the reins slip from my hands, I go mad in a quite literal way. I fall into deep wells of intense paranoia. Worse, I believe myself deserving of the invented networks of witness and judgment that in my mind are encircling me. It is hellish, a pit I am only now in late January rising steadily from with the aid of talk therapy twice a week on top of an added anti-psychotic to my medication regimen.
In the throes, I could not read. For me, this is a shock. I read on average three books a month or so, spending functionally all of my spare time either writing or reading while records play. My eyes would slide off the page only to fall again to the burning light of paranoia. I couldn’t play video games or sleep. I couldn’t focus on television or film. All I could do, the entirety of my ability, was to sit in the time dilated hell of a full-blown panic attack for hours at a time, doing my damnedest not to drive any more people in my life away with the intensities of my psychosis than I already had. But throughout all of this hell was music. That was the sole force that remained.
We talk sometimes about music as an anchor or a fundament for being. Metalheads in particular are fond of discussing heavy metal as foundational to our sense of self. We get a real energy from it, using its bravado and wounded strength to replace the parts of ourselves we feel less confident about. It is a means of alchemical transformation, a dramatisation a la Nietzsche where the imagined self is performed with such vigor that it becomes real, at least temporarily. I think for some people where music is more an aspect of interest or life rather than nearer its center, this sentiment can seem overblown and childish. And yet I know that I am not the only one who, in the abyss, found music still by my side, a tangible tether back to a better self. I have seen this happen for people with hip-hop and punk, with jazz and orchestral music, with dance music and heavy metal. It is a hard event to study because you need to find someone at a thorough and completely ruinous point of desolation to really see it in action, the way music can wrap itself around someone like a comforting cocoon in their times of abyssal darkness.
My love of music and, within that, my fierce love of heavy metal is no show or put-on. Metallica drew me out of myself and began that ecstatic Dionysian process of self-becoming for me, drawing out the potential from the seed. Death metal, jazz fusion and progressive music, found all together in groups like Cynic and Atheist, felt like I discovered my own voice shot in abstract rays through time. Voivod, Spiral Architect, and Watchtower, along with the entire hesher-approved micro-genre of tech-thrash (which makes an appearance this month), fused the most bestial and most cerebral parts of me without choosing one over another. That maximalism of self is ultimately the greatest force I have found within music and within metal. In the throes, I had a gendered discovery, a witness to a feminine aspect of myself in addition to the masculine and (most dominant) agendered parts. Through heavy metal in its maximized plurality, I do not need to choose or reconcile these selves against each other. I am, in multiplicity, and what I am is the thing that emerges only when all elements are layered together like the thin-slices of light that build to a hologram, where the final image is encoded in none but arises with all.
I love heavy metal.
— Langdon Hickman
English (US) · 