Black Kirin is an extreme folk metal band from Changchun, China that does a really compelling blend of melodic death metal, folk metal, and classical (Chinese) music.

Bloodywood is an Indian folk Nu-Metal (?) band with one of the most interesting sounds I’ve ever heard and that dropped single-handedly, without label support, what is arguably the best metal album released this year.

Arka’n Asrafokor is a Togo melodic death-flavoured band with a sound and lyrical content that really needs to be heard.

I’m not familiar enough with all their work. They came out of nowhere for me and I haven’t listened to everything yet.

Weirdly, I frown all the time and people don’t think I’m insane.

They think I’m an asshole.

I don’t understand. WHY HAS OZZIE FORSAKEN ME!?

In This Moment came out of left field for me. I’d never heard of them and someone hooked me up to one of their songs and … HOW THE HELL DID I MISS THIS!?

OK, fixed. Thanks for catching that.

I didn’t spot that. Sorry. I’ll edit the link if I can.

Post away. There’s no “too much”.

I’ve had about forty years to collect a very broad spectrum of music. 😉 (This is just random samplings from my metal division. I’ve got a whole lot more…)

😊

Thanks. And thanks for the life you’ve been bringing to this channel too.

A guy who’s been giving us the gift of music for the last few days. 😁 I thought I’d spare him some finger pain for a bit.

Yeah, this was kind of an “out of left field” thing for me. Never expected such powerful works from Belarus. (And of course there’s no reason to be surprised, but here I am, surprised.)

Sit back and let the rest of us inspire. :)

God, this brings back memories! I was working in a mechanics’ shop in CFB Lahr and had this album on my boom box playing over and over and over again all day, every day (until the tape just plain wore through) … and nobody objected. It was one HELL of an album and kept the mood light all day.

British Steel is the album that got me hooked on metal, and it’s a tossup between Breaking the Law and Metal Gods as to which song most influenced it.

I have always understood that C generally compiles almost directly to assembly with little to no abstraction overhead, and it would not require platform-specific ASM code.

You have always understood incorrectly then. I’d recommend a trip over to Godbolt and take a look at the assembler output from C code. Play around with compiler options and see the (often MASSIVE!) changes. That alone should tell you that it doesn’t compile “almost directly to assembly”.

But then note something different. Count the different instructions used by the C compiler. Then look at the number of instructions available in an average CISC processor. Huge swaths of the instruction set, especially the more esoteric, but performance-oriented instructions for very specific use cases, are typically not touched by the compiler.

In the very, very, very ancient days of C the C compiler compiled almost directly to assembly. Specifically PDP-11 assembly. And any processor that was similar to the PDP-11 had similar mappings available. This hasn’t been the case, however, likely longer than you’ve been alive.

Ooh. Nice topic!

Uh… Def Leppard. I was a huge fan of them up to and including Pyromania, then … I stopped. I know glam metal doesn’t get a lot of respect, but it was my gateway drug into the heavier stuff and Def Leppard was … a lot of my youthful turn into a metalhead.

Saxon. They were my stepping stone from glam metal into the harder stuff, together with old Black Sabbath. Unlike Black Sabbath, however, which has remained on my playlist almost constantly—rarely does a week go by without me dropping a Sabbath album into the headset—I hardly ever listen to Saxon any longer.

For something a bit more modern, Gloryhammer. Absolutely hilariously fun power metal cheese that I enjoyed like crazy … and then stopped after the shenanigans with their lead singer. I followed the lead singer as Angus McSix later, but simply stopped listening to Gloryhammer because the whole situation left a bad taste in my mouth.

I like to call Leah “The Enya of Metal”. If you want almost pure instrumental metal there’s Amogh Symphony (or Wang Wen if you want something metal-adjacent that’s mostly instrumental).