Good metal band names tell you the style before you hear a note: black metal reaches for frost, forests and Latin, death metal for the crypt, power metal for dragons and glory. This metal band name generator gives you band names, stage names and album titles for black, death, doom, thrash and power metal and metalcore, following the patterns real bands use without borrowing their names.
Eight good metal band names
All eight came from the generator, one or two from each style:
- Vinterskog: Norwegian for "winter forest", the classic black metal subject in a single word.
- Regnum Noctis: Latin for "kingdom of night". Black metal loves a dead language.
- Tomb of Abhorrence: death metal's favourite shape: a grim place, then something worse.
- Coffinspawn: two ugly words jammed together, which is half of death metal naming.
- Father Obadiah: doom metal often sounds like a lost congregation.
- Chemical Attack: thrash is about war, toxins and the end of the world, said fast.
- Guardians of the Silver Moon: power metal names read like a fantasy novel's subtitle.
- While the Skyline Breaks: metalcore's half-sentence names, built around a moment of collapse.
How each metal style names itself
Metal split into styles early, and each one built its own vocabulary:
- Doom starts with Black Sabbath, the Birmingham band whose first album came out in 1970. Doom names still sound like a church service gone wrong: Weeping Liturgy, Sister Ursula, and albums like When the Bells Fell Silent.
- Thrash took off in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s, and its "Big Four" were Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax. The names are about destruction, nuclear and otherwise: Atomic Damage, Speedwrecker, Total Aggression.
- Death metal grew up in Florida around Tampa, with bands like Death, Obituary and Morbid Angel. Expect decay, tombs and Latin-sounding anatomy: Sepulchral Decay, Vaults of Oblivion.
- Black metal's best-known wave came from Norway in the early 1990s. Bands took names from Norse myth and Old Norse, and musicians used pseudonyms, such as Fenriz of Darkthrone. Here you get Lord Vinterkald, Vargskugge and Latin album titles like Vox Noctis.
- Power metal owes a lot to Helloween's Keeper of the Seven Keys albums of the late 1980s: soaring, heroic and full of invented kingdoms, like Legends of Aethoria.
- Metalcore borrowed the long names of hardcore: As I Lay Dying took theirs from William Faulkner's novel. The generator's version is As the Forest Fades, with album titles like The Weight of Fear.
Choose Stage name for pseudonyms (black metal) and nicknames in quotes, like Paul 'Tombstone' Keogh (death and thrash), or Album title for a record.
Choosing your metal name
- Say it the way the singer would. A black metal name should sound good rasped; a power metal name should fit in a chorus.
- Think about the logo. Black and death metal logos are famously unreadable, so a short name like Tombrot survives being drawn as thorns better than a long one.
- Search before you commit. Look the name up on Spotify, Bandcamp and YouTube, and check the social handles are free. Two acts with one name confuse fans and streaming services alike.
- Releasing music? A quick trademark search is worth doing before you print merch or sign anything.
Black metal's quiet side became dungeon synth, through ambient projects like Mortiis, who played bass in Emperor: try the Dungeon Synth Name Generator. For gothic and darkwave bands there's the Goth Band Name Generator, and for the scene metalcore came from, the Hardcore Band Name Generator. The Band Name Generator covers every other genre, and the Song Title Generator names the tracks.
For more genres, see all the music genre name generators.