Abstract
The term metal music covers a wide range of musical genres, which in some cases are very different from each other to the point where any genre connection is no longer recognizable. So what exactly do we mean by metal music? In the past, the music of different subcultures was closely tied to the territory in which the subculture in question was located, which usually led to its perception mainly through the political categorization of the different subgenres - skins, punks, etc., but with the current deterritorialized environment of metal music, this begins to make no sense and does not lead to any closer understanding of what makes metal metal metal, i.e. it does not help us to understand the distinction between the different subgenres of metal.
What the current "division" of genres can better bring us closer to is the characteristic and significant quality of metal called heaviness. However, when we try to define the essence of heaviness, we encounter manifold problems when trying to compare certain levels and types of heaviness with each other.
The difficulty of understanding heaviness is evident when comparing the compositional techniques and musical practices of metal sub-genres at different ends of the genre periphery. Doom metal evokes a different feeling of heaviness than death metal, yet as listeners we tend to equate the two feelings and look for a connection between them by calling them both "heavy".
Thus, for us, heaviness differs only in the form in which it is evoked. This paper will address the issue of heaviness itself - pointing out the problems that heaviness solves in understanding metal as a multi-genre musical style, and conversely the problems that this concept brings. It then compares its various iterations with each other, in order to reach some sort of closer understanding of the phenomenon, based on the differences between the different instances of heaviness, leading to the identification of the basic cognitive elements of heaviness.