Ruthless Metal: thehistoryofruthlessmetal

THE HISTORY OF RUTHLESS METAL.

This is the story of how I got into heavy music and how I created the worlds first thrash metal site (Ruuth's Inn) but also the birth of Swedish Metal From The Past as well as the YouTube channel Ruthless Metal.

MY BEGINNING.

I was born in 1981 and my earliest memories of hard rock was mostly through MTV, In the beginning I liked Michael Jackson but then Metallica's One showed up and it made me a fan of heavier music. This must have been around the year 1990 or so. Because I remember One being on MTV and there was a lot of talk about them and their new black album that came out in 1991. I remember Appetite For Destruction becoming the first ever CD that I bought, I bought Metallica's Ride The Lightning soon after. At the time I was really into Guns N' Roses and Metallica.

The song that made me interested in heavy music: Metallica - One (1989)

I also got a tape from my older sister with KISS on one side and Europe on the other, I remember getting a tape with Mr. Big from my sister and I bought Sepultura's Chaos A.D. back when it was new. I also remember liking Swedish punk band Dia Psalma. When the grunge wave came I got my some Soundgarden and Nirvana records. So I mostly listened to whatever that was somewhat heavy when I was a kid, I never realized that Metallica and Guns N' Roses were in different subgenres, It was all hard rock for me.

MY METAL AWAKENING.

My real metal awakening came a little later and I remember it very well. This was when Load and Reload had been released and I was still into Metallica, Perhaps even more so than before and I had Load and Reload on repeat when they were new. This made me curious of listening to other Metallica releases and I remembered that I had Metallica's Ride the Lightning somewhere and I hadn't listened to it in years. I put it on and it blew me away. I can still remember that moment, It changed my life. What the heck, this dated stuff sounded very different from Load and Reload and that this old material was actually much better than what was my favourite music at the time. I always thought that music was always developing and getting better. The concept of older things being better than what was new was a foreign concept for me at the time.

After that I quickly bought all early Metallica records and I loved them, I was hooked and I figured out that Dave Mustaine had been in the band and that his music was somewhat similar to Metallica's so I started buying Megadeth records too. This was 1996-1997 or so. I learned that this type of music was called thrash metal, perhaps from a metal magazine because the internet had just started to become a thing.

So I started buying records that were called thrash metal, I found a Japanese site that I couldn't read but I saw images of thrash metal album artworks on it. I found some midis online through the "Vibrations of Doom" website. So I listened to them trying to imagine what the records would sound like. I found a bunch of NWOBHM bands from Metallica's cover album Garage Inc. Diamond Head, Mercyful Fate & Holocaust. I recorded Metallica and Megadeth on Woodstock '99 and I watched those concerts over and over. Testament also played in my hometown in the year 2000 and I was of course there.

After buying pretty much every Metallica and Megadeth record I started buying thrash albums simply because they belonged to the same genre as Metallica and Megadeth, I had never heard Testament, Exodus, Slayer, Kreator, Anthrax, Sodom or Overkill but I bought records from those bands and I loved 'em. My childhood friend Per-Ola was also getting into metal so we had a lot of discussions even if we liked somewhat different types of metal.

RUUTH'S INN: THE WORLD'S FIRST THRASH METAL SITE.

At the same time me and my friend who also was into metal started learning how to do websites. We created an Iron Maiden site, or he did the most of the work. So then I got inspired to create a thrash metal website. I called it Ruuth's Inn since my last name is Ruuth and Ruthie's Inn was a popular thrash metal venue in the heart of the Bay Area of San Francisco. I also started being on different metal forums online, Mostly on The Swedish Rock Festival forum.

Ruuth's Inn was the first website in the world that focused solely on thrash metal, we had reviews, interviews, news and articles. In the beginning it was hard do find artwork for albums (I had no scanner). And the information about these old bands were almost non-existant on the internet. There were no metal archives, no youtube, no facebook, no wikipedia, no music might/rockdetector. We had our ears, a few metal review sites, old magazines and the info that was typed on the album booklets.

After some time Tomas Ericson, vocalist of Helvetets Port started helping the site with a few reviews. More metal fans came along like Jorge DeMelo, Mikael Vedin, Aaron DiDonato, Mr. Thrash, Nemesis to name a few and they all wrote reviews and did interviews for me.

