How Song Forms Create Ritual Spaces for Experiencing Heaviness

Abstract Metal fans often contrast their music with mainstream rock and pop, which they deride as “formulaic,” but metal features its own song-form formulas that are widespread within the genre’s mainstream. Metal’s default song form resembles the “compound AABA” verse-chorus song form that is the norm in rock and pop, but it is more stylized and less vocal-centric, structured as a series of sections based on repeating riffs. This chapter shows how these conventional idioms of riff-based structure in metal are used to frame the interior of songs as ritual spaces for extreme dance practices and embodied experiences of impact. The chapter ends with an analysis of form and narrative in Ghost’s “Cirice,” showing how within a conventional song form, listeners can recall the genre’s ideologies and musical conventions and help re-enact them, renewing their genre commitments as fans by reliving or re-performing their previous experiences of heaviness.