HowSelf

HowSelf are a São Paulo heavy metal band working a corner of the paulista scene that often gets overshadowed by the city's better-known death, thrash, and grindcore exports: traditional, riff-forward heavy metal in the lineage that connects Brazil's long-running NWOBHM-inspired underground to the modern wave of bands rebuilding that tradition from the ground up. São Paulo has always been the country's busiest metal market — the megacity that sustains everything from arena-scale thrash legends to the smallest pub-show heavy metal acts trading bills in the Mooca, Vila Madalena, and ABC paulista circuit — and HowSelf sit comfortably inside that ecosystem. They have appeared on bills at SP extreme and heavy metal nights including Brutality Fest and the Comemoração SLA Noises events that have anchored parts of the local scene in recent years, mixing on bills with harder bands in the way that traditional metal acts often do in Brazil, where the audience is omnivorous and a denim-jacketed crowd will happily turn out for a Maiden-shaped band and a death metal band on the same night. The HowSelf approach favors melodic riffing, dual-guitar texture, and the kind of songwriting that prioritizes a memorable chorus over technical excess — the values that have always defined classic heavy metal regardless of decade. They are part of a quietly persistent paulista wave of traditional metal acts who self-release on Bandcamp, build audiences through live work rather than streaming numbers, and keep the older virtues of the genre — melody, conviction, craft — stubbornly alive in a city whose extreme metal reputation tends to drown out everything else.