Springsteen believes deeply in the power of faith and overcoming, and many of his songs embody these messages. Built on the ruins of unspeakable tragedies, much of his music sees heroic protagonists escaping desolate conditions, leaving bad relationships, and coming to terms with the despair of their everyday lives. In the timeless, anthemic “No Surrender,” a duo of protagonists remind each other to give themselves up to the thrill of being alive and feelin’ it, to bailing out of school with virtue in their hearts and rock n’ roll at the foreground. His late-career powerhouse “We Take Care of Our Own” holds a fist up in national solidarity, submitting that nobody fights alone when they’re on American soil. For The Boss, unbounded optimism and raging passion are the formula for overcoming the overwhelming suffering embedded in contemporary life.

Thrash songs can be about a lot of things, but sometimes theyre just about the act of thrashing. Call it meta-metal if you like, but sometimes the best mindset for thrashing is simply thinking, “I’ve gotta bang my head right now, for no other reason than because thrash exists.” It’s a perfectly sound rationale.Here are a few songs that are about thrashing, whether directly or indirectly. Of course, something like Metallica’s “Metal Militia” is extremely direct with lyrics like “Joining together to take on the world/ With our heavy metal/ Spreading the message to everyone here/ Come let yourself go.” Other tracks are a little more veiled, but are clearly about the band giving it to you hard, like Pantera’s “Cowboys from Hell” (about some outlaws who come to town intending to mess shit up) or Anthrax’s “Metal Thrashing Mad” (which uses the metaphor of an out-of-control car to conjure the sensation of thrashing). Either way, if you feel like you gotta thrash because you simply must thrash, this playlist will do the trick.This feature is part of our Thrash 101 online course that was produced in partnership with the good rocking folks at GimmeRadio, a free 24/7 metal radio station hosted by heavy-music experts like Megadeths Dave Mustaine and Lamb of Gods Randy Blythe. Check them out here and sign up for the Thrash 101 course here.

Thank you for checking out the 12th installment of our Thrash 101 program, produced in conjunction with GimmeRadio, your free 24/7 radio station hosted by heavy-music experts and artists. Get more awesome metal right here.Thrash songs can be about a lot of things, but sometimes theyre just about the act of thrashing. Call it meta-metal if you like, but sometimes the best mindset for thrashing is simply thinking, “I’ve gotta bang my head right now, for no other reason than because thrash exists.” It’s a perfectly sound rationale.Here are a few songs that are about thrashing, whether directly or indirectly. Of course, something like Metallica’s “Metal Militia” is extremely direct with lyrics like “Joining together to take on the world/ With our heavy metal/ Spreading the message to everyone here/ Come let yourself go.” Other tracks are a little more veiled, but are clearly about the band giving it to you hard, like Pantera’s “Cowboys from Hell” (about some outlaws who come to town intending to mess shit up) or Anthrax’s “Metal Thrashing Mad” (which uses the metaphor of an out-of-control car to conjure the sensation of thrashing). Either way, if you feel like you gotta thrash because you simply must thrash, this playlist will do the trick.

By the mid-1980s, the sound of heavy metal had come a long way from the demonic riffs of Sabbath and the groovy beats of Deep Purple. Its themes had evolved a lot, too. When Ozzy encounters Satan on the song “Black Sabbath,” he lets out a petrified cry of “Oh, no, no, please, God, help me!” But in the music of Slayer, Entombed, and the other bands in this playlist, we start to see man aligning with evil, pursuing it, making peace with it, even encouraging it. As thrash gave way to the rise of death metal, the mantra became “the more evil, the better”—we start getting dark, mythological, and even sadistic lyrics accompanying faster, heavier, and gnarlier music. As Mercyful Fate sang, “You know my only pleasure/ Is to hear you cry.” If that ain’t true evil, I don’t know what is.This feature is part of our Thrash 101 online course that was produced in partnership with the good rocking folks at GimmeRadio, a free 24/7 metal radio station hosted by heavy-music experts like Megadeths Dave Mustaine and Lamb of Gods Randy Blythe. Check them out here and sign up for the Thrash 101 course here.

Welcome to the sixth chapter of Thrash 101. This feature was produced in partnership with GimmeRadio, your free 24/7 metal radio station hosted by heavy-music experts like Megadeths Dave Mustaine and Death Angels Will Carroll. Check it out here.By the mid-1980s, the sound of heavy metal had come a long way from the demonic riffs of Sabbath and the groovy beats of Deep Purple. Its themes had evolved a lot, too. When Ozzy encounters Satan on the song “Black Sabbath,” he lets out a petrified cry of “Oh, no, no, please, God, help me!” But in the music of Slayer, Entombed, and the other bands in this playlist, we start to see man aligning with evil, pursuing it, making peace with it, even encouraging it. As thrash gave way to the rise of death metal, the mantra became “the more evil, the better”—we start getting dark, mythological, and even sadistic lyrics accompanying faster, heavier, and gnarlier music. As Mercyful Fate sang, “You know my only pleasure/ Is to hear you cry.” If that ain’t true evil, I don’t know what is.

