16. Robert Frost
His most memorable poems take place in the middle of the woods, so he’d be a natural black metal frontman. And some of his lines are downright badass. “Leaves got up in a coil and hissed, blindly struck at my knee and missed”— Slap that on the back of a t-shirt in a vaguely northern European font with some AI art of swirling leaves in a sepia filter on the front, and Frost’s band will have merch sales through the roof. He secretly can’t stand the recording production values and wants to at least get Arthur Rizk for the next album. He also needs a nap.
15. James Joyce
His booze-fueled music career begins with a straightforward collection of basic-but-respectable Judas Priest-influenced metal tracks and then starts to get weird. By his fourth and final record, he’s gone full-blown avant-garde, putting out a double album that sounds like Imperial Triumphant covering Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. Lots of metalheads claim it’s a work of genius, but the Spotify numbers and record sales don’t lie. No one wants to listen to this thing. Whenever people talk about his band, the phrase “Well, I like his earlier stuff better” is pretty much a given.
14. Sue Grafton
On the one hand, an author of cozy “Murder She Wrote”-style mysteries probably isn’t going to have much luck getting a metal band off the ground. On the other, Morbid Angel most likely took her work as inspiration for the whole “titling your albums in alphabetical order” thing, so who knows, maybe Trey Azagthoth is a big enough fan to invite her to tour with them this summer.
13. Anne Brontë
The unfairly-overlooked Brontë sister puts together a group that does goth-inflected deathcore. They become critical darlings, publicly beef with Lorna Shore, and serve as guest musicians with some of the most respected undergroundish metal acts working today. The band is doing great until some dipshit named Gilbert strongarms his way into being their manager, steals Anne’s business papers, embezzles from the merch revenue, and just runs the whole thing into the ground.
12. Percy Shelley
He’s got plenty of demos ready to go, but for now, he’s coasting off the royalties from one of his best poems being used as the title of, and in the promo materials for, the most acclaimed episode of “Breaking Bad.” He does have one track called “The Masque of Anarchy,” which is pretty badass as titles go, and written mostly in an iambic tetrameter that would go great with the right slam-death instrumentation. But for some reason, he wants to sell it to Chris Barnes and Six Feet Under, a band of which he is sincerely and mystifyingly an absolute superfan.
11. Stephen King
Well of course Stephen King is going to be in a metal band, but rather than some sort of specialized niche, they’re going to be pretty straightforwardly influenced by legacy acts like Sabbath and Deep Purple and Maiden. They also love Megadeth, but no one in the band can play guitar fast enough to sound like them. They will release half a dozen albums, of vastly varying quality, every single year for several decades.
10. Vladimir Nabokov
The band for which he serves as lead guitarist and primary songwriter has a bunch of critically acclaimed albums. They’re one of those bands who, whenever someone ranks their discography, there’s a caveat at the beginning like “This band has no bad albums!” But then Nabokov writes ONE concept album about a middle-aged man’s lust for his fiance’s daughter and it’s like that’s all anyone remembers about them. THEY HAVE OTHER ALBUMS TOO, YOU KNOW!
9. Aphra Behn
Her breakout single will explore the nuances of feminine desire and the expectations of a stiflingly patriarchal society through a meticulous-yet-somehow-vague narrative of a sexual encounter. The music itself is hyper-complex and sounds like Malignancy, or maybe “Obscura”-era Gorguts. It will be acclaimed by a variety of thoughtful metal critics before being derided as “woke” by the kind of YouTuber metalhead dolts who think bands are posers if they don’t wear all black for publicity shots and didn’t pass out in the bathroom of a club in Tampa in the late ’80s.
8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Oh, he’s ready. “Dejection: An Ode” is one of the most hopeless pieces of poetry ever written in English, and it is way overdue to be turned into lyrics over a dark, heavy-as-hell death-doom dirge. And just when you think you have him pegged as a guru of heavy gloomy metal, he turns around and shows Iron Maiden exactly how “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” ought to be interpreted musically, complete with a wild harmonized guitar solo. Also, Coleridge is pretty fun to hang with on the tour bus.
7. William Wordsworth
Wordsworth fronts the most respected atmospheric black metal band around. Most of his poems are about chilling in the woods while being vaguely annoyed, so it’s a natural fit. And the words to “Tintern Abbey” work surprisingly well as a distorted spoken word piece accompanied by blast beats and shrieking tremolos. The constant reissues and remasters of his biggest album is a little irritating, but no one can deny that Will fronts a killer group.
6. Toni Morrison
Morrison’s books are full of some of the most desperate and gruesome depictions of human nature imaginable. I mean, she’s got a major character named Macon Dead, for heck’s sake. In other words, her prose is perfect to be adapted into a brutal death metal band with just a touch of Norwegian black metal. True, Morrison’s books feel like they’d be most appropriately scored by an A24-style string composition. But once she gets inspired by some Incantation and Dying Fetus records, all bets are off. Her band is gonna melt your face off right before you get shoulder-checked to the floor of the pit.
5. Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Browning uses a lot of romanticized imagery of baby animals to critique 19th century England’s horrific treatment of child laborers. A collab with Cattle Decapitation is pretty much inevitable, though singer Travis Ryan will later remark that Browning’s preferences for album art were “a little on the gross side.”
4. Charlotte Brontë
Brontë’s masterpiece “Jane Eyre” is one of the biggest middle fingers ever waggled in the face of the Victorian patriarchy. Charlotte is going to start an outspokenly feminist, all-women/nonbinary deathgrind band with at least one current member of Ragana. Their debut record, the album art of which depicts Mr. Brocklehurst’s severed head on a stick, is co-produced by Erik Rutan and makes almost everyone’s year-end list.
3. Jane Austen
She pretty much created the novel as we know it now, and she’ll do the same thing with music, writing albums that effortlessly bring together dozens of genres and influences into a brand-new style that hundreds of future bands will try and mostly fail to reproduce. More than one metal YouTuber will refer to her as the “Ozzy of our generation,” and it will still be an understatement.
2. Virginia Woolf and Mary Shelley (tie)
Considering their similar last names and VERY similar vibes, Woolf will team up with Chelsea Wolfe to create some of the most brilliant and heartrending goth metal you’ve ever heard, with Virginia putting the literary technique of focalization to work on some astonishingly deep and moving lyrics. Then they audition Mary Shelley, the author of the greatest horror novel ever written, to join them on bass, and they are basically unstoppable. They’ll call themselves Ginny Shelley Wolfe, and will embark on a highly-successful world tour with Deafheaven and My Dying Bride and be single-handedly responsible for a resurgence in goth culture that dwarfs Taylor Swift fandom.
1. Ottessa Moshfegh
American literature’s current master of writing about cannibalism, incest, loveless families, drug abuse, witchcraft, casual self-harm, and general human depravity could start a successful blackened death metal band without even trying. Take almost any passage from her most recent novel “Lapvona,” and you’ve got inspiration for a song that will make most most bands’ lyrics sound like the soundtrack to Daniel Tiger. The band will be polarizing among critics and fans, but no one can deny the talent. Or the misanthropy.
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