New Metal Bands in South America Dropped 39% Since Their 2020 Peak — Is the Scene Still Growing?

As of 2026-09-08, South American Metal Index indexes 4,742 bands across the continent. That total keeps climbing, but the rate at which new bands are being founded tells a different story. New band formation peaked in 2020 at 258 entries and has fallen every year since, landing at 157 in 2024 — a 39% drop from the 2020 high. The question in the headline — is the scene growing? — depends entirely on whether you're counting the size of the archive or the pace of new arrivals.

The Decade in New Bands

Looking at the last eleven years of data in our index, the pattern is not subtle. New band counts rose gradually through the late 2010s, spiked in 2020, and have declined in five consecutive years since:

A few caveats matter here. The 2025 figure (112) and especially the 2026 figure (18) are almost certainly undercounts — bands formed this year and last are still being added to the index as they play shows, release material, or otherwise surface in our data. Formation dates get recorded after the fact, not in real time, so the most recent years always look artificially thin at first and fill in over subsequent updates. The more reliable comparison is between 2020 (258) and 2024 (157), a full calendar year with time to be captured — and that comparison still shows a real decline of 101 bands, or roughly 39%.

Even setting aside 2025 and 2026 entirely, the trend from 2020 onward is consistently downward: 258, then 212, then 184, then 158, then 157. That's four straight years of decline before you even touch the incomplete data. Whatever caused the 2020 spike — and cross-referencing against global metal database trends elsewhere suggests a lot of new act registrations happened during the pandemic period, when musicians had unusual amounts of time to record and self-release — it was not sustained.

What Genres New Bands Are Choosing

Of the 4,742 bands in the index, the genre breakdown among newly formed acts skews heavily toward the three pillars of extreme metal. Black Metal leads new band formation with 389 entries, followed closely by Death Metal at 374 and Thrash Metal at 339. Together those three genres account for more new bands than the next seven categories combined.

Note that some of the entries reflect how bands self-tag rather than distinct subgenres — "Death" (114) and "Black" (102) likely overlap conceptually with the full "Death Metal" and "Black Metal" labels above them, and "Heavy" (79) similarly shadows "Heavy Metal" (175). Taken together, black-metal-adjacent tags account for at least 491 new bands and death-metal-adjacent tags for at least 488, making these two the dominant creative directions for anyone starting a band in South America regardless of exact label conventions. Thrash retains a strong, distinct third position at 339 with no comparable secondary tag inflating its count, suggesting it's the most consistently and clearly identified of the three leading genres.

Reading the Decline

A shrinking rate of new band formation doesn't necessarily mean fewer people are playing metal — it can also reflect consolidation, where musicians join or rejoin existing acts rather than starting new ones, or it can reflect a maturing scene where the bands formed in the 2016–2020 window are still active and touring rather than being replaced. Our index doesn't track band dissolution rates in this dataset, so we can't say whether the 4,742 total bands reflects a stable, active roster or one increasingly weighted toward older acts. What we can say is that the raw count of new entries has fallen in each of the last four fully-recorded years, from 258 in 2020 to 157 in 2024.

Anyone tracking whether this trend continues into the back half of the decade should watch the 2025 and 2026 figures specifically — right now they look dramatically low (112 and 18, respectively), but that's a data-lag artifact more than a real signal. Check back on this series in a future update once those years have had time to populate. In the meantime, the safest read of the confirmed data is: total archive size is up, but the pipeline of new bands has been narrowing since 2020, concentrated overwhelmingly in Black Metal, Death Metal, and Thrash Metal. For a look at how that shows up on stage right now, see our upcoming shows listings.

Methodology

This analysis draws on South American Metal Index's own database of bands, shows, and venues across the continent, current as of 2026-09-08. New band counts are based on the recorded formation year for each entry in the index; recent years (particularly 2025 and 2026) are subject to upward revision as bands are added to the database retroactively. Genre counts reflect self-reported or index-assigned genre tags for bands formed in the years covered, and some genre categories may overlap due to inconsistent tagging conventions across sources.