Last week’s Sunday Spotify Slaylist got us thinking – horror films and heavy metal have a long and established history together, and while Judgment Night is definitely an interesting soundtrack to look at for its historical significance in pairing modern rap and rock together pre-nu metal, it definitely wasn’t a horror film. With this being the last Sunday before Halloween proper, we figured we needed to address this by looking at the soundtrack to something unashamedly Halloween-ish.

We’re going full schlock. We’re diving in to the soundtrack for the nadir/logical conclusion of the supernaturally-endowed slasher villain genre. We’re talking Freddy Vs Jason.

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Seven years ago today, IBM’s chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue defeated the then-world champion chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov in a series of six games. If we put on our tinfoil conspiracy-theorist hats, then this was the day that the slow and eventual machine takeover of humanity really begun. With that in mind, we’re taking a break from building our survival anti-Skynet bunker to put together this week’s Slaylist of future-fearing machine-war heavy metal.

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There’s a new (nu?) trend afoot in the world of emerging metalcore bands and that trend is similar in its makeup to nu metal when it came out. Instead of chug heavy riffs, we start with metalcore and instead of rap, we have RnB. Gavin Lloyd grew up with nu metal. Is this new trend as worthy or original, though? Hmmm…

I grew up during nu metal’s heyday and the likes of Limp Bizkit and Slipknot went a long way towards shaping my taste in music and making me the metal-loving scamp I am today. Nu metal was huge and had a mainstream crossover appeal that hasn’t been seen since in terms of heavy music.

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