This specific article is a milestone in the history of Kevy Metal. When I started the site back in late 2011, at the time with a brief introduction, followed by a review of Dark Angel’s ‘Leave Scars’ a day later, I never thought I would be able to make it that long, let alone make the site what is is today. So with that milestone reached, I thought it would be interesting to take a deep dive into the history of the site, highlighting some of the most noteworthy articles, both positively and negatively. And don’t worry: the regular scheduled programming will resume in a few days.

Kevy Metal was started with two vague main ideas in mind. One was to keep people I knew, but didn’t see as much anymore – most of them fellow students at the School for Journalism – informed about my publications. That idea got phased out over time, especially as the visitor count increasingly got taken over by people who are just as obsessed with music as I am. The other idea was to train myself in writing positive reviews, which at the time I found more difficult than pointing out flaws in an album, but was an important part of how the reviews section in Gitarist was set up.

While the site has always been a fun hobby for me, professionalizing the site and its layout in May 2024 is exactly what needed to happen to make it something I am actually proud of. It probably shows, because the number of publications has gone up considerably since, although part of that is a simple fact that it made presenting the site as a serious medium much more viable. So let’s take a look at a few stand-out articles or moments.

Most Views: Korol i Shut

At the moment of writing, my review of Korol i Shut’s ‘Bunt na Korable’ is the best-viewed article on this website by a considerable margin. It currently sits at well over 4200 views, over 4000 of which happened between October 2024 and February 2025, more than five years after it was first published. That is without a doubt the longest a publication has needed to blow up, but who knows? There may be one that’s already been written that’s yet to meet its audience.

To this day, I haven’t been able to figure out why it blew up as much as it has specifically when it did. Frontman Mikhail Gorshenëv had died well over a decade prior, signaling the end of the band, and even the television series based on the band’s history and lyrics had been out for over a year at that point. It’s also somewhat ironic that an album of a horror punk band did so well on a site run by someone who generally doesn’t like punk music very much. To be fair, ‘Bunt na Korable’ is a lot more than just punk, though.

Best-Viewed Interviews: Japanese All-Female Bands

All-female rock and metal bands from Japan have traditionally done well in terms of views on this site. My interviews with Scandal, Saki from Mary’s Blood, Nemophila and Amahiru, and Narumi are all in the top five of best-viewed interviews on this site.

Interestingly, neary all views for the Scandal interview came in the month the interview was published, on the day it was shared by the band. The view counts of the others have been divided a little more evenly over the time since they were published, no doubt helped by the fact that the Saki interview is actually listed as a source for multiple Wikipedia entries. I’m genuinely thankful to whoever did that, because it sure as hell wasn’t me.

Maybe I should be pursuing more interviews among Japanese all-female bands to get more views, but the answers are generally so media-trained that I don’t get a lot of enjoyment from them, and they don’t fit the site’s current focus on long-form informative content very well. This doesn’t apply to Saki, by the way, who I genuinely had a nice chat with. It does apply to the Scandal interview, and then some. I would also happily interview Midori from Lovebites again in a heartbeat.

Best-Viewed Interview I’m Actually Proud of: Kaiser Kuo

Well over two years before actually interviewing him, I got in touch with Kaiser Kuo, former guitarist for Chinese hard rock/heavy metal pioneers Tang Dynasy and current guitarist for Chun Qiu. He helped me out with some questions I had for my review on Tang Dynasty’s sophomore album ‘Epic’, which is the one Tang Dynasty album he actually plays on. He liked the review, and we stayed in touch. He was also the one to introduce me to the music of Song of Chu, so I was grateful for that already.

About two years later, we had a long Zoom call talking about the history of the Chinese hard rock scene, not necessarily limited to his part in it. If there is one interview that I would show to people to let them know what Kevy Metal is all about, it would be this one. I realize it’s quite long, but the information density is very high, and I think how much fun the interview was to do shines through in the article. Kaiser had just reestablished Chun Qiu at the time, so I hope I will get the chance to talk to him about that someday soon.

The Most Surprisingly Well-Performing Article

While Tools for Discovery technically started in 2020, it wasn’t really turned into a recurring section until sometime in 2025. The general idea behind Tools for Discovery is to help people navigate the discographies of bands whose work is somewhat difficult to explore for westerners, more often than not due to a language barrier or simply where the band is from. But when I combined my interviews with multiple Helloween members into Helloweek 2025, I thought it would be fun to include Helloween’s discography as well.

Almost immediately following the publication, my Helloween Tools for Discovery started attracting views. While I was happy about that, I kind of wish people would have read the interviews instead, as those were more work, and genuinely fun to do. It’s not like the Tools for Discovery wasn’t a lot of work, because I did have to listen through seventeen albums and write a bit about every one of them, so it’s good that doesn’t go to waste.