But after a while I thought it was a bit inconsistent for reviewers to only write 3-4 reviews, So I stopped taking help from people who didn't want to help out on a more regular basis.

I must also mention DekSlayer, a metal fan who re-designed the site in the beginning because I had no idea what to do in photoshop back then. :) Fortunately I've learned that since then. At the time we had the html-address devoted.to/thrash, which I unfortunately don't have anymore.

Ruuth's inn Logo. (This was from 2004 or so)

I also received some support and help from people like Danne W, Immerstahl, Si the thrash metal skull, Carlos G., Per-Ola Nilsson, Jose Luis Cano, Peder 'Paddlurken' Lundgren of Kjell-Peders and Olof Wikstrand frontman in Enforcer & Corrupt.

I'm not exactly sure what year I uploaded the site to the internet for the first time. It might have been in 1998 when I started coding it or it could have been in 2001, because in 2001 I did my first ever interview for the site with The Haunted who had just released their second studio album The Haunted Made Me Do It. I found the date 30/1/2003 as the date when the site went online which would be a bit strange since I did an interview with The Haunted two years earlier. Why would I have done an interview if I had no place to upload it. Doens't make any sense so I'm not exactly sure when the site was online but it certainly was online by 2003.

Then the internet took some giant leaps around the year 2000 and DC++ and Napster showed up around the year 2000. It was still hard to find mp3's but I found Coroner and Cathedral through filesharing. This deepend my understanding of not only thrash but heavy and doom metal as well. I also saw Motorhead, Dio and Manowar play in Sweden in 1999. That was an amazing show and I'm so glad I went.

This was before the-metal-archives that was created in 2002 and then YouTube showed up in 2005 and Spotify in 2006. So the internet was a very basic and different place before that. But sites like BNRmetal, Vibrations of Doom, Sweden Rock Festival, No Life 'Til Metal and later The Corroseum became hubs that I visited daily to read about metal. The Metal-Archives (Encyclopedia Metallum) then appeared in 2002 and that site was a revelation for us metal fans because people could add bands that their grandpa played in so it was by far the best place to find information on metal music and it still is some two decades later.

In 2003 and 2004 it was more or less metal around the clock for me. I developed the site, I interviewed a ton of bands such as Testament, Megadeth, Vio-Lence, Infernäl Mäjesty, Overkill, Sodom and a ton of underground thrash metal bands. As a poor man it was hard to keep up with the payments of the site, I had no revenue, I just paid to have the site up. At the same time I got more and more interested in traditional heavy metal. I always liked Iron Maiden and Diamond Head but I started diving deeper into the NWOBHM and the Swedish variant FWOSHM as well as some USPM. During this time I also collaborated with thrashlist.com that provided some information for me before the metal-archives could do so.

I also met Mr. Thrash online sometime during the early 2000's. I was studying at the time and Mr. Thrash sent me burned CD-Roms with thrash metal and we talked a lot about metal. But one day the messages stopped and I learned several weeks later that he had passed away. So here's my tribute to Mr. Thrash.

Ruuth's inn Logo. (I guess this was from 2015 or so)

I also had a neighbour during the years that I studied (The same guy that created that Iron Maiden website with me back in the day) He listened a lot to Blind Guardian, Running Wild, Savatage, Helloween, Rage and stuff like that as well as. So I was more or less forced into listening to the same music as he because he played it loud and it echoed through my appartment even if I found that stuff to be too melodic for me at the time. Which was stupid of me. I dissed Dio for the longest time because I was a stubborn moron. Fortunately I matured since then.

During 2004, 2005 and 2006 I also visited Sweden Rock Festival Where I saw Anthrax, Celtic Frost, Diamond Head, Metal Church, Motörhead, Venom, Judas Priest, Blitzkrieg, Saxon, Nifelheim, Blitzkrieg, Hirax, Candlemass with Messiah Marcolin, A reformed Europe, Deep Purple and lots of other bands.

in 2005 I was fed up paying for my old thrash metal site. The internet was also changing around this time, personal websites went down the drain in favour of the social media giants. My estimation was that I had about 10.000-20.000 viewers per year or so, Which was good but with no ads or anything so no revenue to pay for the upkeep. I wrote hundreds of reviews, interviewed 50 bands or so and I wrote articles and I did a massive job on the 'Ruuth's Inn -Thrash Metal Website' as it was called.

