KEN Mode are a metal band from Winnipeg, Canada, whose new album Entrench (out on March 19th) will probably sell less copies in their hometown than it will in a borough of a foreign city that’s 1500 miles away. Today, Brooklyn is more often associated with indie rock, producing artists like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio and Grizzly Bear. But in fact, the borough has a sizable metal scene of its own, and a storied history of metal.

Sir Lord Baltimore, often hailed as America’s first legitimate metal band, were born and raised in BK, and brought their brand of stoner rock on tour with ’70s British metal heavyweights like Black Sabbath and Humble Pie. In the latter decades of the 20th century, Brooklyn bred such stellar metal bands as the shock-rocking Carnivore, nu-metal-before-there-was-nu-metal pioneers Biohazard, Injustice (featuring the guy who would later do the “Huzzah” beat), and goth metal titans Type O Negative.

But several decades and terrible late-career albums later, the forefathers of Brooklyn metal have been surpassed by the borough’s other music scenes — namely hip-hop in the ’90s, and indie rock in the ’00s. With indie rock came an influx of the “hipster” archetype, a type of person that the media loves to attempt to describe. For this article’s purposes, defining the hipster in terms other than their general music taste would be irrelevant. But suffice “hipster music” to mean anything that attempts to situate itself as separate from the mainstream, which in early ’00s Brooklyn usually meant indie rock. Thus, the American hipster has become inextricably linked with indie/alternative music.

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