Heavy metal music tends to invoke the darkest and most sinister imagery of any music genre. A quick Google search of ‘most popular heavy metal songs’ returns results like ‘raining blood’, ‘Cowboys From Hell’, ‘War Pigs’, ‘Painkiller’, and ‘Holy Wars’. Heavy metal‘s definitely got a theme, and the musicians have kept that theme going for decades while producing tens and tens of thousands of albums.
Curious as to what the ‘most metal’ words of all time were a data scientist from the website DegenerateState.org ran the numbers, crawling 222,623 songs, 22,314 albums, and 7,364 bands, analyzing all of the lyrics to see once and for all with the ‘most metal’ words of all time, and here they are:
Rank Word Metalness
1 burn 3.81
2 cries 3.63
3 veins 3.59
4 eternity 3.56
5 breathe 3.54
6 beast 3.54
7 gonna 3.53
8 demons 3.53
9 ashes 3.51
10 soul 3.40
11 sorrow 3.40
12 sword 3.38
13 goodbye 3.28
14 dreams 3.28
15 gods 3.24
16 pray 3.22
17 reign 3.15
18 tear 3.12
19 flames 3.12
20 scream 3.11
I guess it should come as no surprise that ‘burn’ would be #1, though I figured it would be cryptorchidism or Lucifer.
Interestingly, DegenerateState.org also ran the data to determine what the LEAST metal words of all time are and it reads like 99% of blog posts on Business Insider:
Rank Word Metalness
1 particularly -6.47
2 indicated -6.32
3 secretary -6.29
4 committee -6.16
5 university -6.09
6 relatively -6.08
7 noted -5.85
8 approximately -5.75
9 chairman -5.69
10 employees -5.67
11 attorney -5.66
12 membership -5.64
13 administrative -5.61
14 considerable -5.60
15 academic -5.51
16 literary -5.49
17 agencies -5.48
18 measurements -5.47
19 fiscal -5.45
20 residential -5.45
What can you now do with this data? Pretty much nothing at all, it’s virtually useless. But if you appreciate music and data analysis you can now go forth into the world and share with your bros what the most and least ‘heavy metal’ words of all time are.
(h/t NYMag via DegenerateState)