All That Remains

With the sudden demise of MTV’s Headbangers Ball in 1995, metal had nowhere to go but underground. The scene fractured, the sound intensified, and shares of Aqua Net plunged. Since then, a legion of back-to-basics core whores like Massachusetts’s All That Remains have pumped life back into the genre that media forgot. Whether you call it metalcore or melodic death or simply Satan on a stick, the music greases all the necks of those whose heads come mounted on a hinge. Still marathon-touring in support of 2006’s The Fall of Ideas, the outfit bludgeons with ferocious growling, extreme shredding and power chords, like a soundtrack to homicide. Yet lead singer Phil Labonte occasionally takes the chainsaw out of his throat to remind audiences how lovely his singing voice is. The formula works. All That Remains’ videos find enough regular rotation on MTV2’s resurrected Headbangers Ball that fans can now say they want their Metal TV.