A few years ago, I wasn’t nearly as active in the world of extreme, underground, or whatever-the-hell-this-is metal as I am today. Truth be told, I had completely dropped off.

It was a combination of things. Getting older, raising kids, the general feeling that I’d already been there and done that. While I still carried a handful of legacy bands from back in the day, it had been years since anything new actually caught my attention. I figured the underground was the underground and I was a Womble, wombling free.

(If you aren’t British, you can look that one up).

It just didn’t have the same spark in me as it used to. I’d done the whole schtick already. I didn’t really care what was going on—not for lack of trying, but down to the fact that nothing had grabbed me by the throat and shaken ten bales of shit out of me in a long time. Extreme metal had gone from being my brother to being my third cousin twice removed.

Then one afternoon I was sat playing with my kids, YouTube running in the background, minding my own business. I was going through an Alice Cooper phase again, so I’d stuck on Billion Dollar Babies and just let it play through.

It had devolved into random auto-play recommendations—some I let run, some I skipped—when all of a sudden, one of the most haunting openings to any track I had ever heard in my life drifted out of the TV speakers.

I stopped and looked up. It was this:

As the music and the vocals weaved their way towards me, I was breathless. I mean, what the fuck was this? My brain started scrambling for references, couldn’t think of any, and then it kicked in and tore my fucking face off.

I sat there for seven minutes stunned. Absolutely and completely. I couldn’t explain why it was affecting me the way it was. I’m not a religious man, not by a long shot, but I realised in those moments that this was as close to seeing the face of God as I would ever get.

When it finished, my two girls looked at me and asked if I was alright. I looked at them and it dawned on me—I was crying. My eyes were full and tears were running down my cheeks. I laughed and told them I was better than alright. Dad had just discovered something he had long thought was gone.

The next moment I was scrambling for the controller and going into my play history. There it was. The last one played. I was hesitant to start it again. Was it a fluke? Did it just catch me at the right moment? Would I listen to it again, find it flat, and wonder what the hell had just happened to me? I didn’t want to ruin the experience, but I had to know.

The second time was just as devastating. And the third. And the fourth. Over and over, again and again.

It had me. In its jaws. In its heart. And in its blackened soul.

I dove back into the internet like a man possessed. Not just searching for Gaerea, but for any band that I hadn’t heard. I went through lists, Wikipedias, Reddit threads, every conceivable place you could imagine a starving man would go to feast on this new bounty.

Then it dawned on me. What about the bands that don’t make it that far? The ones that don’t have a record company behind them or the money to front for a PR team? What do they do?

So I headed to Bandcamp and started stripping back the layers. The more I did, the more I realised that there were countless brilliant artists making music that most people would never get to hear.

That is when I decided to do… well… this.

Now, the past couple of years haven’t been easy. I have thrown tantrums and quit at least twice. No, make that three times. I get overwhelmed at times due to the sheer amount of PR emails and album reviews that drop in my inbox on a daily basis—53 being my record so far—and when you’re a one-man operation, it can seem as if you’re drowning. It isn’t easy. I don’t work well with others, so having people on board always ends badly. Not their fault, mine. I can’t expect people to do this for nothing with the same passion as me while not getting paid for it. Hell, even I question why the fuck I do it some days.

But whenever I do, I return to The Poet’s Ballet.

Whenever it seems that there is no point, whenever I go off the grid for a few weeks to clear my head, whenever I chuck my toys out of the pram and say ‘Screw you guys, I’m going home’, you can bet that at some point I’ll return—and when I do, it’s because this fucking song dragged me back from the edge.

If I have ever covered your work, ever given you a write-up or a positive review, don’t thank me. You don’t need to. Instead, thank this song and this band, because without it, none of this would exist.