Zoomers and the return of “metal” in the 2020s: what happened to the first “digital generation”?

From scarcity to the algorithm

The late 1990s and the early 2000s were a time when music was part of your identity. Back then almost everyone was sorted into “gopniks” and “informals” — street toughs on one side, and on the other anyone whose look and taste placed them outside the mainstream. In Kyiv the latter had two refugia, places where you were safe and comfortable: the record shop Domino behind the Passage arcade, and MoonCore on Vorovskoho Street.

A visit to either felt like a religious act, in form as much as in sensation. Communion there was taken with the gifts of heavy metal — cassettes costing between 1.5 and 2 hryvnias. For comparison, a pack of cigarettes ran between 0.5 and 1 hryvnia, and a reasonably well-off student had perhaps 15–20 hryvnias to get through a week.

Domino was an incredibly pompous and, in its own way, baroque “place of power”: wildly expensive, more display case than shop. From Mooncore, by contrast, I rarely came out without a cassette by Exploited, Otyg, Kreator and the like.

It is worth noting that back then the scarcity of information was even greater than the scarcity of music. It is one thing to ask the man behind the counter and buy what he recommends, quite another to understand who it is you have just bought.

Today a single touch of AI hands a music lover the information it once took months to track down. The internet was only just appearing: very slow, expensive and thin on content. And music, in spite of everything, carried that same protest vibe which, or so it seemed to me, ended with my own generation’s youth.

And perhaps the main irony is this: the generation that no longer has to spend months hunting for the music, or for information about it, is suddenly finding in old metal the very charge of protest that we thought was tied for good to our own youth?

A new generation of old metal

And yet, in barely twenty years, something paradoxical starts happening in the realm of “heavy music” at the beginning of the 2020s. Namely: a generation that grew up with a smartphone in its hand, with streaming, TikTok and practically unlimited access to the music of every era, has begun discovering genres formed long before it was born. And not only the renaissance of poppy nu-metal, but classic heavy, speed, power, thrash, death and black metal.

One sign of the revived interest in extreme music is the appearance of young bands that deliberately reach for the sound and imagery of the 1980s and 1990s. And audiences are turning up at gigs who witnessed neither Iron Maiden’s heyday, nor the first wave of Norwegian black metal, nor the golden age of American death metal.

Still, to call this simply a “return of metal” would be a banal exaggeration. The reason is that metal is not displacing pop or rap, and it is not returning to its former position in mass culture. Sociologically it is more accurate to speak of a “renaissance of the metal subculture” and its “generational renewal”.

Within these two phenomena, old genres acquire new listeners and musicians, while the digital generation rebuilds the way they are consumed. It loosens genre borders, changes the rules of subcultural belonging and at the same time restores the value of the live gig, of physical formats, of analogue sound, hand-drawn artwork and the local scene.

This paradox — a digital generation enchanted by an analogue past — is the central theme of this piece.

The paradox of the metal renaissance of the 2020s lies not so much in the return of old music as in the arrival of a new generation that finds it through digital algorithms yet values in it precisely what the digital world lacks: materiality, a living community, imperfect sound and a sense of subcultural apartness.

Music without scarcity or borders

Generation Z is usually taken to mean people born roughly between the second half of the 1990s and the early 2010s. Those boundaries are highly conventional, but for a serious conversation about music something else matters more. Namely, that unlike those of us who hunted cassettes in Kyiv in the late 1990s, this generation never lived through the technological revolution. For them, networks and streaming are simply the environment they exist in.

It is exactly this that radically changes the point of entry. In my generation, nine times out of ten a teenager heard about a band from their peers. Occasionally from the television chart show Hit-rik. One of its five songs a week would fall into the “rock-plus” bracket.

But even so, geography, money and the local subculture all had their say. If you lived in a small district town, had limited funds and peers who took a dim view of your taste, then consuming culture itself became hard to access and often risky. You hunted for music, and the closely cropped lads in “Adidas” and “North” caps hunted for you.

