Calder Hannan is a Music Theorist and post-graduate student at Columbia University. In this episode we discuss his research in Extreme Metal Studies and his analytical approach to the music of Meshuggah, Car Bomb, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Between the Buried and Me, Anomalous, Bell Witch, … We also touch on the idea of heaviness, issues of form and genre admixture in metal music, ear training for metal musicians, the evolution of extreme metal studies and of the field of music theory, and much more.