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Raising doom abroad: Indonesian metal bands ignored at home, popular overseas
These three metal bands may not get much attention domestically, but they’ve caught the ears of foreign metalheads.
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Metal supergroup: Masakre is made up of veterans from the local metal scene, and they have found more recognition abroad than in Indonesia. (Personal collection/Courtesy of Masakre)
The world knows of Indonesia’s love for heavy metal.
Frank Mullen, a member of the iconic American metal band Suffocation said on stage when the band played in Jakarta in 2007, "We have traveled all over the world, and Indonesia has the biggest metalhead crowd we've ever seen. We never thought that there would be a sea of people willing to jostle for our concerts.”
Local metal names such as Deadsquad, Seringai and Burgerkill have legions of fans as dedicated as those for global stars like Metallica and Slipknot.
And yet, hundreds of local metal acts and releases receive little to no attention from the local market, which in general focuses on international bands and the bigger local names mentioned above. For one reason or another, certain names are celebrated abroad but ignored in their own country. The Jakarta Post took a look at three such names.
Exhumation
The 2010s saw the rise of the “brutal death metal” genre, with hundreds of albums released by local bands, almost exclusively independently. Most sounded similar, with grunt-like vocals and blast-beat drumming – almost-inhumanly fast kick drum marathons. This was the time that Yogyakarta death metal band Exhumation began releasing records, including 2012’s Hymn to Your God and 2014’s Opus Death, which took less from contemporary death metal and instead looked to the genre’s 1980s incarnations, which were decidedly darker and more theatrical, particularly in lyrical imagery.