SWEDISH METAL FROM THE PAST.

I paused the metal website and stored it on my computer and I created a new webside called Swedish Metal From The Past, which focused on the FWOSHM wave (First Wave of Swedish Heavy Metal). So I was listening less to thrash and more to trad metal and doom mostly. I also had more help with the Swedish metal site from Tomas Ericson (Helvetets Port), Immerstahl (A metal fan I met on some forum) and my old pal Per-Ola who was my neighbour for 2-3 years. He was a big metal fan, he collected Candlemass and Swedish metal records, he listened to European power metal and he wrote articles for Sweden Rock Magazine. He also wrote the Candlemass book: Behind The Wall of Doom that was released in 2016.

Swedish Metal From The Past Logo. (I guess this was from 2006 or so)

This was also during a time when a lot of things changed for me. My old mate Per-Ola moved to the South of Sweden and my other metal friend in town Tomas Ericson of Helvetets Port also moved to the south so all the sudden I had no metal friends left. I had other friends but none of them were interested in metal so the daily metal discussions went away and I lost a little interest in it even though I kept reading about it online and I always listened to metal but I stopped digging for new bands and I just kept listening to the stuff that I already liked. I got a girlfriend too and she didn't care for metal either so my interest for that stuff took a backseat even though it never went away. The Metal Forums were on their way out and I stopped hanging on the Sweden Rock Forum, Where I've been a member for years simply because it became more about bashing other people's taste in music. So I didn't find it constructive to be there any more.

Swedish Metal From The Past Logo. (2014 logo)

FAST FORWARD TO 2013.

Between 2006 and 2013 I hadn't written any reviews, no interviews or website work at all. Then in 2013 one of my best friends passed away in a train accident so I plugged in an old hard drive to look for photos of him. While doing so I decided to copy over the Ruuth's Inn and Swedish Metal websites to my new computer.

This was also a new era when uploading websites had become free (at least with ads). So I decided to upload my old websites again. Since English wasn't my first language I thought I needed to brush up the language a bit and so I updated some of the texts, I brushed up the graphics that some other metal dude had helped me with back in the day because I've learned Photoshop since the last time the site was online.

I started interviewing bands again, I probably did around 70 interviews between 2014 and 2016. Bands like Nuclear Assault, Venom Inc, Atrophy, Helstar, Anacrusis, Morbid Saint, DBC, Gammacide, Mezzrow, Hexx, Meliah Rage, Paradox and Flotsam and Jetsam to name a few. There just wasn't enough information on these bands online so I wanted to interview these bands to document whatever was going on within the thrash metal community.

I started collaborating with the YouTube channel Thrash Metal Riffs, So if you watch their old videos you can see that it was in collaboration with Ruuth's Inn and I linked to their videos through the Ruuth's Inn site.

I also tried to make a thrash metal podcast called Thrash Talk where I talked about the genre and played some newer thrash metal songs. It had about 100 listeners per episode but those have now been scrubbed from the internet because they were terrible. Definitely badly recorded and with no real editing.

Despite the Ruuth's Inn site having over 50.000 visitors since the start I saw a heavy decline in readers on the site, simply because of social media had taken over the internet and that people no longer visited personal websites.

In 2017 I also got some health issues so I once again stopped working on the thrash metal site. The site was also extremely dated, My language was bad when looking back at it so the site went offline once again.

Ruuth's Inn: Thrash Metal Webzine. - How the site looked in 2017.

2021: THE BIRTH OF RUTHLESS META

In 2021 I decided to create a YouTube channel, I named it Ruthless Metal as a tie-in with the old Ruuth's Inn. I wanted a new name and not use my own name this time. I've called myself Ruthless online for about 20 years so it made sense I guess. I did however entertain the name Metal Elite but I think I did the right thing going with Ruthless Metal.

I had a gaming channel mostly about Red Dead and GTA but that one was dying so I thought I would do just a metal video just for fun since I had a great knowledge about it. I took a few or a month and created a documentary about the history of Swedish hard rock and heavy metal, It blew up in a way that I wasn't prepared for. It got a hundred thousand views and the channel was partnered within hours (You need 1000 subscribers to get partnered).

