It's Valentine's Day, so because I love you VGC, thought I'd share a bunch of rock with ye today. You can do the same if you want. In contrast to previous rock music-themed threads, the subgenre, themes, and era don't matter here. The only rule of this thread is that if you're sharing music here, it has to be some kind of hard rock. Just simply felt like doing this today since I just assembled this collection and am proud of the way it flows. Enjoy! And contribute your own songs if you want too.

Japan has many incredible rock bands these days and I thought I'd start out by showcasing a few of them. Also this is hard rock music, so I recommend, if feasible, cranking the volume up nice and loud the way these songs are meant to be heard.

If you don't think you need Japanese idol music in your life, Baby Metal is here to prove you wrong. Dead wrong!

And if you're looking for your Aggretsuko vibes (as I always am)...

Jumping off that to something else involving animal hats...

Since that reminds me of the '90s, we'll just keep on with the '90s feels for a moment.

We're going more downbeat and gothic now, but still a kind of retro (2000s Flash games) type aura. I also just wanna promote Ghosttundra's channel.

Staying downbeat, but taking a step back toward punk, a song about internet addiction:

A psychedelic tune goes well here, I think.

Alright, Japanese power metal time. To me, it just feels right.

It's Valentine's Day, so let's have an amazing two-song set that includes one of the most beautiful love songs I've ever heard in my life. (I tear up every time I hear it. Yeah, I'm a sap.) This group mixes metal with traditional Japanese instruments and aesthetics. Note that this particular video's on the quiet side though, so you might want to crank up the volume to about double wherever it is you've had it set up to now to get the proper effect:

And now behold something called Taiwanese folk metal. The ambience is truly something else!

Somehow to me, it feels natural to springboard from that to something resembling old Black Sabbath music with some rich '80s D&D and Red Sonja vibes. There's an endearingly retro B quality to this.

Sticking with that type of feel...

And for something a bit more recent...

And finally, this just feels like the right way to close things out on a day such as this:

Hope you've enjoyed my little song collection!

I will rock with you.

Speaking of Rock and Valentines:

The poorly named show "Girls" set a certain expectation of a scene with its title - it shouldn't have! But it did. So the audience wanted romance and sex and the city, but instead got a dark raunchy comedy with characters as flawed as those on Curb and Always Sunny - and tons of protagonist deprecation. The show is otherwise a black comedy along the lines of Kevin Smith or Judd Apatow style dark comedy with more than a dash of Curb Your Enthusiasm and a lot of sex, perversion, and nudity - and as a result of the title, more or less the entire fanbase hates the show and its characters. But I love it! I love adventurous characters trudging into, and offending, polite society. Also, another reason that kinda makes the "Girls" title a bit misleading are that there are four male leads as well as the four "girl" leads. Either way - here are the two scenes from that show that fit that "Girls" expectation - the "As You Like It" scenes, quite fit for Valentines day:

For obvious reasons, my favourite scenes of the show are not appropriate for these forums :D

I'm one of like 3 or 4 straight guys who will admit to loving this show and its characters. I do not recommend it to its target audience, but very much recommend it to the dark comedy audience - like the book American Psycho or the Rules of Attraction? Chances are much higher you'll like this show. Ray met Shoshana after she smoked weed for the first time... but what she actually did was accidentally smoked crack (in what's dubbed the "crackcident"), took off her bottoms, and started running half naked around New York City. He's a man in his thirties, she's a 21 year old university student. The show itself is written and produced primarily by Judd Apatow and Lena Dunham - IMO, his best TV collaboration with Dunham as the lead writer. It's kind of the third show in a trilogy: Freaks and Geeks focusing on High School, Undeclared focusing on University, and Girls focusing on that wild-time gap between university and career. Similar cast and crew, Hannah's (Lena Dunham) mom is played by the same person who plays the main mom in Freaks and Geeks (Lindsey Weir's mom).

But more music that comes to mind:

Bought a whole bunch of dry cider for tonight's Valentines. There's a tax cut that made it cheaper. I like it better than Chardonnay, which it tastes like. Cask strength rye whisky for the overrun (Full tax on that, though!), but I love rye.

Thought I might add a bit more to the rock song collection I started in the OP today.

The first addition is the KoRn klassic Freak on a Leash as sung stunningly well by an 8-year-old girl.

Since we're on rage tunes...

I have to include some Japanese rock...

...and a video game tune.

Since we're in the '90s now, here's something else I like from that time frame. The young lady giving off little-sister-messing-with-everyone vibes in this video is Kathleen Hanna, the lead singer for the classic riot grrl band Bikini Kill. She does an admirable job of making the video funny.

This is a newer song I like, but feels very '90s: 

I'll close this out with a cool punk song I discovered through a Tony Hawk game:


Hope ya enjoyed!