Today’s teenager can move in a single evening from Black Sabbath to Judas Priest, Venom, Bathory, Mayhem, Morbid Angel, Blind Guardian and the contemporary underground. Thanks to modern technology, musical history has long ceased to be linear. And, crucially, it is safe. In essence, as with books that were once in short supply, cultural consumption is now boundless, safe and inclusive. Markers such as locality, danger and exclusivity belong to the past.

Perhaps that is why a British BPI report described today’s young listeners as “omnivorous”. On the one hand, genre loyalty has not disappeared. On the other, the choice of track depends on mood and emotion. And on a third, old recordings no longer have to be found: they were digitised long ago and are simply there.

This point runs deeper than it seems at first glance. An example: for a “thrasher” or a “punk” of my generation, decades of personal history lie between Black Sabbath in 1970, Judas Priest’s Painkiller in 1990 and Mayhem’s De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas in 1994.

For a sixteen-year-old listener today the distance between them is virtually nil. What results is a rather interesting effect: the “compression of musical time”. Within it, “old” is not a marker of age, and analogue sound is simply a different aesthetic.

So the main difference between a zoomer and a 1990s “metalhead” is not merely easier access to music: the digital environment has compressed musical time so far that Black Sabbath, Mayhem and the contemporary underground have ended up in a single cultural present, where “old” no longer means age but merely one aesthetic among those on offer.

Back to the past, but without nostalgia

If a renaissance is taken to mean metal’s return to the summit of mass culture, then probably not. Pop, rap and other contemporary genres obviously have far larger audiences.

But if you look at “metal” as an ecosystem, the picture changes.

First, veterans such as Metallica, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest still fill stadiums.

Second, newer bands are snapping at their heels and aiming for the big arenas too.

But the most interesting changes are happening in the underground. Where NWOTHM — the New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal — is taking shape. Its cardinal difference from the genre’s earlier model of development is that the new generation is not looking for itself by rejecting what came before. This is closer to a restoration and a rethinking of the parents’ musical experience. Of something treated not as a museum exhibit but as material for a new cycle.

The “metal” renaissance is happening not as the genre’s return to the summit of mass culture but as the launch of a new cycle inside the scene itself, where the past stops being a museum exhibit and becomes, once again, material for making contemporary music.

From memory to a living scene

The formula “zoomers brought metal back” is, of course, too simple. If only because the renaissance of particular strands happened earlier. NWOTHM and the old-school death metal revival were taking shape well before the 2020s. And all the while older musicians, collectors, labels, festivals and local scenes had been keeping the genres alive for decades.

Gen Z’s almost revolutionary role in this process is a different one: it provides the culture with a generational continuation. A culture that could otherwise have turned into a scene devoted to its own memory.

Which is why, if the only people at an Iron Maiden show are those who were listening in 1985, that is nostalgia.

But when someone born in the twenty-first century goes to a gig and then starts their own death metal band, that is cultural reproduction.

One theory holds that transmission begins in the family: that the first push towards the “metal classics” comes from parents. Only then do the digital platforms step in and offer goods to suit every ear.

The point, above all, is that the old routes have been shortened, and today all you need to take part in a subculture is the internet. At the same time, what once made it so attractive disappears: exclusivity. That important, at times central, component alongside musical identity. There are pluses and minuses here. On the one hand, the absence of exclusivity lowers the threshold of entry to the subject and the phenomenon. On the other, so-called “subcultural discipline” weakens. To call yourself something, you no longer have to be it. You can simply listen to the music.

Gen Z’s revolutionary quality lies not in having brought metal back but in not having let it become a subculture of its own memory. By lowering the threshold of entry and destroying the old exclusivity, the new generation simultaneously secured for it the single most important condition of survival: the ability to reproduce itself beyond the generation of its founders.

