The Importance Of A Good Hook In Today’s Metal

In today metal there are so many bands out there trying to break into the scene. A lot of bands get signed that I think are very talented, but they lack a good hook. Whether it’s a good chorus line or just a good verse or rhythm in general that keeps it interesting, it’s gotta have it. There are far too many bands in today’s metal that don’t have that hook. Some people are “Anti-hook” and don’t like them. Why? I honestly don’t know. It’s hard to go to a live show and just bang your head without having a good hook in the song to raise your fist too and sing along.

Some bands have that instant hook right from the get-go and keep that hook all the way through. Songs like Lamb Of God’s Laid To Rest is a song that is relentlessly heavy from beginning to end. With the opening riff, the chorus and the bridge. It’s all there and they keep that same formula throughout most of their music. The title track from Kataklysm’s Prevail starts with a catchy first pumping rhythmic verse and bridges into the chorus “Prevail, the time has come to crush the enemy one by one“. Just about every Megadeth song has a great hook. Dave Mustaine is an amazing song writer and he knows how to write a song that you will remember and play over and over again. Black Sabbath did it with Black Sabbath. The opening chords start it off in an evil, eerie hook that just grasps your attention and start to tell a story like all of their songs.

Metal-core is notorious for having hooks in chorus lines and that’s why it is so successful and mainstream. However, bands like Century, with their release Black Ocean to me was just a wall of noise with thoughtless screaming. Not good rhythmic and/or melodic screaming, but screaming like someone is trying to put a knife in your chest and your trying to fight them off and get someone’s attention to help. It just had no catch to me, it had nothing that made me want to listen to it again. Don’t think I’m just picking on Century, I have the same problem with Job For A Cowboy, however JFAC at least had good vocals but they over-power everything else.

Everyone is always hating  Hatebreed because they find it boring. Hardcore is a genre that always has a hook and usually it’s a catchy chorus line that just makes you want to commit random acts of violence on emo kids. If it’s all blast-beats and constant double thumping of the bass drum all the way through, with vocals that don’t vary, then it gets boring and redundant.

If you want to write a good metal song, or a song of any genre, then you have to think really hard about what you like to hear and what the people around you like to hear. I don’t care if you write a 40 minute song that has every possible note in it, in the most complicated arrangements and structure. You may think it’s brilliant because you wrote it, but if no one else likes it and there really isn’t anything about the song that would make someone want to hear it again, then you have just written a 40 minute piece of garbage that only you will listen to. The fans are ultimately the judge of a musicians work. Everybody knows this. Sometimes it doesn’t happen. Musicians try to self produce songs and they think it sounds great without outside influence on what might make that song better and make it ’sell’. When it bombs and they lose fans they wonder why. “Hook, Line And Sinker”. There’s no other way to put it. A song has to have a good hook, a good line of structure to make it interesting all the way through and a sinker. Something to make the end all worth the rest of the song. Something that makes you say F*ck Yeah! as soon as it’s over. It’s so obvious, yet some people just don’t get it.