It mildly worries me that people expect more of these from conventional hard rock and heavy metal areas, though, and that’s not what the section is intended for. The Helloween ranking did slowly creep into the top five of best-viewed articles in general for this site, and it’s the best-viewed article of this year, with my Golden Earring Tools for Discovery not far behind. Make sure to check the other rankings out; there’s 25 of them there now, and a new one added every two weeks.

The One Missed Review

Since starting Kevy Metal, I have been diligently publishing Album of the Week reviews every Sunday, with the exception of one particular Sunday: the 29^th of March, 2014. That week, I had gone to Istanbul in order to see Pentagram live, because they are awesome and everybody should go and listen to them. My plan was to buy a lot of Turkish music while I was there – which I did – and make one of them the subject of that week’s Album of the Week review.

The problem is that unlike the interviews and other features on this site, I write my reviews pretty much immediately before I publish them. So when I came back home fairly late on a Sunday evening, I had no more time to write a review anymore, and my energy levels weren’t quite up for it either, because traveling is exhausting. I did sort of try to remedy the situation by posting a short recommendation on Mekanik’s ‘Kitlesel Depresyon’ a few days later, but that’s just not the same.

In fourteen and a half years, that is the only Album of the Week review I missed, and it still bugs me. So I fully intend to keep that the only one. I have learned from it though; while I still write most of the reviews right before publishing them, I have started scheduling them when I expect to have a busy weekend away from home.

The One Double Review

Before my Album of the Week reviews were either on current releases or themed, they were about albums I happened to have played a lot that week. Many albums frequently return to my CD player, and that’s how I ended up with the only double Album of the Week review: two reviews about ‘Presence’, perhaps Led Zeppelin’s most underrated album, written and published less than a year apart. You can see that they are fairly similar, even though I wasn’t consciously aware of the 2016 one existing by the time I wrote the 2017 one.

Interestingly, when I realized my error, I quickly tried to fix the situation by writing a review on Blind Guardian’s ‘At the Edge of Time’ instead… Which I had also already reviewed, almost exactly a year before the earlier ‘Presence’ review; they’re both week 37 reviews. Chances of this happening again are fairly minimal given that the focus has shifted towards current releases, and I actually plan things in advance these days, but it is still one of the weirdest moments in the site’s history to me.

Worst Interview

Extremely media-trained answers annoy me, because they tend to not be very informative, and at worst, they are the same as the answers that have been given to many other media. However, it gets even worse when people are not even trying. It’s easier to navigate around that when I’m actually talking to people in real-time, so face-to-face or over a video call, which is why I generally greatly prefer those over e-mail interviews, though I can see the value of those if there is a considerable language barrier.

There has been one e-mail interview that was so bad that I decided to not even publish it. And it’s not like I didn’t see it coming, because this same artist had been giving very short non-answers when I interviewed one of his bands as well. So when I was given the chance to do an interview with Hizaki in the wake of Jupiter’s third album ‘Zeus ~Legends Never Die~‘, I worked really hard on making the questions as open as possible to encourage longer answers. It didn’t help. Most of the short responses he gave weren’t even actual answers to the questions.

I did end up combining it with an album review and a concert announcement in Dutch for The Sushi Times, which was still active at the time, but mainly just as a favor to their press contact for the European market. I still like the music Hizaki makes, especially with Jupiter, but I think an actual interview with him may be a lost cause at this point, at least for a western medium.

Statistics for One Thousand Posts

Here are some statistics that nerds like me might find interesting. Out of the one thousand posts on the site today, 739 are reviews and 163 are interviews. While that may seem out of balance given the recent publication schedule, there have been many weeks between 2011 and 2023 when the Album of the Week reviews were the only publications in a week. The last few years have actually had more interviews than reviews, thanks in part to Peruvian Metal Month and Venezuelan Metal Season having a two or three interviews to one review ratio per week.

This trend is also reflected in the publication statistics. There were consistently between 54 and 65 total posts between 2012 and 2023, which went up to 102 in 2024, and 2025 has been the best year so far with 141 posts. This post is the 42nd post of 2026, and it’s only week 16 of the year. If this pace is kept up, this year will top 2025, though only by a handful of posts. My aim isn’t necessarily to publish more articles every year; it’s to publish better and more informative articles with each passing year.

Looking at the word count per year, the increased number of interviews is clearly visible as well. Where my reviews tend to be just over 500 words – around 100 words per paragraph, five paragraphs, though exceptions exist – the interviews are generally 2000 or over. The average word count was consitently between 530 and 720 in the first ten years. That already crept up to 780 in 2023 (just over 50,000 words in total), but the contrast truly became clear with an average of 1369 words in 2024 (nearly 140,000 words in total) and 1770 words in 2025 (nearly 250,000 words in total).

Now on to number 2000! My intention is to post that one in slightly less than a decade and a half from now.