Why metal bands hide their faces

The material is based on an article by Chris Waugh for The Conversation.

In 2024, the author of this article, along with 20,000 other people, went to a sold-out metal concert in Manchester. Unlike most shows at the Co-op Live Arena, almost nobody in the audience knew who was on stage. It was Sleep Token, an anonymous and disguised band from London (founded in 2016) who are now packing arenas in the UK and US, mixing progressive metal, indie pop and rap.

A few months later, he found himself in the crowd at a concert of the Swedish band Ghost, known for their image of "satanic clergy": frontman Papa Emeritus performs in the mask and make-up of an "anti-pope", while the rest of the members are masked as "nameless demons". Their show is a vivid theatrical parody of religion, built on playing with the image and concealment of identity.

Even later, the author found himself in a concert hall on the outskirts of Antwerp. In semi-darkness, under strobe lights and a lone candelabra, the band Dragged into Sunlight was playing their dark album Hatred for Mankind. The musicians stood with their backs to the audience, said nothing between songs, and once again the audience had no idea what they looked like.

Against the backdrop of an era when pop music is built on maximum visibility and endless displays of individuality - from Taylor Swift tours to loudly announced reunions - a curious shift is taking place in the metal scene. More and more musicians are consciously

• "hide their faces,

• withholding their names and biographies,

• and sometimes ignore the audience altogether - like Dragged into Sunlight playing with their backs to the audience.

Masks, make-up, and aliases in rock and metal are certainly nothing new:

• Kiss and Alice Cooper have been hitting the stage in theatre makeup for decades;

• Slipknot and Gwar used grotesque masks and costumes;

• "corpse paint" (black and white "dead" make-up) and occult aliases have long been the norm in black metal.

But bands like Ghost, Sleep Token and Dragged into Sunlight highlight the paradox:
it's the concealment of face and identity that heightens the emotional impact of their performances.

When the absence of a face heightens feelings

Research within the so-called 'affective turn' in the social sciences suggests looking at emotions as something that circulates between people, rather than just 'what we have inside'.

Cultural theorist Sarah Ahmed describes affect as "something that sticks" - the intensities we feel before we've even had a chance to conceptualise them. Literary critic Raymond Williams has written about "structures of feeling" - when an emotion is already experienced but not yet put into words.

Anonymous metal bands work with this zone of pre-worded experience. When musicians hide their faces and do not tell about themselves, they remove one of the main habitual reference points in the artist's perception. In the resulting "empty" gap, the viewer himself begins to be actively involved - projecting, fantasising, completing the meaning and emotions.

The author of the study (to be published next year) uses affect theory to show how the concealment of face and identity becomes a tool for shaping shared experiences.

How different groups use anonymity

Sleep Token: anonymity as an invitation to intimacy

Sleep Token's lyrics revolve around:

• spiritual and religious experiences,

• desires, both sexual and related to the need for connection and acceptance,

• vulnerability and experience.

In doing so, the lyrics are often deliberately ambiguous. The lack of clear meaning and the missing "clear identities" of the participants leave a space in which listeners put their own emotions and stories - including those that are difficult to articulate.

This is evident in active fan communities - for example, there are regular posts on Reddit where fans talk about how they find it easier to share their personal experiences through the band's music, precisely because there is no 'concrete face' in it, but rather an image where they can project themselves.

Ghost: concealment as irony and satirical spectacle

Ghost build the whole image on a parody of a religious institution:

• Papa Emeritus is a caricatured "satanic pope",

• the rest of the cast are impersonal "nameless demons" in masks.

The sinister, "cult-like" visual series is used to:

• mock the bureaucracy and power structures of the Church,

• to promote ideas of self-knowledge, harmony and mutual pleasure,

• turn the concert into an ironic pseudo-ritual where the serious is turned into a game.

Here, anonymity and masks help to create a distance between the spectator and the real religion, opening a space for collective laughter, play and the "allowed" violation of taboos.

Dragged into Sunlight: anonymity as a blow to the viewer

Dragged into Sunlight has a different approach - a more radical one:

• they don't wear masks,

• but they perform with their backs to the audience,

• the stage is covered in smoke and flashes,

• there's no communication with the audience at all.

The music - a mixture of black metal, death metal and grindcore - is extremely aggressive, noisy and disorientating. The themes of the lyrics are mass murder, brutality, social chaos.

The refusal of contact with the audience and of understandable "faces" increases the effect:
the listener is confronted not with the artist as a person, but with pure affect - thunder, distorted sound, unintelligible screams, an almost physical sensation from the music. It's a kind of "anti-performance" that paradoxically makes the experience stronger.

Why it all works

In all three cases, concealment produces different emotional modes:

• sleep Token has intimacy and a sense of belonging;

• ghost has an ironic celebration, laughter and general "rituals";

• dragged into Sunlight has a shattering, cold, furious catharsis.

But the general principle is the same:
not-knowing and not having a "face" doesn't lessen emotions, it heightens them.

In a world where continuous publicity, transparency and personal brand are increasingly expected of artists, such bands offer something else:

• not to be "recognised" and appreciated as a person,

• but to dissolve into the atmosphere, the sound and the physical sensation of the concert,

• to feel part of something bigger, where name, status and appearance are not important.

Perhaps this is why fans react so strongly to these projects.
When culture obsessively demands to "be seen", metal bands with their faces covered offer a rare luxury - the freedom to simply experience rather than present themselves.