The top 100 most overused words in metal band names
By Doug Moore
If you’re not familiar with Metal Archives, here’s a quick primer: also known as the Encyclopedia Metallum, it’ss basically a Wiki-style, user-driven data base for metal bands. You can search it by band name, song title, album title, musician, and so forth. It’s not a perfect tool, but it’s an indispensible resource for virtually any metal fan.
Anyone who even casually follows metal knows that because the genre has produced so many bands, a lot of the band names involved are…um…a little repetitive. We took a pretty close look at this phenomenon over at Invisible Oranges today — specifically, we used Metal Archives to put together a list of the most overused metal band name words we could come up with. We started out by looking for words that turned up over 100 results on Metal Archives’ band-name search function; when we realized that we’d amassed over 100 such words, we decided to limit the list to the top 100 in terms of results. We’ve got the list itself here — every entry turns up over 100 results, but the top words returned 1,000+ results (!). You can read about the method we used on the original post, but the results are listed in this post.
It probably make a good magnet set, but if you are starting a metal band, you might want to avoid these words…
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THE 100 MOST OVERUSED METAL BAND NAME WORDS
1. Death – 1,184 entries
2. Black – 1,157 entries
3. Dark – 1,094 entries
4. Blood – 924 entries
5. Dead – 741 entries
6. Hell – 704 entries
7. War – 731 entries
8. Necro – 632 entries
9. Soul – 538 entries
10. Night – 520 entries
11. Fall – 503 entries
12. Hate – 470 entries
13. God – 455 entries
14. Evil – 449 entries
15. Kill – 415 entries
16. Fire – 392 entries
17. Storm – 389 entries
18. Rain – 388 entries
19. Lord – 385 entries
20. Head – 383 entries
21. Metal – 359 entries
22. Human – 347 entries
23. Light – 345 entries
24. Moon – 329 entries
25. Winter – 322 entries
26. Shadow – 304 entries
27. Demon – 300 entries
28. Satan – 298 entries
29. Pain – 297 entries
30. Eternal – 285 entries
31. Dream – 284 entries
32. Burn – 273 entries
33. Witch – 271 entries
34. Chaos – 266 entries
35. Flesh – 265 entries
36. Cult – 264 entries
37. Goat – 261 entries
38. Rage – 259 entries
39. Terror – 252 entries
40. Force – 249 entries
41. Fear – 249 entries
42. Throne – 245 entries
43.Wolf – 241 entries
44. Stone – 240 entries
45. Christ – 236 entries
46. Steel – 232 entries
47. Rot – 231 entries
48. Funeral – 230 entries
49. Torment – 222 entries
50. Ritual – 216 entries
51. Cross – 214 entries
52. Gate – 213 entries
53. Frost – 208 entries
54. Gore – 202 entries
55. Doom – 199 entries
56. Corpse – 198 entries
57. Beyond – 194 entries
58. Crypt – 189 entries
59. Infernal – 189 entries
60. Wind – 189 entries
61. Brain – 185 entries
62. Lost – 178 entries
63. Grim – 175 entries
64. Ash – 175 entries
65. Iron – 169 entries
66. Face – 167 entries
67. Raven – 166 entries
68. Spirit – 165 entries
69. Morbid – 164 entries
70. Forest – 155 entries
71. Sick – 154 entries
72. Cold – 147 entries
73. Skull – 147 entries
74. Anger – 147 entries
75. Fuck – 146 entries
76. Fallen – 145 entries
77. Grind – 144 entries
78. Devil – 140 entries
79. Ruin – 140 entries
80. Thrash – 137 entries
81. Suffer – 135 entries
82. Murder – 133 entries
83. Divine – 133 entries
84. Slaughter – 133 entries
85. Brutal – 132 entries
86. Child – 126 entries
87. Nocturnal – 124 entries
88. Sorrow – 124 entries
89. Psycho – 123 entries
90. Torture – 122 entries
91. Torment – 222 entries
92. Wrath – 121 entries
93. Serpent – 119 entries
94. Agony – 118 entries
95. Slave – 116 entries
96. Heaven – 113 entries
97. Circle – 112 entries
98. Grace – 111 entries
99. Noise – 111 entries
100a. Ancient – 108 entries
100b. Dragon – 108 entries
100c. Hand – 108 entries