7 Heavy Metal Songs About Space Travel

One of the more enjoyable things about heavy metal as a genre is the wealth of topicality that has been and could still be explored in its lyrical content. While occurrences like the PMRC trials in the 1980s or the Norwegian church burnings in the 1990s have led many to think “heavy metal” and assume the worst, such short-sightedness overlooks those who sing about fantastic realms, political hot buttons and their favorite stories from other media, just to name a few.

One such topic is outer space, which many artists with a flair for science fiction have covered as the setting for wars, unironic reflections on humanity and aliens searching for the perfect cup of black coffee. However, few just take the simple route and talk about traveling through space itself.

To at least give the final frontier itself its due, in the effort to discover new life, unravel the mysteries of cosmic phenomena and inhabit new worlds, a journey into the black is necessary and what is more black than heavy metal?

Despite long being reviled as satan-worshipping miscreants due to songs like the one that bears their name, much of Black Sabbath’s early catalog speaks to the frustration of their generation and devastation of an era, calling for the kind of love their hippie brethren did but acknowledging the reality of how little their cries got them.

Amid songs about drugs, depression, religion, greed and revolution exists one lambasting a grim future where the Earth has succumbed to the folly of man and the “sons of freedom” pursue new lives out among the stars, leaving the planet in its current state of “worry, hate and fear.”

Despite the gravity of leaving millions behind in what is essentially described as a hopeless hellscape, it is intended to be a song of hope, where starting over, per se, breeds the opportunity to found a world “where freedom waits” and the surviving individuals can experience “peace and happiness in every day.”