Metal Forces

• 1. Introduction

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  Metal Forces is a British heavy metal and hard rock publication that, from its very first issue in August 1983, set out to do something the music press rarely did: champion bands nobody had heard of yet. Bernard Doe founded the magazine with a clear mission to cover and promote artists who were still unknown, and the results would prove startling. Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, Overkill, Death, and Poison all appeared in its pages long before they had secured record deals. The magazine is credited with contributing directly to the success of the band Anacrusis. A former writer named Dave Reynolds has claimed something even more remarkable: that Metal Forces was the first publication to coin the terms thrash metal and death metal. How did a small British magazine end up shaping the vocabulary of an entire genre? And what happened when it tried to grow up?

• 2. The Demolition Column

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  The engine behind Metal Forces was a regular feature called Demolition, which gave unsigned bands a rare platform in an era when the music press mostly covered acts already signed to labels. The column built such a following that the magazine eventually turned it into a vinyl album. Released in 1988 through Chain Reaction Records, Metal Forces Presents: Demolition - Scream Your Brains Out! gathered tracks from Anacrusis, Atrophy, Hobbs' Angel of Death, Aftermath, and Leviathan, the last of those fronted by Chris Barnes. The ten tracks ranged from Leviathan's "Violent Slaughter" to Atrophy's "Chemical Dependency", giving listeners a snapshot of the extreme underground the magazine had been quietly mapping for years. Anacrusis alone contributed two tracks, "Imprisoned" and "Disembowled/Annihilation Complete", and the band's career is cited as a direct beneficiary of the magazine's support. The Demolition column was, in effect, a discovery engine before that phrase existed.

• 3. Naming a Genre

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  Dave Reynolds, who wrote for Metal Forces during its formative years, made a specific historical claim: that the magazine was the first to use the words thrash metal and death metal in print. If accurate, that is an outsized legacy for any music publication, let alone a small British one. The magazine did not simply observe the underground scene; it helped define how people talked about it. The senior vice president of Roadrunner Records later said, in 2007, that Metal Forces along with a similar publication called Kick Ass was "my Bible... the way I discovered new bands and fed my insatiable appetite for all things emerging in the underground." That kind of testimony, from someone inside the industry, suggests the magazine's influence extended well beyond its readership numbers. Metal Forces also covered alternative rock acts such as Nirvana, signaling it was tracking broader shifts in heavy music even as it kept its underground instincts.

• 4. Rivalries and Controversies

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  Metal Forces was, according to Dave Reynolds, created partly in response to difficulties working with the rival publication Kerrang! The relationship between the two became competitive rather than collegial. Reynolds noted that once Metal Forces gained national distribution in the late 1980s, its success prompted Kerrang! to produce a spin-off of its own, titled Mega Metal Kerrang!. The magazine's influence on rival decisions is a measure of how seriously it was taken. Controversy arrived from artists as well. In 1984, Metal Forces printed a review of the black metal band Hellhammer so negative that the band's frontman, Thomas Gabriel Fischer, declared the band would never play in England because of it. Fischer went on to form Celtic Frost, and he kept refusing interview requests from the magazine. In 1986, Dave Mustaine, the former Metallica guitarist who founded Megadeth, complained publicly after the magazine's readers' poll named his successor Kirk Hammett as the number one guitarist. The complicating detail: the poll was based on a demo recording called No Life 'Til Leather, which Mustaine himself had recorded, not Hammett.

• 5. Growth, Change, and Closure

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  In August 1991, Metal Forces launched an offshoot publication called Thrash 'n Burn, a monthly title dedicated specifically to extreme metal. The spin-off was later renamed Xtreme Noize. The parent magazine was going through changes of its own. During the early 1990s, editors shifted away from the balance of established and unknown bands that had defined the publication. The new approach leaned toward more mainstream and well-known rock and heavy metal acts. Readers and advertisers left. Metal Forces released seventy-two issues in its original form before rebranding under the shorter title MF. That abbreviated version ceased publication in February 1993. In March 2012, Metal Forces relaunched online, with its official website collecting information from its print run alongside new coverage of bands. The website meant the Demolition spirit survived in some form, long after the presses stopped.