They do things different in Canada, and just because Drake, The Weeknd and Justin Bieber are dominating the pop world doesn’t mean they don’t have a perfectly robust metal scene. Take, for example, the Juno Awards, the Canadian version of the Grammys. We already wrote about the fact that their nominees for “Heavy Metal Album of the Year” was a diverse list that ranged from the noise rock of KEN Mode to the hardcore of Fuck the Facts, not to mention that the Juno people would let a band with “Fuck” in their name even be nominated. Long-running death metal band Kataklysm was also nominated for their 12th album, Of Ghosts and Gods, as was the female-fronted hard rock of Diemonds and Cancer Bats’ punky metal.
At any rate, the awards were Saturday, and Kataklysm took home the award. Congrats to them, and maybe one day the entirety of metal’s Grammy nominees will be as diverse and underground as their Canadian version. Then again, given that Ghost won this year and a comedy duo won last year, you can’t say the nominees aren’t diverse.
