There’s this kid I know — sixteen, bright, slightly lost, the kind of quiet intensity you only find in someone who’s already built their own world inside their headphones. Thick glasses, twitching fingers, restless mind. He’s just bought a $1,600 guitar and spends his days chasing Metallica riffs like they’re scripture.
He talks about Master of Puppets and Ride the Lightning the way monks talk about sacred texts. He doesn’t just listen — he believes.
And I find myself wondering: why still this? Why still the screaming guitars and clenched jaws in 2025, when the whole world is melting and we’ve got more music at our fingertips than any generation in history?
Because for me — I came up differently.
Sweet dreams are made of this...
When I was a kid, I had a clock radio. Tinny speaker, AM hum. Annie Lennox at midnight, Phil Collins trying to convince me he could “feel it coming in the air tonight.” I didn’t really understand any of it, but it sounded like adulthood — like somebody else’s longing leaking through the airwaves.
But then, somewhere around eighteen, the world shifted. I discovered techno.
Not the chart stuff. Not the Ibiza sunshine kind. I’m talking about the deep, industrial pulse — the hypnotic repetition that stretches time until you lose your sense of self. I remember my first real psytrance night — a warehouse floor, bodies moving like a single organism, strobes slicing the dark. Underworld’s “Born Slippy” came on and it felt like being plugged into the earth itself.
“Drive boy dog boy / dirty numb angel boy...”
Everything was sweat and light and forgiveness. Nobody cared who you were. Everyone was in it. It was communion without words.
That’s what I found in techno — connection.
Metal never gave me that.
Exit light / enter night...
Every metal gig I’ve ever been to felt like walking into a thundercloud. The sound is physical — walls of distortion, double kicks like artillery. It’s impressive, but it’s also a kind of violence. After two songs my ears are ringing and I’m thinking about the exits.
Still, I can see why that kid loves it. Metal is ritual. It’s confrontation turned into art. You take everything you hate about yourself and the world, you feed it into the amplifier, and you come out clean on the other side.
It’s catharsis by combustion.
“I’m your dream, make you real / I’m your eyes when you must steal...” — Metallica, “Sad But True”
For the fans, it’s not just noise — it’s recognition. Someone else has felt the darkness too. And they made it sound like victory.
The need beneath the noise
It’s taken me a long time to realise that most people don’t fall in love with music. They fall in love with the feeling the music lets them have.
Metalheads, ravers, punks — they’re all doing the same thing. They’re finding a home for emotions that don’t have anywhere else to live.
Metal is rebellion turned inward. Techno is surrender turned outward.
One says: I rage, therefore I am. The other says: I dissolve, therefore we are.
Both are trying to break the cage.
And if I should fall from grace with God...
Every genre becomes a church eventually. Metal has its uniforms — the black shirts, the patches, the studied anger. Techno has its temples — the clubs, the warehouses, the pilgrimage to Berlin.
Each pretends to reject conformity but secretly builds its own. And that’s okay. It’s human. We build tribes to survive.
Still, there’s something in psytrance I’ve never found anywhere else — a kind of open-hearted spirituality. Out under the sky, barefoot, people who might never speak again moving together like the same nervous system. The melodies shimmer, the bassline rises like breath, and for a moment you understand that joy doesn’t need language.
“Everything everything everything everything...” — Underworld
Techno, for all its machines, is about empathy. It’s about becoming part of something bigger than you.
The comfort of repetition
I sometimes wonder why people cling so tightly to the songs of their youth. Metal fans still worship The Black Album or Ride the Lightning, as if those riffs were fossils from a perfect age. But I think it’s more than nostalgia.
Those songs are time machines. They’re the sound of the first time life made sense. They’re the emotional fingerprints of identity.
Press play on “Enter Sandman” and they’re sixteen again, terrified and alive. Press play on “Born Slippy” and I’m twenty, sweat in my eyes, heart wide open, thinking this might just be heaven.
Techno moves differently through time. It remixes memory instead of freezing it. We sample the past, loop it, mutate it. Metal preserves. Techno transforms.
Don’t think / just let it flow...
Sometimes I think about that kid and his guitar. I see him learning those same riffs over and over — “One,” “Fade to Black,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls” — and I can feel the gravity of it. He’s not chasing fame. He’s trying to understand himself through sound.
It’s the same thing I do when I lose myself in a mix, chasing that perfect drop where everyone breathes at the same moment.
We’re both reaching for the same thing: wholeness.
Different frequencies, same ache.
“Open up my head and let me out...” — Chemical Brothers, “Out of Control”
In the end
Music isn’t just what we listen to. It’s the shape our longing takes when words fail. Metal, techno, punk, trance — they’re all just dialects of the same language: the desire to feel alive together.
Maybe that’s what I’m learning from this kid and his devotion to Metallica. He’s not wrong. He’s just tuned to a different pain.
And maybe if you listen closely — in a field at dawn, or in a club at 3 a.m., or through the walls of some teenager’s bedroom — you can hear how it all connects. The hum beneath everything. The shared pulse.
“We’re not gonna take it...” “And you may ask yourself — how did I get here?” “Everything everything everything everything…” “Enter night — exit light…”
Different anthems, same heartbeat. We’re all just trying to find a way home through the noise.