The generation that picked up “metal”

There is no single cause of the phenomenon we are discussing. There is a set of hypotheses, each of which has a right to exist.

1. Streaming destroyed scarcity. To immerse yourself in any cultural phenomenon today you no longer have to go to the parties. Telegram, Reddit or GPT will do. The only problem facing cultural artefacts is their marketing. That is hard to build in conditions of an extraordinary surplus of everything. Including “metal”.
2. Generational distance. This applies above all to the archetypes of the 1980s and 1990s “metal scene”: all those soaring vocals, fantasy sleeves and so on.
3. A reaction to digital sterility. Japanese culture has the notion of “wabi-sabi”: the ability to see beauty in the imperfect. Above all this concerns technological shortcomings, the absence of valve warmth — lo-fi, analogue hiss, crude cover art and the rest. Something that lets you focus, for a second at least, on the secondary and interrupt the flow of consumption.
4. The emotional function of heavy music. Aggressive sound is not only a marker of anger, anxiety and frustration. Often it is also a springboard into the pool of release and catharsis.
5. A need for real community. Gigs and festivals provide that experience of physical presence which is in such short supply today.
6. Escapism. Among other things, heavy music is also an escape — temporary, but an escape — from reality into a world of mythology, the Middle Ages and other pre-modern archetypes. A whole album can probably serve as an anchor in a sea of the fragmentary consumption of reels and TikToks.

The new interest in “metal” can be read as a paradoxical answer by the digital generation to its own environment: unlimited access led it to the music of the past, and amid the endless stream of content what proved especially attractive was precisely that music’s imperfection, radicalism, wholeness and capacity to create real experience.

From the forty-minute album to physical presence in a crowd at a gig.

TikTok and co: the new promoters of an old subculture

For all the thousands of videos featuring the old bands my generation knows so well, TikTok’s role is overstated. Yes, TikTok is a house with thousands, millions of doors. But its extremely short format points to the absence of a scene behind them. TikTok is conceptual fragmentation. The scene has to be looked for elsewhere.

Social media created a new intermediary: the metal influencer. Guitarists, vocalists, collectors and fans can introduce a large audience to heavy music without the traditional music press. But within that highly branched ecosystem TikTok is only one part.

Once, to hear a piece of music you had to borrow or buy a cassette. Today the role of the friend, the party, the magazine and even the website is played by algorithms. They “advise” what to listen to next. Prudently and unobtrusively they take you by the hand and offer you the goods here and now. At a price you could once only dream of: a scrap of your attention.

Algorithms can, of course, homogenise a culture — or lead you down the rabbit hole of a niche.

So it can be argued that TikTok did not create the “metal renaissance”.

Its function in reviving interest in the genre is more modest and at the same time underrated. It shortened the path between an accidental, algorithmic encounter with heavy music and actually entering the field, the question, the scene itself.

TikTok did not create the “metal renaissance” and has not replaced the scene — it merely shortened the road to it radically, transforming the journey from a riff heard by chance to immersion in the genre. From a search lasting years into a few algorithmic taps.

The far right, antifascists and metal’s new generation

Stereotypes notwithstanding, there is no single “ideology of metal” — no “satanism”, for instance. Different kinds of “metal” have different histories, and within each genre opposing political positions coexist. And this while a substantial part of the scene remains apolitical as a matter of principle. At the same time, there are signs that in the 2020s political conflicts inside “metal” have become more visible.

The point is that “metal” has traditionally cultivated so-called “transgression”: the breaking of taboos, forbidden symbols, themes of violence, death and war. One of the most problematic consequences of that transgression was the emergence of NSBM — National Socialist Black Metal — where neo-Nazi and racist ideology was not decoration but content. It does not follow, however, that black metal is far right. On the contrary, through the 2010s and 2020s antifascist, anarchist, feminist and other left-wing segments of extreme metal developed alongside the neo-Nazi ones.

