A Look Back at 2020

This year was a different one for all of us. We were mostly at our houses, deprived of concerts, tours, workshops, and other musical events because of the pandemic. Nevertheless it was mostly a year we would all wanted to have never happened, there were some nice things about it too...

After lockdown, we -as the metal community- all had the same question in our minds: What will happen to live concerts? It's a bummer but they were all canceled due to the pandemic. However, this didn't prevent our favorite bands to produce quality music. Let's take a quick look at some of the heaviest studio albums from this year: Ordinary Man by Ozzy Osbourne, What the Dead Men Say by Trivium, Titans of Creation by Testament, Ohms by Deftones and many more.

Alongside these, there were also some live albums that were released by some of the possibly most inspirational metal bands of all time. Metallica released a live album with San Francisco Symphony called S&M2. Iron Maiden also released not one, but two live albums called Sanctuary and Nights of the Dead. Even though we were not able to headbang in arenas and concert halls, we are very grateful that our idols made it possible for us to do it at our houses. We are thrilled for new stuff that's waiting for us in 2021 and we can't wait for the restart of musical events.

It’s always hard to say goodbye to your loved ones, the people you look up to, including your favorite musicians, inspiration sources, idols… In this exceptionally tough year, 2020, we lost several important musicians from the metal music community. Let’s mark these people’s names, remember and appreciate their contributions to metal music.

We lost Martin Birch, who was an important music producer. He worked with several important bands such as Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, and Iron Maiden. Lee Kerslake died on September 19, he was best known as the longtime drummer for Uriah Heep, he also worked with Ozzy Osbourne in the early 1980s. Ray Burton, father of one of the best bass players without any doubt, Cliff Burton, passed away this year too. Tony Costanza left us on August 4, he was the first drummer of the band “Machine Head”. One of our biggest losses was the death of Eddie Van Halen, he died on October 6, at the age of 65, he was an idol for many of us, with his incredible music and inspiration.

This year was not much of a “positive” year. But there were some memories that will never fade out of our minds. We will remember those when we think of 2020. One of the most important things of this year was online gigs!

Many, many metal bands recorded their performance and uploaded it on online platforms. Many of them also did online LIVE gigs including Metallica’s funding concert in their studios in the name of “All Within My Hands Foundation”!! Those were fantastic and very fun to watch! And that is a sign of that nothing will stop metalheads from headbangin’!!! The drive-in gigs were also pretty popular this year. Headbanging in our cars were interesting, and very fun of course!!

There were also some happy news! Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine has recovered from throat cancer! This year was generally a bad year because of the pandemic, but we think that this year has taught us how to survive and actually have fun in terrible situations. We hope next year will be better and most importantly MORE METAL!