A Metal Columnist Confronts Ear Fatigue, and Why That Matters

Langdon Hickman begins the latest edition of his monthly column with an admission that will resonate with anyone who has spent years digging through Bandcamp’s bottomless pit. Listening to five to ten underground metal records every week, week after week, can flatline your senses. Riffs start to blur. The shock of the avant-garde wears off. You lose your bearings for what normal even sounds like.

He describes the experience as ear fatigue, a numbness that sets in when transgressive art becomes routine. The fix, he found, was returning to mainstream material and taking it seriously. Not as a guilty pleasure but as a reset. Engaging with production standards, songwriting conventions, and sonic aesthetics that the wider world considers normal gave him back a frame of reference. It made the bizarre underground feel perverse again in the best way.

Hickman uses that word carefully. Perverse, he argues, is not just about sex. It is about moving against expectation with reckless spirit. Rock, punk, metal, jazz, hip-hop, and electronic music all began as acts of perversion against the accepted order. Things we now take for granted, like industrial textures in pop, were once provocations. He draws a line between conservative listening, which seeks comfort in what already pleases, and adventurous listening, which imagines the strange becoming normalized. The ideal, he notes, is holding both. Chasing only the avant-garde can make you abandon good ideas for the next shiny thing. Pure comfort blocks out anything new.

This framing isn’t a throwaway intro. It gives the column’s subsequent survey of new releases by Darkthrone, Elder, Effluence, Funebrarum, Junon, Trelldom, Tyrranus, and Ysbrydnos a sharper edge. These are not just more names in the endless metal churn. They are examined through a lens that has been deliberately refocused, by a writer who took a cold plunge back into the mainstream to feel the underground’s thrill again.