Back in 2003, my mate Kenn thought that it was time to contribute to metal music with more than buying records and concert tickets. He bought the domain name powermetal.dk and started reviewing releases he’d bought. He’d created a website in Microsoft’s Frontpage editor. It was basic, but it worked. After a wee while he asked me if I wanted to join. There was no hesitation on my behalf and I started doing reviews of CDs. Soon, we were joined by other writers from Denmark and one guy from the Netherlands who’d turn out to be the most fervent writer of us all throughout the lifetime of the webzine.
Kenn was immensely good at networking, and he managed to land agreements with several labels and distros who sent us material and, importantly, got us on the guestlists for concerts and festivals. We were amateurs, indeed, but they could sense that we were serious and loved metal.
Over the years, we had a changing lineup of writers from Denmark, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Bulgaria, Australia, the UK, Ireland and the US. We were in truth an international community of metal lovers.
At some point, it became obvious that the domain name powermetal.dk wasn’t appropriate. There were labels and bands who refrained from working with us because of the power metal tag. We therefore acquired the domain powerofmetal.dk, which reflected what we were: A webzine that embraced all types and genres of hardrock and metal.
We had for a long time dreamed of getting rid of the FrontPage solution. In 2015, we finally had someone on the team who had proficient know-how and the audacity to venture into moving onto a WordPress platform. From there on, the site looked more professional and became increasingly smarter behind the scenes. We also attached Instagram and Facebook accounts, and we had more and more visitors.
Eventually, in 2019, we closed the site after having realised how tough it is to balance family and work life with an extremely time consuming hobby. We ended at an all-time high in terms of readers, and I’m still to this day proud of what we accomplished and thankful for all the good memories.
I decided to simply let the site stay there as a testament to what we’d made, but it’s with WordPress like Apple products; if you just leave them, they’ll eventually not be accessible anymore. So, all of a sudden we couldn’t access the site anymore, and even with the help of support and my good tech-friend who built the site, the Power Of Metal.dk was dead, and I’ve now deleted the database – which means all reviews, interviews and news from 2015 – 2019! It hurt! As you’ll see from the archive section once I get around to it, we still have the old HTML-based reviews and interview from up until 2015 on here.
So, now what? As you can see, there’s a bit of activity on the site again. I felt an urge to do something, and I thought that I’d turn the Power Of Metal.dk into a go-to place if you’re curious about Danish metal music. I’m adding info and super-short reviews about Danish metal releases, old and new. And that’s it. I’ll take my time, no pressure, and make it my opportunity to listen through a lot of Danish metal.
Metal greetings
Thomas ‘Lydmand’ Nielsen