In honor of the recent blood moon, I'm constructing a new rock collection for you today, VGC. I think you're gonna like it! I'll try to make it flow nicely. Also note again that these are rock songs. They're meant to be played loud, so I recommend that.

Would you like to hear some awesome Asian rap-rock? Of course you would and you can't go wrong with Baby Metal, so here they are performing with legendary Thai rapper F.Hero!

This is a Japanese instrumental metal group with incredible talent called Asterism!

And this is a Japanese group called the Mellows. Heavy guitars. Super cute voice. They call their style cute metal. They're cool. This is a very new song of theirs. That creepy laughter adds a whole layer of mood to the atmosphere for me.

Here's a group that hails from my native Texas you may have heard of before telling you not to put up with people's shit.

Speaking of where I live, while I'm an atheist personally, I grew up in a very Christian household and community environment, so I inevitably got pretty familiar with a lot of Christian music whether I wanted to or not and out of all the many, many Christian rock songs I've heard in my life, this one by Project 86 is my favorite. Believer or not, one has to concede that it just rips. Respecting what I can of my heritage here.

This is a actually a trailer for an indie post-apocalyptic survival game called The Flame in the Flood, but it also serves as a nice music video for some Americana folk rock by Chuck Ragan:

Speaking of America, I'll let this modern-day riot grrl duo provide you some of my thoughts on the current climate of my country.

I think the Japanese power metal of the Lovebites goes nicely here. I just do.

That puts me in the mood for more downbeat tunes. Spiral a little with me.





Going further with the downbeat vibes, here's a shoegaze band well-loved by goths I learned about from Ghosttundra's channel on YouTube (that I'm still trying to promote).





This next song is called Pictures Are Gone and it makes me very, very wistful.





There's a lot of turn-of-the-century nostalgia going around these days. Feeding into that, here's a new sort of KoRn-alike group called Chat Pile that a friend recently recommended me. It fits here nicely, keeping the basic mood but building up a bit more energy.





What can comfort me now? Think I'll go with the opening song to one of my favorite video games of all time, Freedom Planet 2. It feels epic and heroic yet feminine and there's also something I find comfortingly familiar about its '90s platformer inspirations.

...And I think that's a good place to leave this particular collection of mine. Hope you enjoyed it!

Thank you guys for all the music. I will be adding it to my playlist.

Glad you're enjoying it! I've got a close-to-never-ending amount. The YouTube algorithm has proven surprisingly helpful to me of late when it comes to finding excellent newer rock songs. That's how I found all the Japanese metal bands I've showcased. Just stumbled onto a Baby Metal song (Gimme Chocolate!) and went down the recommendation rabbit hole.

I go for some variety in these collections in terms of styles and sources.

I guess I might participate in this thread a bit too. I think some of this stuff also deviates a bit from what's been posted to this thread yet, so maybe there's some discovery opportunities here too.

Here's a taste of one my all-times favourite bands, Amorphis. They have great vocals and intros, often some more unique sounds, and great songs otherwise too. I have a really hard time picking just one song, but here's one that illustrates some of the things I appreciate about the band:

If this piqued your interest but perhaps wasn't just quite your thing, you might want to try Wrong Direction for something you might hear on the radio or The Bee for something heavier.

For something different, Machinae Supremacy is also among my favourites, with the name giving a hint of something you can expect from it. This song in particular is among my favourites (it's even better live, but sadly there don't seem to be any good live videos on YouTube):

Moving on to Japan and something Touhou-inspired, we have a bit of Undead Corporation (their other stuff is also rock but largely a bit different):

More Touhou-inspired music, this time something instrumental:

Getting back to Europe, here's something a bit heavier in the form of In Flames:

Not sure if there's any particular characterizations I can give about this song from Fireflight, it's just good hard rock (with a religious aspect too, I guess):

Anyway, that's all from me, at least for now.

Some things I've been spinning lately. Nothing too extreme (unless you're willing to accept stuff like death metal in here).

The Dagger
About 10 years ago, three member of the (at the time) defunct Swedish death metal band Dismember teamed up with stoner metal vocalist Jani Kataja to make an album of '70s style heavy metal / hard rock (with a bit of Iron Maiden thrown in). They only did one (self titled) album, but it had some pretty good songs.


Battle Beast
Heavy metal with some big pop influences. Noora Louhimo is the best metal vocalist around right now in my opinion.


Roxie 77
Led by Ryan Roxie, best known for playing with Alice Cooper. He writes great, catchy rock n roll (although I'm pretty the lick from the song I posted is from an Oasis song).


Hammerfall
Hugely important in the renaissance of heavy / power metal in the late '90s. This is one of their best songs in my opinion.


Angels & Airwaves
The band Tom Delonge formed after his first split with blink-182. Generally speaking, they've done some of the most uplifting, life affirming music I've heard, although the song below is one of their heavier ones and doesn't really fall into that category.

I missed Valentine's day but this is my most played song the last 3 years in a row, so I'll post it anyway.