Sounds of Origin in Heavy Metal Music grew out of the now-yearly Modern Heavy Metal Conference held at the Aalto University School of Business in Helsinki, Finland, led by the book's editor Toni-Matti Karjalainen. It is also not the first publication to have emerged from this conference, which has generated a book of proceedings from its initial 2015 session and a special issue of Metal Music Studies on ‘Metal Business and Markets’ in 2017. Karjalainen's conference has become one of the pillar events for the community involved in metal music studies, which has blossomed as an academic field over the last decade, complete with a learned society (The International Society for Metal Music Studies) and the aforementioned journal.

Sounds of Origin is also one of a number of edited collections on metal music that have come out recently, and indeed the field of metal studies has thus far produced a number of edited collections as opposed to monographs. Several factors probably contribute to this trend. Edited collections provide an obvious way to take advantage of the interdisciplinary nature of metal studies, as they attract scholars from music, anthropology, sociology, literature, philosophy, marketing, business and other fields as well. Additionally, heavy metal music may be a secondary specialty for some of these scholars, so authoring single chapters provides a way to explore beyond their primary research agendas. Another consideration is the youth of the metal studies field, in terms of both the newness of the community but also the relatively young age of the scholars who are working within it. For early-career authors, these collections are an excellent introduction to academic publishing and provide crucial stepping-stones towards developing full monographs. In this vein, the number of single-author books in the field is definitely growing. The disciplinary diversity of metal studies has also resulted in books on heavy metal from publishing firms that do not publish widely on music, or even the arts and humanities in general. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, for example, publishes mostly in the sciences, and places books on fine arts, music and literature within the social sciences. Similarly, Emerald Publishing (home of the Studies in Metal Music and Culture series) focuses mostly on business, finance, education and public policy, with metal music placed under the umbrella of sociology and criminology.

This collection also adds to the growing number of studies of popular music heritage and issues of historiography and curation, along with intersections of music and cultural or national identity. In some ways this is not particularly new territory considering the number of ethnographic books, articles, and documentaries on local metal scenes around the world. Sounds of Origin takes a step back to consider some wider questions, however, exploring how narratives of origin and heritage are curated and mediated by metal musicians and the media industries involved in heavy metal music. This provides insight into how origin narratives serve diverse purposes for metal musicians and fans by providing legitimation and authentication, creating a sense of a shared community, serving as a marketing shorthand, and driving tourism and the monetisation of local heritages.

Sounds of Origin includes seven studies of metal music scenes and their interactions with geography and local culture. Toni-Matti Karjalainen's opening chapter details how country-of-origin narratives around metal bands are cultivated and sustained by music media, regardless of whether the band's music or aesthetic is expressive of any sort of local identity. His chapter focuses particularly on Finland, and highlights ways in which metal from beyond the Anglophone world is often marketed in an exoticised manner that relies on romanticised visions of Northern wildness and stereotyped ideals of Finnish depressiveness. Yet these tropes also help to distinguish bands from smaller countries, becoming both a brand identity and a means of authentication by providing the appearance of rootedness within an era of globalisation. As Karjalainen notes, the development of the Internet and social media certainly helped these bands reach a global audience and possibly increased the need to reference their local identity as context for their music.

This trajectory continues in the next three chapters, which focus on black metal scenes in Norway, Italy, and Java. Baptiste Pilo takes another look at the infamous Norwegian black metal scene of the 1990s, a scene that was fairly obsessed with claims of underground authenticity and with their own constructed Nordic identities. Indeed, personal and musical authenticity became intertwined with cultural and territorial identities for a number of these musicians, often with an ethnocentric and racist subtext that is readily made explicit, as Pilo demonstrates. In this chapter, Pilo considers that Norwegian black metal's authentication by these official national entities has lessened its underground credibility by diffusing it into the wider culture, echoing Dick Hebdige's account of the 1970s punk subcultures. Certainly a number of black metal musicians express this opinion, although it's worth considering that the relationship between the Norwegian black metal underground and the country's mainstream culture may have been more ambiguous than the scene's participants might admit.

The chapter on Italian black metal by Tommaso Fragioni, Filippo Masina, Giulio Pieroni and Mario Venturella details the various ways the Italian black metal bands have re-imagined the Scandinavian ideal of ‘localised’ metal in an Italian context. Their chapter is more of a preliminary mapping-out of the scene's networks and branches, but it demonstrates already provocative connections with Italian identities and histories, particularly Italian fascism and anti-modern philosophy and their connections to folklore. Gianluca Chelini's chapter on Javanese ‘post-heritage’ black metal details the intersection of black metal and Indonesia's cultural histories and tourist narratives. By a close investigation of Indonesian cultural heritage as both a tool of nation-building and a tourist commodity, along with some welcome musical analysis of syncretic Javanese metal, Chelini argues that an earlier process of commodification reduced traditional forms of music to a stock of ‘Javanese’ musical elements that contemporary musicians use as cultural signifiers. Beyond the interesting musical fusions, Chelini's examples also question the countercultural ideal of metal scenes, noting that the interactions between a metal scene and its wider society are multifaceted and multidirectional rather than being merely oppositional.

The next two chapters move beyond black metal to explore varied heritage and identity narratives in Ireland and Australia. Joseph Norman focuses on the use of Celtic mythology and Irish Gothic aesthetics in the music of Bogs of Aughiska, a largely electronic ‘dark ambient’ musician. Dark ambient and noise music have a distinctly avant-garde bent towards maximalist drones that renders the music as both something of a tabula rasa and a fitting sonic representation of the sublime. Bogs then ‘Celt-ifies’ the style through song titles, artwork and the inclusion of spoken word recordings of Irish storytellers recalling legends and fairy stories from County Clare. As with the chapter on Italian black metal, this chapter is primarily descriptive. Similarly, Matt Sage and Caelli Jo Brooker explore musical identities in Australian metalcore and post-hardcore. As opposed to some of the other subjects in this collection, there appears to be little about these bands that would necessarily identify them as ‘Australian’, but here the focus is not particularly on musical style but rather on the development of high profile Australian metalcore and post-hardcore bands. As with the examples in Finland and Java, their examples provide a counterweight to assertions within metal scenes (and metal studies) that forever position ‘true’ metal in opposition to commercial success. Here, some bands’ success is an inspiration for the further development of a localised yet internationally visible Australian metal scene.

Finally, Amanda DiGioia's ethnography on the metal scene in New Haven finds a scene bound not by shared cultural roots, but instead a sense of shared political goals involving support for civil rights and opposition to the current administration in the US. DiGioia notes that this political climate likely encouraged her interviewees to emphasise their city's diversity, its status as a ‘sanctuary city’ for undocumented immigrants, and its welcoming attitude towards LGBTQ communities. However, DiGioia also observes that while white, straight and male scene participants rhapsodised about the scene's supposed inclusiveness, participants who were persons of colour, women and/or queer reported a much less positive experience. Her chapter ends the book with yet another example of metal scenes’ embeddedness in wider society, showing that the same inequalities and privileged blindnesses that plague workplaces, schools and the public sphere also show up in the moshpit. After decades of negative press and scholarly scorn directed at metal music, metal fans and scholars often default to a defensive or rehabilitative stance when describing the music and its scene, but DiGioia's study demonstrates how this position can obscure and negate the experiences of many participants.