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…

THE 100 MOST OVERUSED METAL BAND NAME WORDS

1. Death1,184 entries
2. Black1,157 entries
3. Dark1,094 entries
4. Blood924 entries
5. Dead741 entries
6. Hell704 entries
7. War731 entries
8. Necro632 entries
9. Soul538 entries
10. Night520 entries
11. Fall503 entries
12. Hate470 entries
13. God455 entries
14. Evil449 entries
15. Kill415 entries
16. Fire392 entries
17. Storm389 entries
18. Rain388 entries
19. Lord385 entries
20. Head383 entries
21. Metal359 entries
22. Human347 entries
23. Light345 entries
24. Moon329 entries
25. Winter322 entries
26. Shadow304 entries
27. Demon300 entries
28. Satan298 entries
29. Pain297 entries
30. Eternal285 entries
31. Dream284 entries
32. Burn273 entries
33. Witch271 entries
34. Chaos266 entries
35. Flesh265 entries
36. Cult264 entries
37. Goat261 entries
38. Rage259 entries
39. Terror252 entries
40. Force249 entries
41. Fear249 entries
42. Throne245 entries
43.Wolf241 entries
44. Stone240 entries
45. Christ236 entries
46. Steel232 entries
47. Rot231 entries
48. Funeral230 entries
49. Torment222 entries
50. Ritual216 entries
51. Cross214 entries
52. Gate213 entries
53. Frost208 entries
54. Gore202 entries
55. Doom199 entries
56. Corpse198 entries
57. Beyond194 entries
58. Crypt189 entries
59. Infernal189 entries
60. Wind189 entries
61. Brain185 entries
62. Lost178 entries
63. Grim175 entries
64. Ash175 entries
65. Iron169 entries
66. Face167 entries
67. Raven166 entries
68. Spirit165 entries
69. Morbid164 entries
70. Forest155 entries
71. Sick154 entries
72. Cold147 entries
73. Skull147 entries
74. Anger147 entries
75. Fuck146 entries
76. Fallen145 entries
77. Grind144 entries
78. Devil140 entries
79. Ruin140 entries
80. Thrash137 entries
81. Suffer135 entries
82. Murder133 entries
83. Divine133 entries
84. Slaughter133 entries
85. Brutal132 entries
86. Child126 entries
87. Nocturnal124 entries
88. Sorrow124 entries
89. Psycho123 entries
90. Torture122 entries
91. Torment222 entries
92. Wrath121 entries
93. Serpent119 entries
94. Agony118 entries
95. Slave116 entries
96. Heaven113 entries
97. Circle112 entries
98. Grace111 entries
99. Noise111 entries
100a. Ancient108 entries
100b. Dragon108 entries
100c. Hand108 entries