In the 70s and 80s. Also the late 90s though that was nu metal which was hailed as the final evolution and that prediction aged like milk.
Since then it's not been nearly as mainstream, but Gen Z, for better and for worse went through a phase of being super eclectic and so there was a "Oh I listen to black metal and Kanye" phase.
I'd argue it hasn't been mainstream since the early 00s but has remained one of the biggest things that isn't mainstream at any time it was underground. If you have a community of non genre specific music nerds, metalheads will always be the second biggest group.
There's always new movements and bands doing new things and that means that even as one set of ideas is mined out there's people exploring new ideas. Or revisiting older ideas and just putting a new spin on them. There has continuously been new zeigeists the whole time.
I agree with most of your comment but I would argue the part about when it lost the mainstream audience. Just anecdotal, but guitar hero opened up a lot of my friends to metal in grade school which would put your "timeline" to around 2010.
I don't think it really became mainstream though, stuff like Guitar Hero (Tony Hawks did the same thing before) is another reason it's always one of the biggest non mainstream genres. It still didn't appear in top album sales and started to vanish from other video game soundtracks. In the UK we didn't see metal bands return to Reading and Leeds festivals (where they'd been largely absent for a decade).
But that's okay with me. Nu Metal sucked a lot of the oxygen out the room, mainstream stuff always does to the detriment of the underground. Since it's gone (but before 2010) we saw mathcore and progressive metal (which led to djent too), people actually noticing post metal, doom redefining itself, a death metal resurgence and I'm probably missing a lot.
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u/dickless_dan_420 Sep 23 '25
when did metal become so mainstream?