The most common meaningful word across heavy metal lyrics, not "death." Ten of thirteen subgenres agree. Only black metal actually leads with "death."
The Metal Corpus is a data pipeline that collects, cleans, and analyzes lyrics from over 1,100 heavy metal bands across 13 subgenres, built to answer a question I've had for years: what does the genre actually talk about?
Walkthrough
The Full Analysis
Three metrics, three different answers: the most used word, the most disproportionately "metal" word, and the most universally "metal" word across every subgenre. The full breakdown with tables, word clouds, my methodology, and more lives in the notebook.
View the Notebook GitHub RepoGuess the Subgenre
While making the subgenre-unique words table, I found that I could often identify the subgenre without needing to rely on the row name. I had some fun with it, so I created a quick game centered around that concept:
Play the Game