17 years ago, in the summer of 2000, I arrived at a melting hot Giants Stadium parking lot at noon for a day-long festival to metal, Tattoo the Earth. The concert would culminate with me seeing my all-time favorite band for the very first time, Metallica. My friends and I never sat down, sang every lyric, and I even teared up during the firework show that opened “One.” Now 35 years old, I arrived with my wife to the new Giants stadium, MetLife Stadium, in East Rutherford, New Jersey to see Metallica for the 8th time. And as they’ve done every time, Metallica, the greatest metal band of all time, did not disappoint.

More below.

The Grammys were held on Sunday night, February 12, 2017, and hosted by James Corden at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California, with the live broadcast on CBS starting at 8pm EST (5pm PST).

Below are some of the highlights and clips from the broadcast of The 59th Annual Grammy Awards, along with the full list of Grammy winners at the end.

Here’s my usual official Grammys warning: I hate country music, I strongly dislike pop music, and I mostly have no idea about new music that’s not hard rock or heavy metal. I can, though, be objective when talking about a performance when it happens to be really good. With that, when I say I’m writing about the “highlights,” well, it’s the highlights according to me, a metalhead who watched the Grammys, a show that doesn’t even bother to televise the Heavy Metal category. With all of the deaths in the music world in 2016, I was sure that there’d be a lot of tributes, and I was intrigued by the tease of the Metallica and Lady Gaga team-up. Turns out, this year was mostly a snooze-fest, but there were some energetic performances that made up for everything else.

Wow! What a suck-fest 2016 was, huh? Lemmy goes and dies in the waning moments of 2015 and it’s all gone to hell since then. Bowie, Brexit, Prince, Trump, Mohammad Ali, ISIS, Leonard Cohen, Glenn Frye, Harambe, Keith Emerson AND Greg Lake, Standing Rock… the list of death, destruction, and atrocities goes on. Hell, The Cubs even won the World Series, so you know the end must be near! Thankfully though, we metalheads had a treasure-trove of great new music in which to drown our sorrows. There were so many great albums released that it was more difficult than ever for me to work up my year-end best-of list! Who would’ve though that Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica, and Darkthrone would all drop their greatest albums in decades? Perhaps another seal of the apocalypse breaking? I’ll let you decide that one for yourself. And as for the younger bands, there seem to be great ones crawling out of the woodwork everywhere.

So, without further ado, I present to you my favorite metal albums of 2016 from across all of the myriad subgenres. Keep in mind please, that this is exactly that… my favorite albums of the year. Yours are undoubtedly different. You probably even strongly disagree with some or all of my selections. Which is perfectly fine. Go write your own damn column!

Well, friends of the metal persuasion, that time of year has rolled around again. The holiday season is upon us, time to show up on doorsteps with your electric twangers and sing songs about roasting nuts, burn down churches, and, most of all, it’s time to avoid all your repulsive metalhead friends that might have the nerve to expect a gift. But for those of you who just don’t seem to have that flare for hiding in your closet for two months straight, here are some wallet-emptying items they’re sure to find amusing.

Here’s the 2016 Metalhead’s Holiday Gift Guide”¦

Why on Earth is GoD featuring aMetallica video for Black Metal Friday, you ask? Well, just two days ago, the trash metal legends released videos for all 13 tracks from their highly anticipated tenth studio album Hardwired…To Self-Destruct, which is available worldwide today, November 18, 2016, via the band’s own Blackened Recordings label.

One of those clips was for the song “ManUNkind” and featured a group of actors performing onstage in corpse paint and bearing a striking resemblance to the notorious Norwegian band Mayhem. I had commented in my review of Hardwired… To Self-Destruct yesterday that I thought it was just Metallica’s way of trolling the metal trolls. Well, it turns out that it is actually our first look at Lords Of Chaos, the upcoming feature film following the almost surreal saga of Mayhem.