Biggest Deception - Metal Storm Awards 2024

Hail Darkness - Death Divine

Special circumstances deserve a special "award". The Metal Storm staff nominated Death Divine by Hail Darkness for Best Hard Rock Album in this year's Metal Storm Awards, only to learn the moment voting went live that the project had been revealed a couple of months earlier to be an AI-generated hoax. We count ourselves hoodwinked - and none too pleased about the chicanery. The album was a later and lower-profile addition to our nominees, and with the vast quantity of albums we endeavor to consider each year, we were unable to do thorough research on each and we suspected no foul play regarding this particular "band". The fact that its true identity escaped notice may credit its complexity as an experiment, but frankly we consider that beside the point: our concern is with both the ethical violations involved in the representation of this project and, even more importantly, preserving the integrity of human-made art as something with intrinsic value that something artificially generated cannot pretend to. We have dedicated years of our lives to the maintenance of this website and the proliferation of heavy metal because we believe in the importance of art, which we understand to be a form of human expression; it would be counter to our views to allow something like Hail Darkness to take up space more deserved by the work of human hands. Therefore, we give this album not a chance for competition among real bands but a special recognition of its own: Biggest Deception.