Thrash metal bands like Metallica, Slayer, and Overkill adopted logos with straight, sharp edges to reflect the tight and controlled nature of the music. Indeed, there might be no better example of typography’s multi-sensorial nature than extreme metal logos. It's reached the point that you can almost determine the style of music from the typography. “Logos just tend to get more and more extreme and as you branch out,” says Riddick. “Later on it got more aggressive and pointy.”Īs metal evolved into myriad subgenres, each more extreme than the last, wordmarks and branding evolved in step. “Typographically, that stuff sort of starts off as psychedelic,” Butler says of early metal logos. It is a distant cousin to the aggressive wordmarks seen today. The bubbly letterforms of the logo that appeared on the band's eponymous debut album look more hallucinatory than creepy. If you trace the genre's abrasive aesthetic to its roots, you’ll find your way to Black Sabbath, the British band widely regarded as the creator of heavy metal. The identities of metal bands-black and death metal bands, in particular-tend to feature grotesque imagery and typography that swirls like branches, drips like blood, and clings like spider webs.
This mindset has led to an artistic style that’s defined by visuals that are almost hostile. “The point of these logos is like, unless you’re in-the-know already, it’s not for you,” says Tim Butler, who designs merchandise for bands like Metallica and Slayer. It’s music made by outsiders for outsiders, and its logos reflect as much. Metal and its innumerable sub-genres have always embraced ideals like iconoclasm, pride, and independence. “The genre kind of commands a particular style of logo that the listener can identify with,” says Mark Riddick, a designer and author of Logos From Hell, a 600-page book that chronicles the logos of thousands of metal bands.
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That might sound obvious, but extreme metal, perhaps more than any other musical genre, abides by a strict and clear visual code that conveys to listeners exactly what they’re getting into. But then, it was designed to be that way. Slayer's logo-much like the flame and pitchfork motif of Morbid Angel or Autopsy’s dripping, ghoulish font-is scary and alienating. It looks harsh and dangerous, like a graphical lightning bolt that’s striking too close for comfort. The wordmark, first seen on the 1983 album Show No Mercy, features clean, angular letters that interweave with a pentagram of swords. Even if you’ve never heard a song by Slayer, the seminal thrash metal band that came out of Southern California in 1981, you could make an educated guess about the kind of music they play simply by looking at their logo.