This book explores heavy metal in Madagascar, including its sounds and philosophical aesthetics as well as its social, cultural, and historical contexts.

Heavy metal has been listened to in Madagascar's capital, Antananarivo, since the late 1960s. A substantial metal scene emerged in the mid-1980s and declined in the 1990s, in line with global trends. Around 2010, Malagasy metal experienced a sudden and forceful comeback. This book provides an ethnography of this “heavy metal resurrection,” as it was called in Antananarivo. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this book explores the sonic strategies of Malagasy heavy metal, examines how musicians and fans engage with its aesthetic imaginaries, and follows their struggle to align aspirations for global sounds with the constraints of local conditions. In doing so, it shows how Malagasy heavy metal relates to life as lived in Madagascar's urban highlands, and argues that it speaks to local conditions largely by aesthetically transcending them.

Heavy Metal in Madagascar argues not only that heavy metal provides Madagascar's musicians and fans with guidelines for existential orientation, but also that it does so through the sensual knowledge offered in moments of aesthetic experience. The book thus argues-both theoretically and ethnographically-that it is through metal's sonic agency that this music relates to the actual lives of Madagascar's metalheads, and thereby to the social, cultural, and historical worlds within which Malagasy metal unfolds. Overall, the book seeks to understand the double nature of Malagasy metal's relationship to historical context: in directly responding to its demands, while also dialectically transcending them through the meaningful experience of metal's particular sounds.