Week of Sep 14 – Sep 20 · 2026
Two hundred and fifty-five tracks across seven full days, and the number that matters is the artist count: a hundred and thirty of them, against last week's thirty-nine. Where the monomania week drained one band at a time, this week is its mirror. It opens at the very peak of the crust obsession, Monday's sixty-six-song flood with a whole Wolfpack box set at its heart, and then, by Wednesday, flips into the opposite gear and never flips back. The back half of the week grazes: the black metal canon, then its obscure underground, then the entire family tree of heavy music in a single Saturday. It ends on three tracks of jazz fusion late on Sunday, a door held open onto somewhere else.
The same week as numbers
| Day | Tracks | First play | Last play | Mean heaviness |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | 66 | 17:33 | 23:46 | 8.0 |
| Tuesday | 8 | 13:15 | 13:42 | 7.0 |
| Wednesday | 23 | 07:51 | 23:03 | 7.8 |
| Thursday | 42 | 10:42 | 22:51 | 7.3 |
| Friday | 59 | 09:48 | 00:02 | 8.0 |
| Saturday | 54 | 09:11 | 21:09 | 7.5 |
| Sunday | 3 | 22:04 | 23:04 | 4.3 |
The Arc
The shape is a hinge. Monday and, in its own softened way, Tuesday belong to the crust immersion that had run for days, the fastest and most uniform noise in the library taken in bulk. Then Wednesday breaks it: for the first time in a fortnight he stops locking on, and the rest of the week is browsing, each day wider and less settled than the last. Friday holds both modes at once, a black metal survey by morning and a crust set replayed twice by night, as if the week were showing its two halves side by side before letting the immersion go.
The Map
The extremes stay Swedish and American. Sweden supplies the crust that opens the week, Wolfpack and Anti Cimex and Skitsystem, and much of the black metal that fills the middle, Bathory and Dissection. America supplies the powerviolence and the modern death metal that closes it, Nausea and disrupt and the young gore of 200 Stab Wounds. Britain sits between them twice over, the crust of Extreme Noise Terror and Amebix and, on Saturday, the 1970s hard rock the whole genre descends from. The black metal survey pulls the map wider still, one track each out of Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, Finland, and Australia.
The Subjects
The subject is extremity itself, more than any one theme inside it. The crust is anti-authority and anti-war, the black metal cold and occult, the death metal gore and the body, and the atmospheric wing turns toward winter and wilderness and deep space. What binds them is not a message but an appetite for the far edge, the heaviest and most uncompromising version of whatever room he is standing in. Only the Saturday roots and the Sunday fusion step back from that edge, and even they are chosen for intensity rather than ease.
The Turn
The turn is Wednesday, and it is a turn of method, not mood. For two weeks the way he listened was to seize one thing and wear it out; from Wednesday on he cannot sit still, moving a track at a time through whole scenes and eras. And yet the daily notes keep catching the old compulsion leaking through, a crust set replayed note for note on Friday, a young death metal band run nearly whole on Saturday. The habit does not vanish when the method changes. It only has to share the week now with a restlessness that had been gone a long time.
Of the 130 artists heard this week, 66 had never appeared on the record before. The longest he stayed with one name: Wolfpack, 18 tracks unbroken.
Who spanned the week
What followed what
| Hushed | Low | Mid | Heavy | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hushed | ||||
| Low | 1 | 1 | ||
| Mid | 24 | 6 | ||
| Heavy | 6 | 210 |