New Wave of American Heavy Metal
| New wave of American heavy metal | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | |
| Cultural origins | Early to mid-1990s, United States and Canada |
| Typical instruments | |
The new wave of American heavy metal (commonly abbreviated as NWOAHM) is a heavy metal music movement that originated in the United States and Canada during the early to mid-1990s and expanded most in the early to mid-2000s. Some of the bands considered part of the movement had formed as early as the late 1980s, but did not become influential or reach popular standing until the following decade. The term itself borrows from the new wave of British heavy metal dating to 1979. NWOAHM includes a wide variety of styles, including alternative metal, groove metal, industrial metal, nu metal and metalcore.
Although the term is used by the media with increasing frequency, the definition has not been finished completely. This is due in part to the growing addition of bands that assimilate to common styles in NWOAHM (as defined below), yet have not differentiated greatly enough as to garner a new genre moniker. One description by longtime metal author Garry Sharpe-Young helps classify the NWOAHM as a "marriage of European-style riffing and throaty vocals" Several of the bands within the NWOAHM are credited with bringing heavy metal back into the mainstream.
The new wave of American heavy metal has its origins in a group of post-grunge acts from the 1990s that brought heavy metal "back to its core brutality" and drawing not from the traditional blues formula but from thrash metal and punk. In the book The Next Generation of Rock & Punk, Joel McIver acknowledged Korn as the pioneers of the new wave of American heavy metal, and also credits them as the first band labeled as nu metal. The nu metal genre was popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Other roots of NWOAHM are attributed to bands such as Pantera, Biohazard, and Machine Head.
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