Blackgaze - Metal or not?

I'm interested to know what your take on Blackgaze is, particularly Ben and Daniel. Do you consider Blackgaze to be a legitimate metal genre or are any solely Blackgaze releases ineligible for inclusion on Metal Academy?

The fact that blackgaze is regarded as a metal subgenre means that we'll be including all releases that fall under that label. I mean one of the biggest reasons for wanting to create this website in the first place was our frustration with other sites that black mark certain subgenres of metal just because they don't like them or don't think they fit into their personal idea of what metal should be (I'm looking at you Reddit & Metal Archives). So we won't be omitting them.

But as for whether I personally regard these releases as being metal or not, in my experience I do. I don't think there's really much doubt that records like Deafheaven's "Sunbather", Alcest's "Écailles de lune", Woods of Desolation's "Torn Beyond Reason" or Lantlôs' ".neon" are metal based. I think people's questioning about their metal credentials is based more around their BLACK metal credentials than metal overall as they certainly have a different atmosphere to what a lot of people are comfortable with in their black metal. It can be one that's very much in direct contract with the black metal philosophy but I don't mind being challenged artistically & find that I really like some of these releases. Alcest however are simply not for me.

Thanks for clearing that up Daniel. I had a feeling that it would be considered ok for the Academy (as I believe it should be). Just checking because, as you rightly say, some websites make completely arbitrary decisions on what constitutes being "metal enough" - a position particularly odd in the case of metal-archives as they claim to be an encyclopaedia of metal music yet dismiss many valid artists out of hand because of personal bias.

Yet another example of why Metal Academy is a superior site for the Metal connoisseur!