Ennio Morricone found his way onto the fast track pretty early. Within his first few years of working in film scoring, he orchestrated the music for Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 existential classic L’Avventura; the following year, he arranged and conducted the music for Vittorio De Sica’s The Last Judgment and orchestrated Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso. It would have been easy for Morricone to settle down into a long career of writing for Italian art-house films. But with 1964’s A Fistful of Dollars, the immensely popular spaghetti western featuring a breakout performance by Clint Eastwood and a career-elevating turn by director Sergio Leone, Morricone set his sights west of Italy. He looked so far west, in fact, that before long, he was writing music not only for westerns but also for horror movies, comedies, thrillers, and more. Morricone established a trademark sound with the twangy guitars, whimsical whistles, and violent yawps of Leone’s spaghetti-western trilogy, which also included For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. In the ensuing decades, he would continually reinvent himself. The ’80s brought the warm strings and triumphant, romantic horns of The Untouchables as well as the delicate, sympathetic melodies of the gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America. His music for John Carpenter’s horror masterpiece The Thing turned cello ostinatos into harbingers of terror, while heartbeat bass refrains bolstered the film’s immaculately cold suspense. The Legend of 1900 (1998) saw the composer dipping into jazz and ultimately doubling down on his sentimental side, while The Hateful Eight combined the many sides of Morricone, folding in stressful motifs into a grand vision of the dark side of the American West.

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist right here.I like to stay active—I work out, I go on walks, I do yoga. Each activity I do comes with a different set of musical criteria, though—for example, when I do yoga each morning, I almost exclusively listen to drone or black metal. At the gym, however, when I’m on the elliptical or lifting weights, I like to get lost in modern jams. This is the special time of day in which I don’t have to listen to classical music for work, I don’t have to write, I don’t have to do any thinking at all. I can just rock ‘n roll. This year has seen a number of great additions to my workout jam repertoire, from Bowie’s incredible final album to Swans’ brilliant and aggressive The Glowing Man, both of which have seen so much gym time that I now think about bicep curls and stairmasters every time I hear them. My top exercise album of the year has unquestionably been The Life of Pablo, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has spent more than five minutes talking to me. I listened to that album so many times while going for runs that I think my heartbeat is permanently synced up to its flow. Here is a playlist of some of my favorite gym tunes of the year. I have structured it so that you could actually listen to it during a workout. It starts with a new recording of the “Allemande” from Bach’s C minor French Suite, which should aid you in some elegant stretching. Then, the blood gradually starts flowing with Aphex Twin’s “Cheetah 7b.” By the time the climax of Ashbringer’s “In Remembrance” hits, you should be completely in the zone, ready to take on the world… or at least hit a new high in your preferred routine. Some moderate songs follow, allowing you to relax as you maintain your peak, then coming down with The Field’s “The Follower” and, finally, getting back into the real world with Nick Cave’s sobering “I Need You.”

“I go on describing this place / And the way it feels to live and die.” — Mount Eerie, “Through The Trees, Pt. 2”I once heard a professor say that Robert Schumann’s music only makes sense if you’re in a certain part of Germany. I tend to disagree with those kinds of claims, but I’d also be lying if I said that Phil Elverum’s music doesn’t strongly evoke the magic, mystery, and feeling of the Pacific Northwest. And it’s not just me, it’s a common point made about his songs: it’s in the imagery of the music, between the trees and the ocean roars, through the black metal interludes, behind the Twin Peaks synths and references; his music is about space and feeling, and the spaces are particular.His early work as The Microphones was bombastic, experimental, and seriously affecting, capturing through music and lyrics exactly how it feels to be a young person and to embody a wild existence. If you’re like me and this music has been with you for a while, you probably straighten up in your seat and unfocus your eyes a bit when I mention The Glow, Pt. 2. It’s real.As Elverum transitioned from The Microphones to Mount Eerie, his songs became a little clearer, a little more adult, and a little more enveloping. His 2012 releases form a perfect snapshot of his tremendous ability to evoke all things at once: The intimate, almost trembling Clear Moon fuses airy guitars and shuffling percussion to create distinctly breezy-yet-serious tableaus, while Ocean Roar is an explosive, electronic-infused synthesis of post-rock and black metal. Taken together, these albums represent the complex essence of Mount Eerie.The initiated and uninitiated alike can prepare themselves for Elverum’s newest work, the haunting and raw A Crow Looked At Me, which deals with the tragic loss of his wife, musician/artist Geneviève Castrée, from pancreatic cancer in July 2016. In this intensely personal album, he pursues brave, new paths of truth and sound, while still sounding like classic Elverum. Get brought up to speed with this playlist of his work as Mount Eerie and The Microphones.