Music

Long awaited crowdfunded extreme metal doc released for free

by Tyler Munro

Head to BangerTV to download the full episode for free

Sam Dunn is one of us. With A Headbanger’s Journey and later Global Metal, he took the tough task of contextualizing one of music’s most controversial genres for a mass audience, and his Metal Evolution series bravely took to task taking it on in even greater detail. The problem? Something was missing. Something… extreme.

As it happens, the networks weren’t into profiling artists who burned churches, put disemboweled bodies on their covers and sang songs about cumming blood—11 episodes, but nary a mention of extreme metal. Dunn turned to crowdfunding and, after a false start, got to work—The Lost Episode surfaced two years later to tell the story of death metal, black metal and grindcore.

Campaign contributors got first dibs on the hour-long episode, but Banger, Dunn’s production company, has just released the episode free through BitTorrent. Bigger still, the thing comes an entire season’s worth of transcripts and a huge, 20-minute uncut interview with former Gorgoroth singer Gaahl, the source from which the infamous “Satan” interview was culled in A Headbanger’s Journey.

And because it’s not easy to summarize something as massive and decade-spanning as extreme metal in a single 60-minute episode, Dunn’s planning on keeping the Metal Evolution project going, announcing in a video—above—that they’re taking suggestions on what to cover next. Metal is as divisive of a genre out there and its fans are passionate, often unwilling to settle on a middle ground. More than anything, this project seems to be working to cover its bases, and the extreme metal episode is one hell of a stat.

Grab the BitTorrent bundle or stream the episode here.