Map of Metal: An Interactive History of Heavy Metal Subgenres

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🛠️ Map of Metal

What it isClickable map of metal subgenres with band history and embedded samples
PlatformWeb browser (desktop or tablet; mobile unfinished)
PriceFree · GitHub
Linkmapofmetal.com · HN discussion

Patrick Galbraith built Map of Metal with a friend studying multimedia: one person on the data, one on the code, about a week or two total. That was 2009. The site became the map a generation of metal-curious listeners used to see how thrash split into death, how doom fed stoner, why power metal sounds nothing like black. It resurfaced on Hacker News in May 2026 while Galbraith’s wife was picking something on TV. His comment thread is half technical history, half lament for the old web.

  1. The map is the interface. You pan and zoom a stylized terrain where regions are subgenres and paths show influence. Click a node and you get a write-up plus a tracklist with YouTube clips for each exemplar band. Hear the difference between NWOBHM and melodeath instead of reading a Wikipedia wall of adjectives.

  2. Flash soul, HTML5 body. The original ran in Adobe Flash. Galbraith ported it to HTML5 a few years back and posted the source mostly to keep the thing alive. Genre data lives as JSON files under data/genre-info/ in the repo, each with title, description, decade, and fallback video IDs if a clip dies.

  3. YouTube embedding used to be the easy part. When the Flash version launched, YouTube had tiny text ads and Galbraith could hide the player chrome entirely. YouTube blacklisted the site anyway. He got unblocked after asking a Google engineer on a dev forum. “Very different times,” he wrote on HN. Today the visible player and pre-roll ads are part of the tradeoff for free hosting.

  4. Mobile never shipped. Galbraith started a custom WebGL renderer because phone performance was rough, then life intervened. The site still shows “Mobile support coming soon.” Use a laptop or tablet. He has sketches for a much larger map (2m x 1.5m unfolded) with more subgenres and historical events. That version exists on paper, not in production.

  5. The canon has gaps and that is fine. HN commenters flagged missing branches (blackgaze, grey metal, metalstep). The map is metal-only by design, not a map of all music. Treat it as a curated rabbit hole, not a complete taxonomy. You can suggest genres via the GitHub repo if you bring descriptions and 8–10 exemplar tracks.

First run

  1. Open mapofmetal.com on desktop and hit ENTER.
  2. Pan the map and click any genre region that catches your eye.
  3. Read the blurb, then play tracks from the embedded list.
  4. Follow connected paths to see how one sound forked into another.

No account, no install. Prints are sold on Zazzle if you want to support the project.

Worth your time if: you like metal even a little and want a visual tour with samples attached, or you miss the Flash-era web when two people could ship something weird in two weeks.

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