In April 2013 I was invited to give a keynote lecture at the ‘Heavy Metal and Popular Culture’ conference at Bowling Green University.  I took the opportunity to present some thoughts on the future of metal studies as a discipline (then just starting to emerge) and also what the future of metal could and should hold. I argued that metal was in a kind of ‘crisis’ of ‘abundance’ and tried to challenge myself and the audience to think about what metal could be if it broke the boundaries of metal itself.

In this collection I have included the original paper, together with my publication of it as a series of posts for the website Souciant.