Ben

I've been a huge fan of metal music since my brother (Daniel) introduced me to Metallica way back in the late eighties. I spent the first year or so almost exclusively listening to Iron Maiden and thrash metal (mostly Slayer, Metallica and Testament), but once I embraced the likes of Sepultura, Morbid Angel and Death, a whole world of amazing music opened up to me.

Despite the above pathway into metal, I now consider black metal and extreme doom metal (death doom and funeral doom) to be my favourite genres, but I can get excited about metal in just about all of its many forms.

Unlike Daniel, I'm not a musician, so I approach metal with much more focus on atmosphere, emotions and overall packaging than he does. It's for this reason that we decided to start the Metal Academy Podcast a couple of years back. We both have long histories with metal, but we often have completely different things to say about it. Since then, we've been chronologically exploring the genre, and the 20+ episodes we've produced to date have covered the years 1970 through to 1985. I love doing the podcast, and Daniel and I spend way more time together than we have in the past couple of decades, but I had another itch that needed scratching.

I've always wanted to build a clan-based metal community, where fans can find like-minded people and discover releases that those particular people enjoy. Metal Academy gave me the excuse to actually do it. Like all communities, this one might take a little while to grow, but Daniel and I trust that if we keep putting as much passion into it as we do with the podcast, well...something will happen. We look forward to finding out what that something is.