So, as before, it is more accurate to call today’s scene polarised. Although — and this matters — the revival of an old musical form does not mean the automatic return of all the social norms of that era.

In reality the political dimension of young people’s new interest in metal remains almost unstudied. In particular, there is no representative data that would establish whether zoomer metalheads lean more towards the right or the left of the political spectrum.

At the same time, they are entering a scene where political conflict already exists. At one pole, the National Socialist Black Metal tradition formed back in the 1990s and the transnational far-right networks connected to it; at the other, Red and Anarchist Black Metal, and antifascist, antiracist and queer milieus.

So metal’s return among the younger generation potentially means not only the revival of a musical genre but a new stage in the struggle over the political meaning of the metal subculture.

Zoomers are not entering a politically sterile subculture but a field that has long been polarised. Yet in reproducing the sound of the past they are under no obligation to inherit its politics — and the struggle over what will be kept from old metal and what discarded may become one of the main conflicts of the scene’s new generation.

Being a “metalhead” without sitting an exam

The classic subculture was often built on gatekeeping. The essence of it was that the initiate had to prove he was “real”. That meant knowing and listening to the “right” bands, telling the underground from the commercial, the “true” from the posers.

For genres that defined themselves a priori against popular culture, this always mattered. But today that model is having a hard time. The reason is musical “omnivorousness”, which eats away at the old principle of subcultural purity like acid.

No, this does not mean subcultural identity is disappearing. As long as the external attributes are there — the hair, the piercings, the T-shirts and so on — that is neither possible nor necessary. It is just that today all these symbols are becoming ever more universal and ever less often demand complete submission to a single subculture. Zoomers separate the aesthetics of the scene from its discipline. The first they accept readily, the second far less so.

Something similar is probably happening with politics. The scene traditionally contains three main currents: right, left and apolitical. But where zoomers’ involvement in them is concerned, this is more about a change in the rules of social interaction than the victory of any one ideology.

Some young listeners bring into “metal” an attentiveness to inclusivity, racism, sexism and safe space, but it would be a mistake to declare Gen Z metalheads left-wing by default. Black metal retains a far-right segment, apolitical scenes exist, and traditional metal often revolves around music, fantasy and historical imagery with no clear political programme.

The main change lies not in Gen Z making metal “more left-wing” or less subcultural, but in its separating the right to belong to the scene from any obligation to accept the whole of its cultural, behavioural and political package. The aesthetics remain, while the discipline gradually loses its power.

How old metal became young people’s music

To make the link between the children’s generation and the revived interest in their parents’ music clearer, I have picked out several reviews.

In them the theme unfolds chronologically: from the first observations of Gen Z entering an old subculture to a fully formed young death metal scene.

So:

