Since the beginning of time, human beings have made metal music. If you’ve never listened to metal—either because you abhor, let’s face it, grown, white men screaming and growling pseudo poetries or because it makes your face muscles vibrate—I urge you to reconsider. Here are some good metal tunes and my crap reasons for liking them:

Deafheaven, “Dream House”

Because they accidentally took their name from a Shakespearean sonnet (Sonnet 29), boast a pink album cover with beautiful typography, and create an unholy union of shoegaze, grindcore, and emo. Emily Dickinson once wrote, “I dwell in Possibility— / A fairer house than Prose—” She once wrote that, and I pretend that it inspired this song.

Gojira, “Planned Obsolescence”

French environmentalist heavy metal is a thing. It was too easy then, I think, to take the name of the famous giagantic Japanese lizard. Still, this song strikes me as a sort of spiritual successor to Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs.” Where the former depicted saw the geopolitical landscape through the lens of “witches at black masses,” Gojira gives us “created weakness for the numbers on the board.” “The demon needs to feed” is also a very good lyric. I am writing this on a two years dated MacBook Air. The double bass reminds me of a skipping CD in my friend’s Honda Accord during a high school carpool.

Mastodon, “Sleeping Giant”

Merriam-Webster defines mastodon as “a type of animal that was related to the mammoth and that lived in ancient times.” Mastodon, the metal band, is a household name. Let’s talk about these guys for a few minutes. Everyone and their mom knows they made a concept album about Moby Dick that introduced a giant prehistoric shark Melville’s classic tale. Similarly, everyone knows about their concept album about a guy who travels through space-time as an astral projection and accidentally possesses Rasputin. However, not everyone knows that this song, “Sleeping Giant,” off their cleverly titled Blood Mountain LP, which features the following as a closing lyric:

Infinite path carved with unrivaled skill.

Mastodon, “Curl of the Burl”

I killed a man ‘cause he killed my goat.

Mastodon, “Blood and Thunder”

This ivory leg is what propels me.

SubRosa, “Fat of the Ram”

Probably the scariest song in this primer. The title is likely biblical. The woman singing starts with a pretty dirge, but this song is a maelstrom (and I mean a maelstrom, a large, swirling body of water—I’m not just employing some metal-sounding diction) of doomy guitars and crash.

Boris, “Blackout”

I think it’s a good idea to bookend this list of metal tunes with another pink album cover.