Exciting news! January will be Peruvian Metal Month on Kevy Metal. What does that mean? For starters, every interview that will be published here throughout the month will be with a metal musician from Peru, and each of the four Album of the Week reviews will be about releases by Peruvian metal bands. This idea has been many months in the making and it has become somewhat bigger than I originally imagined it would be, so I cannot wait for all of you to read what has come out of it.

In order to be consistent about the month being devoted to Peruvian metal, I have decided to pull my Best of 2023 list forward a day to new year’s eve. If you haven’t been working on Peruvian Metal Month for about half a year like I have, I can imagine you may have some questions about the initiative. I will try to answer the most obvious ones right here.

Why Peru?

Why not? In all seriousness: I made some connections in the Peruvian metal scene earlier this year. Turns out that Peru has a number of quality metal bands that hardly anyone outside the country and maybe a handful of other Latin American countries has ever heard. All of this made the Peruvian metal scene extremely interesting to immerse myself in for a while. Some of the bands that will be featured in the upcoming month I had not even heard of before starting the project, but I’m certainly glad I do now.

My initial plan was to carry on with the initiative if I could do at least one interview with a relatively high-profile artist, or just one whose work I enjoy a lot. Spoiler alert: when I set that bar, I could not predict how many Peruvian metal artists would react positively to my interview requests and I cannot wait to share the results with all of you. At the time of writing, some of the interviews are still waiting for an appointment and some of the mailers still have to come back with answers, but I am very happy with the way things have turned out already.

Why These Specific Artists?

Honestly, most of the artists interviewed for Peruvian Metal Month made it in simply because they answered their messages. Sometimes artists I interviewed recommended getting in touch with other artists, though I was quite surprised how few musicians jumped at the opportunity to promote other bands of their own of befriended bands. This is no criticism, as it is not unheard of in a music scene that hasn’t had all of its spontaneity ironed out yet as the European metal scene has, but it was surprising nonetheless.

All of this is not to say that my personal preferences had no effect on the selection process at all. In fact, all the artists I contacted were artists whose work I enjoy and with whom I could at least find some musical common ground. My initial plan was to focus primarily on heavy, power and thrash metal, because those are the genres I am most familiar with. When some other opportunities were more or less thrown my way, however, I decided to broaden my scope a little.

Is This the Definitive Guide on Peruvian Metal?

Absolutely not. Aside from the fact that I was not able to get in touch with every artist I had in mind, my personal taste played too big a role in the selection process as well for that. Despite broadening my scope along the way, the choice of artists is still partly determined by my own preferences. For example: I don’t enjoy black metal enough to have a good grasp of what would or would not qualify as interesting for fans of the genre.

But if I can do it with these sub-genres, there are obviously black metal fans out there who can do the same with more extreme styles. There is a lot to discover in Peru and I have barely scratched the surface what I will be covering in the upcoming weeks. Metal-Archives.com lists over 700 Peruvian metal bands and since inclusion on that site is release-based, it’s fully possible that there are and have been hundreds more that never made it to the demo phase. At least yet.

Will There Be a Follow-Up?

The honest and unsatisfying answer to that is: maybe, we’ll see. It really depends on how well these articles do. This was loads of fun to do for me, but it has also been a lot of work on top of a full-time job and freelancing for multiple magazines. If statistics point out that there has not been any additional interest in a month-long feature like this, there is a chance I will consider it a fun experiment that did not work out.

Obviously, my hope is that the opposite will happen. Introducing potentially interested people to good music they may not have heard otherwise is something I have enjoyed doing for many, many years before I was even doing it professionally. If this is a success, I will be looking forward to diving into another relatively unknown scene in a different region when my schedule allows me to.

Gratitude

There are a few people without whom Peruvian Metal Month could not have been the project it has become. First off, all the artists who took the time to answer my questions. I would like to thank all of you for your effort and I hope it will result in a few extra people listening to your excellent music. And Julia: your enthusiasm about the idea, despite you not enjoying metal all that much and not knowing much about Peru, made me feel like I was going in the right direction. You are the best.

About half of the interviews that will be published in the upcoming weeks would not have been possible without the help of Rafael Nuñez. After connecting with Rafael, he quickly became a great friend and a very valuable “man on the ground” who was always very willing to help out when my trails reached a dead end. He also turned my amateurish idea into the cool logo above this article. Also, massive thanks to my friend Stephany (Yuki) from Arlequin Magazine for helping me navigate the options of WordPress and offering to promote the interviews months before this announcement was even published.

Peruvian Metal Month Spotify Playlist

Curious to hear what Peru has to offer in terms of metal beforehand? You can find a Spotify playlist at the end of this article that I compiled. If an artist is featured in this playlist, that does not necessarily mean they will be interviewed or reviewed in the next few weeks, though I have included as many of the artists I interviewed as possible. The rest is a combination of Peruvian metal songs I like and songs that have been recommended to me by the musicians I interviewed. Enjoy!