Some 20 years after I started Ruuth's Inn I actually earned a few hundred dollars. So I was very happy to be able to make some money on something that I had done for free for the last two decades.

I came up with an idea of 'Who invented different metal genres'. Those videos also got a lot of views. Then I came up with the idea to show some riffs that Metallica might have lifted from other bands and those videos blew up even more. With the Metallica: Master of Plagiarism video getting over a million views. I also launched the popular Rank 'Em All series where I ranked the full discography of different metal bands.

YouTube seemed easy and I thought I was perhaps able to make it a full-time job. Not through the YouTube revenues alone but perhaps if I sold some merchendise, started a patreon and what not so I did that.

But then the algorithm screwed me up. I went from averaging 300.000 views down to 3000 views. I'm not sure why. Maybe I used some strong language, maybe I used some artwork that looked to dangerous or I mentioned some metal album or song that the YouTube filters found offensive.

Because no matter what I did, I just couldn't get any views anymore. So the dreams of going full-time with this was quickly crushed. It's sad that these things happen and I've posted over a hundred videos since those early ones but I just can't get any views anymore. So I guess the algorithm screwed me over.

2022: RUTHLESS METAL BLOG

With the initial success of Ruthless Metal I thought I should upload all the work I've done decades ago. I had over a hundred interviews and 500+ reviews on my hard drive.

The old site did however look like garbage so I decided to start a blog through blogspot.com
and upload the interviews and articles there. Since it was like a thousand files that needed to be uploaded and updated graphically this is something that I still work on to this day.

Now in 2026 I have uploaded most interviews, articles and reviews from both Ruuth's Inn and Swedish Metal - From the Past. I got some crappy articles that I don't think needs uploading, I rather write new stuff if that's the case. So now all my work is future proof, at least as long as blogspot.com is online.

The blog still doesn't have much visitors, simply because nobody reads blogs anymore and I haven't promoted it that much besides some links through my YouTube channel.

But the Ruthless Metal YouTube Channel has been a success overall with over 11 million views since 2001. 75.000 Subscribers and I've posted over 300 videos and counting now in early 2026. We're also on Spotify, Discord, Patreon, Instagram, Facebook and so on.

But then on the other hand 74.000 subscribers came the first two years and around 1000 the last two years. So I guess the channel got shadowbanned somehow.

Despite that I hope I can transcend that somehow and reach 100.000 subscribers so I'll earn that YouTube play button plack. That would be a nice reward for 25 years of hard work, Since I never really earned much money from all this work.

Ruthless Metal Blog (How the site looked in 2026)

THE FUTURE & LEGACY

My goal is to keep this going, both the blog and the youtube channel despite the lacking views but now I do it simply because I enjoy it so I can't upload on a weekly basis since I just can't pour all my time into it anymore. I also consider reviews to be a bit dated art form since people can listen to any song in the world with just a click on YouTube or Spotify. The algorithm has replaced reviewers.

But I hope that the channel and the blog is still relevant to people who are into it and all the views on YouTube has certainly been humbling. I've noticed people caring about my opinions and I get a lot of comments about people who wants to hear my take on certain bands or albums.

I also see the blog and the videos as a way to document thrash and heavy metal history for future generations. If someone a hundred years from now stumbles upon Black Sabbath or Metallica and they want to learn more. That has always been a drive for me. To document metal for the future and since I don't see YouTube going away I think it's most likely future proved for a few decades at least.

That's the history of me, Ruuth's Inn, Swedish Metal From The Past and Ruthless Metal YouTube channel and blog.

So stay heavy and never listen to the garbage that Loudwire, Kerrang! and Metal Hammer spews. I'll never forgive sites and magazines like them for throwing metal under the bus in the 90's when nu metal and grunge showed up.

So my message is, Never let the traditional metal genres die (Heavy, Power, Thrash, Doom, Black, Prog & Death). Future generations need good guitar based metal music and not just some OnlyFans girl with a potty mouth dancing to some Spotify-playlist. That's not art or even music to me.

To quote Dio, Long Live Rock n' Roll!

Cheers! / Ruthless