With this year's release of Spotify Wrapped today, me and millions of others have been excitedly sharing our top songs and artists with our online circles across various social media platforms all day. Amongst my personal top 20, I have several songs from the metalcore band Knocked Loose's most recent album, You Won't Go Before You're Supposed To (2024). One of those songs that's in my top 20 is #13, "Suffocate" featuring Poppy.
I am excited that I have that song in my top 20 of Spotify Wrapped; after all, the song has been nominated for a Grammy for the Best Metal Performance in 2025. Despite having been around for many years, I have only recently discovered Knocked Loose; my personal favorite band, Motionless in White, featured Knocked Loose's lead singer Bryan Garris on the song "Slaughterhouse" from their sixth studio album, Scoring The End Of The World (2022). In 2023, Knocked Loose were one of the many performers featured at Coachella, which was a fantastic time for everyone who went (side note, but the "unknown song" that this article I linked lists was "Deep In The Willow"). I even saw Knocked Loose open for Motionless in White's Touring The End Of The World Tour in October of 2023 in San Antonio, TX, which further cemented my love for them and their careers as they have moved forward in such a short amount of time since I initially discovered them. They bring a sort of energy to the metalcore scene that, as a long time fan of the metalcore genre, I'm excited to be part of, whether it's me seeing them in concert or sitting alone in my room listening to their albums through Spotify.
Poppy has had a very similar rise to fame to Knocked Loose, though it's been a different journey for her in a big way. Initially, Poppy entered the public eye as a mysterious YouTuber; one of the first videos I remember seeing from her was her "I'm Poppy." video from 2015, where she...stands in an empty void of a room introducing herself over and over again for ten minutes straight. I remember watching videos back in the day about conspiracy theories surrounding Poppy; other YouTubers, such as The Film Theorists, proposed the theory Poppy's personal YouTube channel to be some sort of satirical art project about consumerism and how the music industry makes musicians and other artists to force people to ignore the real world around them.
In fact, when Poppy first started making music back in the mid-2010's, it was nothing like the music she makes now; the first music video she ever released was in July of 2015 for her song "Lowlife":
Listening back to this song, it's insane to think that eight years later, Poppy would be making metal music, whether it be on her own like her cover of "Spit" by Kittie and her original song "BLOODMONEY" or collaborating with metal bands like Knocked Loose on "Suffocate" and Bad Omens on "V.A.N.". However, as someone who has been loosely following Poppy's career since back in the mid-2010's, I feel the same excitement for her growing career as I do for Knocked Loose's. I'm excited for the music I enjoy from these younger artists to get the recognition that I believe they deserve, and that I get to be part of the wave that keeps them in the public eye.
Many metalcore musicians are becoming more prevalent in the the wider popular culture, even outside of the likes of Knocked Loose or Poppy. Spiritbox, for example, has featured on two songs by Megan Thee Stallion. The first the band worked with Megan was on the rock version of "Cobra" back in 2023, and then again on Megan's most recent album MEGAN: ACT II (2024), featuring on the song "TYG". During the 2024 Olympics, French metal band Gojira also had a massive performance of the song "Ah! Ça Ira" with Marina Viotti during the games' opening ceremony. These developments of putting metal musicians on the center stage of modern popular culture, while very exciting, does give some insight into how the wider audience of the world feel about metal in the modern era.
Recently, Knocked Loose and Poppy performed "Suffocate" on Jimmy Kimmel Live. I have to say, I'm extremely jealous of everyone who got to attend this performance live; just look at the video from the performance uploaded to the official Jimmy Kimmel Live channel on YouTube:
I have never been so excited to see any musician on national television before, but I had always never been so disappointed in seeing the reaction from people nationwide about the performance. The band, Poppy, and the crowd are having a fantastic time, but audiences at home were not pleased at all. On Jimmy Kimmel's Facebook page, so-called "concerned" parents and the like have commented a variety of insults towards Jimmy Kimmel, the show, and the performers on the post with the video of the performance. Most of their insults are, at best, something every metal band has heard before since the beginning of metal, and at worst, people who refuse to understand that there are people out there who are different (and arguably way cooler) than them.