1. Tobias Holst, “The future belongs to the young”, Devilution (1, 2, 3), 27 March 2021. Holst talks to “metalheads” aged 14 to 22 and shows that for them the history of metal is available here and now, in full. His respondents’ tastes span Deep Purple, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Pantera, Mayhem, Slipknot and contemporary extreme metal. One of the teenagers came to old Judas Priest through newer music and then listened through the entire discography. Metal retains its psychological function — it provides a language for aggression, anxiety and separation from the mainstream. But young listeners move between genres more freely and depend less on subcultural “purity”.
2. Dekai Averett, “Gen Z metalheads create a more inclusive subculture”, The Arrowhead, 25 April 2022. Averett describes how the mechanism of entry into metal has changed: instead of magazines, older friends and the local scene, the internet, television and social media matter more and more. Along with the music, dark clothing, band T-shirts and piercings are coming back, but young “metalheads” are less inclined towards gatekeeping and the division into the “true” and the “posers”. One of the older interviewees recalls once taking pride in knowing obscure bands and despising popular music. The younger respondents question the very right to determine who may call themselves a “metalhead”.
3. Michael Pementel, “The six best new death metal bands of the 2020s”, Loudwire, 28 April 2025. Pementel describes the revitalisation of death metal and the fact that a blend of death with hardcore and punk is developing in parallel with an old-school revival with a coarser sound. Tribal Gaze, Undeath, 200 Stab Wounds, Frozen Soul, Molder and others work with the legacy of Entombed, Immolation, Morbid Angel, Bolt Thrower, Obituary and Autopsy without simply copying it. For the generational question, what matters is that this new wave of bands is bringing a younger audience into the death metal scene.
4. Penfold, “The new wave: why traditional heavy metal is making a big comeback”, Loaded Radio, 20 October 2025. The central phenomenon here is NWOTHM: Eternal Champion, Haunt, Night Demon, Visigoth, Skull Fist, Smoulder and others are bringing back riffs, high vocals, fantasy sleeves and the epic imagery of the 1980s. Penfold explains the renaissance through a combination of nostalgia, festival culture and digital availability. Spotify, Bandcamp and YouTube let a young listener discover Iron Maiden and a small contemporary underground band side by side, and the return of traditional heavy appears as a search for authenticity, live performance and musical craft.
5. Mervi Vuorela, “How death metal became the number one genre in youth metal culture”, GramexPress, 2026. The piece describes the third wave of Finnish death metal, made by musicians aged 15 to 22. Cryptic Hatred, Azatoth, Malformed, Whisper and others take their bearings from Morbid Angel, Deicide and Cannibal Corpse, although they were born long after the genre’s first flowering. The young musicians link the growing interest in harsher music to the pandemic, isolation, fear and aggression. At the same time they are building DIY studios, gigs and festivals, they value physical formats, and they combine an old-school aesthetic with safe space and antifascist principles. This is no longer merely listening to old records but the reproduction of a scene’s social infrastructure.

Together these five texts register an important shift: if at the start of the 2020s Gen Z appears mainly as a new listener to a vast metal archive, a few years later it is already creating its own bands, gigs, festivals and DIY infrastructure — moving, in other words, from consuming its parents’ music to reproducing the scene in full, on its own terms.

Not a return, but a reassembly

The main problem with the word “return” is that “metal” never went anywhere. Yes, having lost its former place in mass culture, it broke up into dozens of scenes, festivals, labels, local communities and micro-genres.

But in the 2020s a change of generations became visible. People for whom Metallica, Iron Maiden, Morbid Angel or Mayhem are not memories of their youth but historical recordings are entering the scene as listeners and as musicians.

When a fifty-year-old buys a reissue of an album from 1986, his nostalgia is like a fountain. When a seventeen-year-old buys an old-school death metal cassette, the reason lies elsewhere. For him this is not his own past but an alternative present. Digital culture made musical history accessible and at the same time weakened its attachment to generations. That is precisely why dirty sound becomes an aesthetic choice, the cassette a valued object, and listening to an album from beginning to end an alternative to the endless algorithmic stream.

So it can be argued that Gen Z is not restoring the old subculture. At least, not entirely. It can reproduce the sound of the 1990s and discard the gatekeeping of the 1990s; wear the old T-shirts without adopting the musicians’ politics; admire a radical aesthetic while demanding different rules of behaviour at gigs. What is happening, therefore, is not a restoration but a reassembly of the tradition.

And so now, at the end of this text, I realise that the questions “why did zoomers return to metal?” and “did zoomers bring metal back?” are not quite correctly framed.

They never returned anywhere, because it never went anywhere. What they received was a vast archive without the system of coordinates in which it once existed. For them the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2020s all sit on a single screen.

So Gen Z is not restoring the old metal subculture but reassembling it to suit itself — reproducing the sound, the images and the materiality of the past while discarding part of its hierarchies, political attitudes and rules of subcultural “purity”.

And TikTok, YouTube, Spotify and the other digital platforms have become the chief intermediaries of that process. They did not bring metal back from oblivion; they opened its vast archive to a new generation. And in doing so they gave the old subculture not a second life but a new youth.