June 1, 2025 – [Any City That Still Bleeds] —
The modern music industry has made its choice: simpler, dumber, deader. In a cultural landscape where mumble rap drools across every playlist and pop hooks are chemically engineered for maximum catchiness, the industry no longer hides what it’s doing—it’s lowering the bar until it scrapes the dirt.
Across corporate boardrooms where profit is gospel and data scientists have replaced producers, music has been boiled down to a science—stripped of soul, creativity, and risk. Complex harmony has been abandoned for predictable major and minor scales, diminished chords and modal progressions replaced by the safest possible choices. Gone is the era that gave us songs like “The Number of the Beast” (Iron Maiden), “War Pigs” (Black Sabbath), “Subdivisions” (Rush), and “Rocketman” ( Elton John)—tracks that dared to be strange, political, dissonant, or defiantly uncommercial. Today’s hits are built for algorithms, not artistry. But metal hasn’t played along (Well most metal, coughs, m******re).
"What passes for lyrics today in say mumble rap barely even qualifies as language," says Moonskin’s vocalist. "It’s not songwriting—it’s stream-of-consciousness slurring over clickbait beats. Half-conscious, drug-numbed, barely coherent. Mass-produced lyrically lobotomized sludge spoon-fed to listeners trained not to question it. Even country—a genre once rich with storytelling and character has been flattened into a formula. It’s the same song, over and over."
By contrast, the world Moonskin inhabits—alongside bands like Cradle of Filth, Meshuggah, In Flames, Lamb Of God, and *special shoutout to Devin Townsend*—remains defiantly lyrical, layered, and unafraid to demand intelligence from its audience. These bands/artists still write with intent. With poetry. With fury that’s not just loud, but thoughtful.
"Metal doesn’t need to be ‘accessible,’" Moonskin continues. "It needs to be honest. And honesty is ugly. It’s complex. It doesn’t come in three words and a looped beat."
Their latest single, Blood Enslaved, in comparison isn’t just a song —it’s a piece of art, a warning. Not the longest, technical, or lyrically complex but deliberate and unflinching, and a far cry above “**** pass me the hookah”. It’s an allegory of vampirism that explores the seduction and surrender of those who follow blindly—those who offer up their lifeblood to power-hungry architects in robes of divinity, and the addiction that afflicts the latter.
So, while mainstream execs toast another chart-topping track built on deliberate stupidity, metalheads still dig through lyrics, dissect riffs, and search for meaning. In this era of musical sedation, metal is the last genre that still trusts its audience to think.
For those who missed it—Moonskin’s Blood Enslaved waits in the dark.