About Salvo

Salvo is a new heavy metal publication from veteran music journalist Kim Kelly. Founded in response to the lack of outlets for high-quality, thoughtful metal journalism, Salvo will feature in-depth, longform interviews and artist profiles on both established metal legends and the best of the underground. It's a shot across the bow, and a testament to the enduring love we all share for this complex, global, ever-evolving genre. Heavy metal is art, and it deserves to be treated with care and respect.

Kim Kelly (hi, that's me!) is not new to this. She got her start as a music journalist when she was 15 years old, and has since written about metal for everyone from Decibel, Metal Maniacs, Terrorizer, and Metalsucks to the New York Times, NPR, and Pitchfork. Throughout her long career in the metal world, Kelly has also worked as a touring merch person, a roadie, a publicist, and a promoter; in January 2019, she launched Black Flags Over Brooklyn, the first explicitly antifascist metal festival in U.S. history. She also spent five years as the heavy metal editor at Noisey, VICE's former music and culture site, before striking out on her own in 2019.

While many who follow her work now are more familiar with her labor reporting and her critically acclaimed 2022 book, FIGHT LIKE HELL: The Untold History of American Labor, Kelly sold her soul to rock'n'roll long ago. Salvo is a new project, but it is also a return to form for a lifelong hesher who has, quite frankly, missed writing about metal. Those who have appreciated Kelly's decades of coverage of the extreme metal underground and championing of marginalized artists will find much to their taste here; those who think it is somehow preferable (let alone possible) to "keep politics out of metal" are welcome to keep on walking. If you are a false, do not entry: you will find no clickbait, no pink slime, no regurgitated press releases or soulless soundbites here.

If you subscribe today, you'll get full access to the website as well as weekly email newsletters with new interviews and a monthly Reaper's Digest news roundup. Thank you for supporting independent metal media!

What does a subscription get you?

By signing up for a Salvo subscription, you'll get each new missive delivered directly to your inbox, and will also have access to the full archive (there is a free option as well, but you'll only get access to a handful of posts that way).

While Salvo is very much a labor of love, the goal is to create a self-sustaining metal publication and eventually be able to afford to bring in guest artists, illustrators, writers, and more—and that costs money! The dream is to be able to fund reporting trips to cover far-flung local scenes and expand into different types of media, too, but none of that happens without reader support.

Who dares, wins.

Start your own thing

Get started for free and set up your very own newsletter using Ghost, the same platform that powers Salvo.