Of course, these negative Nancies are combated and drowned out by the many positive reactions; a lot of commenters mention that, despite their dislike of Knocked Loose, they can recognize that this is a huge moment in current metal history. Others praise Jimmy Kimmel and his team for doing something that other late night shows are scared to do, bringing on a performance that is outside of the social norm of the modern era. After all, Jimmy Kimmel's brought on other metal musicians in the past; back in 2011, the show featured Asking Alexandria and their song "Closure" with an equally energetic crowd to Knocked Loose's over a decade later. However, even amongst this positivity and showcasing of metal music and its subgenres on national television, I can't help but think back to the Satanic Panic of the 1980's with the seemingly inevitable negative reactions.
There is a very detailed history behind the origins of the Satanic Panic, but in the simplest of terminology, it was equal parts a moral panic and mass hysteria phenomenon that started in 1980, where people were worried about the influences "afflicting" the youth at the time. These influences were fairly simple, and hardly the vehicles of Satan that the 1980's would make them out to be; tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, as well as the heavy metal music genre, were both on the rise at the time, but since both of them depicted demons and other "not Christian" imagery, people believed them to be inherently Satanic — and, consequently, inherently evil, corrupting the future of the United States as well as the world at large. Such panic brought up fruitless witch hunts, searching for someone or something to blame; once again, the heavy metal music genre and Dungeon & Dragons were two highlighted cores of the Satanic Panic.
Notice how I never said that the Satanic Panic phenomenon necessarily stopped; while it has certainly moved past the worst of it, the repercussions of this worldwide hysteria is still felt to this very day. While shows and movies like Netflix's Stranger Things (2016—), Peacock's Hysteria! (2024), and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021) use the time period and subsequent Satanic Panic phenomenon as a vehicle for storytelling, there is no doubt that it still has its lasting effects into the modern era in real life. Moral panics always seems to circle around popular culture and politics until it finds something to latch itself onto in one way or another. For example, originating in 2017, QAnon, an infamous far-right political movement and conspiracy theory, played into the age-old fears of the Satanic Panic to spread harmful rumors about Democratic politicians in 2021 by claiming that they were doing "satanic rituals" after kidnapping and torturing children.
Metal music is, of course, another mode in which the Satanic Panic makes an appearance — but that, of course, is not necessarily a baseless accusation. Starting in the 80's and entering the 90's, various bands in Norway cropped up with a new subgenre of metal called "black metal". This subgenre of heavy metal is all about being scary and being Satanic, playing into the age of the Satanic Panic; bands like Mayhem, Gorgoroth, Burzum, and Darkthrone (I promise those are all real bands) thrived during the early nineties during the second wave of black metal. If any of those band names sound familiar, it mostly likely because of their infamy. Øystein Aarseth (also known as the psuedonym "Euronymous") from the band Mayhem, Varg Vikernes from the band Old Funeral, and various other black metal musicians in the scene at the time were responsible for a string of church burnings in Norway in the 1990's as well as many other crimes, including murder. Their church burnings were, of course, to get a rise out of those who were against Satanism and paganism, as well as a sort of protest against historical injustices against pagans in Norway. At least, these are all claims made by Vikernes, who is not exactly known to tell the truth. In my own findings, it seems that the church burnings primarily happened to enact more fear of the black metal scene at the time; after all, their entire goal was to seem scary and Satanic. To a bunch of teen and young adult boys in the 1990's, what's a better promotion of their Satanic image than to burn down churches? These events, amongst other situations (like that time Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath bit a bat's head off on stage), have left a dark spot in the history of metal music for those outside of the scene.
It's a sad thing to realize that the terrifying and tangible truth is that the Satanic Panic has not stopped, and most likely won't stop anytime soon. It simply hibernates until another situation where the phenomenon can thrive arrives in popular culture, changing how it appears based on the needs of the situation; unfortunately, it seems that Knocked Loose and Poppy performing on Jimmy Kimmel Live is the newest "threat" for the Satanic Panic to latch onto.
When making an Instagram post providing a retrospective on the performance, Bryan Garris said it best while addressing anyone offended by the performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live: "if it scared you, good."
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