If you look up the term “gateway band” on Urban Dictionary, the first entry defines it as “Your gateway band is the band you first listened to which completely opened up your world of music.” That’s pretty accurate if you ask us. Considering your “gateway bands” are usually a product of the environment you grew up in as well as the era of musical trends you experienced, it only makes sense that they vary wildly for different age groups. For instance, a member of Generation X probably isn’t going to have metalcore bands like Killswitch Engage be their entry level to different kinds of music, but a millennial could very well have, say, grunge bands be their gateway despite being quite young when the genre of music was popular.
Any way you slice it, there are always going to be certain bands that are great entry level points to other genres of music. Nobody who listens to metal starts out listening to Cannibal Corpse or Borknagar (though if that applies to you, we really want to talk to you). And it’s even less likely that someone’s first favorite band is an underground act most have never heard of. Certainly possible, of course, but simply not all that likely.
By definition and in execution, a gateway band is likely to be a band or musician you’re exposed to at an early, impressionable age. Depending on the era you grew up in, you might have discovered the band (or bands) via anywhere from an MTV video on Headbanger’s Ball to a Youtube DragonBallZ or Runescape AMV that happened to get some major traction. Quite often, these discoveries happen around the ages of 10-15, when you’re just starting to become your own individual person and discover new art and ideas on your own.
For many, these bands may well have included Linkin Park, Nirvana, Chevelle, Asking Alexandria, and/or Breaking Benjamin. These can even be further expanded to heavier genres of music, especially with bands like Slipknot, Avenged Sevenfold, and even Trivium. A common theme here is that many of these bands could be found in popular movies and/or video games of the day. For instance, the Madden 2004 soundtrack had prominent tracks from Yellowcard, Thrice, and Avenged Sevenfold, while Breaking Benjamin’s “Blow Me Away” featured prominently on the Halo 2 soundtrack. And of course, the Transformers movies prominently featured Linkin Park songs “Iridescent” and “New Divide”, the latter written specifically for the series. In fact, Linkin Park (and nu-metal, in particular) became popular by everything from word-of-mouth promotion to intelligent bands adopting the Internet’s means of communication to gain popularity. Linkin Park and Deftones, in particular, had innovative music videos that quickly became as renowned as the songs they contained. And particularly with the latter two bands, they ended up with very diverse influences in their music. Linkin Park blended electronic, metal, rock, and hip-hop influences that drew from the greats of all those genres, while Deftones drew from shoegaze, dream pop, alternative metal, and still had some hip-hop and plenty of electronic influences that also lent them to interesting new music discoveries.
Technology is also a defining factor on how you discovered certain gateway bands. For many who discovered the earliest thrash metal or glam metal bands, radio and especially MTV were your likely outlets for it. The Internet didn’t exist at that point, so you couldn’t just click Wikipedia and search “thrash metal”. If you’re a millennial or even younger, though, your first gateway bands likely came after discovering them on burgeoning social media (MySpace loomed large), or even the FUSE channel in varying forms of music. Remember how awesome Juliya was on Uranium? For fans of more extreme metal and metalcore, that was the place to be if your Internet connection was still laggy (or even if it wasn’t).
There’s even a new generation of music fans finding their new favorite bands and musicians through TikTok. Along with resurrecting older bands with legacies already behind them (MCR, Linkin Park, the list goes on), newer bands can indeed find success if their music happens to go viral on TikTok, and other forms of social media as well. In fact, it can provide a major boost to a still-developing band’s career. In the case of The Plot In You, their song “Feel Nothing” already proved to be arguably their most popular song, but when it went viral via TikTok in late 2021, it helped the band rocket past 1 million Spotify listeners monthly – currently, the band is still riding that wave with its viral popularity as well as their newest full-length.
There’s also Lorna Shore’s “To The Hellfire” single, which saw a ton of popularity on TikTok and in general last year. Keeping in mind it’s a track over 6 minutes long, it’s awfully impressive that a song this long and this heavy managed to make its way into this many ears. There’s really no wrong way to discover bands like this or even get noticed, as far as we’re concerned. The technology is different, sure, but the methodology is pretty much the same. Create great songs that are memorable to many and you’ll likely experience some semblance of success.
At the end of the day, nobody should really care how you discovered a certain band. All that matters is how said band made you feel when you found them – and the impact they have on your life. It speaks volumes.
