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Nothing else matters if you have heavy metal playing loud in your headphones. Or thrash metal. Or death metal. Or any other of the sub-genres. I’ve composed our most brutal typographical selection featuring my favorite metal fonts for true fans and those obsessed with metal attributes.
If you ask what makes me feel most nostalgic, it is the metal culture. Today music styles are crazily merging, and true fans look like ordinary people — as if we have lost this wild sense of freedom and rebellion. So for everyone missing those times, I suggest an epic throwback to the days when heavy metal was your everything, you were wearing your first Dr.Martens boots, and the only gentle thing about you was Gently by Slipknot.
Heavy metal lettering is as varied as the heavy metal music genre itself. And as a true fan, I’ve done my best to cover as many styles as possible. Inside the selection, you’ll find death metal, thrash metal, folk metal, extreme metal fonts, and many others — all to quench your thirst for grim or epic aesthetics set up by your favorite bands.
Our Team’s Top Pick
Dramaga
Dramaga Typeface is a heavy metal font with a distinctive old-school style inspired by post-hardcore bands. You can try mixing the uppercase and lowercase letters to find a suitable layout for your designs. You are also free to experiment with the background and let it be more minimalist, or horror, like from some 80s band’s poster.
The font comes with OpenType features, so you’ll get plenty of tools for creativity: stylistic alternates and standard ligatures with swashes. Dramaga is an excellent option to create gothic designs, branding, logos, product packaging, heavy metal album covers, merchandise, and posters.
Anemouth
Anemouth is a dark metal font filled with a gothic aesthetic and slightly tangent to the “devil” impression. It comes with a classic horror appearance but with a soul that already belongs to the modern world.
Anemouth will be suitable for album covers, posters, band logos, and names, performing in the metal, hardcore, underground, or even punk genre. Besides, it will also be suitable for merchandise such as t-shirts, bandanas, band posters, etc. As a bonus, you’ll get an illustration that matches the scary character of this heavy metal font.
Brothers of Metal
Glaive Typeface
Glaive is a metal font that features stylistic alternates just by using Caps Lock. You can keep it clean or add a swash, as this set also includes a bunch of ornaments to complete your hardcore design projects.
On one side, this heavy metal font can perform as a powerful, stand-out element for themed merch, prints, logos, and labels. Conversely, it’s incredibly minimalist and isn’t overcharged with rock elements, so implementing it in a broader range of designs will hardly be a problem.
Death Crow
Aviorte Blackletter Font
Aviorte is an elegant and artistic gothic metal font bringing the charm of horror aesthetic in full. It is packed with diverse uppercase letters, numerals, and themed punctuation marks. So you can always make your composition look both decorative and scary. Multilanguage support added to the package also allows you to design & translate messages for any audience.
As a little bonus to complete the look: swashes, drawn Dobermann heads, and ornamental elements to make Aviorte stand out from other metal fonts. This type is ready to be your title, headline or logotype, badge, t-shirt design, or poster.
Riotiks
Sauronking
Metal typography is as varied as metal music genres are. While many featured items are dark and death metal fonts, we’ve found it logical to bring a powerful old-school metal font from the 70s. Sauronking is a blackletter type inspired by rock prints, t-shirts, concert vibes, bikers’ outwear, and beer labels.
Its unique style will look great on logos, posters, headlines, packaging, tattoos, clothing, and anywhere such a distinctive metal style is relevant! It features accents for multilingual support, PUA-encoded numerals, and punctuation (OpenType Standard).
Witch Typeface
Killviners — Modern Blackletter Font
Killviners is a modern, blackletter metal font that works perfectly for сraft beer packaging, tote bag print, horror posters, and the title for a new rock band EP you’ve recorded with your friends.
There are so many designs you can use this typeface for! Trust your gut when picking the metal font, of course, but also be sure this one won’t let you down. Consisting of all the necessities (numerals, punctuation, multilingual support, uppercase and lowercase, and stylistic alternates), the Killviners will be the magnet for attention in your upcoming concepts!
Kingdom Hearts
Bite Hard Font
Bite Hard is a handcrafted metal font with a reserved, industrial look. The letters look solid and menacing, making Bite Hard stand out from other fonts on the list. It has four styles (bat hard, base, wire, FX) to help you quickly recolor and combine lettering compositions.
The opportunity to switch between four different visual solutions gives you extra freedom in designing merchandise, posters, logos, labels, packaging, and signages. Not every metal font allows that, in fact! As a bonus, a vector snake illustration is included — so feel free to use it to crown your metal typography projects.
Northen (Deathcore)
Sacre Font
Sacre is an original metal band font containing uppercase and lowercase symbols, basic punctuation, and bonus strokes. This font was brush-drawn with classic markers, so their texture is clearly visible in every element. Sacre is all about the rage of the concerts with slamming, moshing, circle pit, and wall of death.
In your case, this metal font will be perfect to create themed projects and merchandise — or as a focal element for designs outside the subculture, like headers, typographic posters, and branding projects.
Metal Macabre Font
Yourever — Brutal Death Metal Font
If you are searching for a death metal font to make your blood freeze, Yourever is the one! It has accumulated all the grim and macabre vibes from the album covers, so you can now create something of yours — like decorating your band’s name, designing scary merchandise and posters, or simply putting up a powerful logo.
Compared to the basic death metal fonts of the kind, Yourever includes uppercase and lowercase characters, numerals, and bonus vector metal elements to set you free in your frightening creativity.
The Rock Brush Font
Metal Lord
Metal Lord is a deathmetal font created in 1996 that has been completely redrawn, spaced, and kerned since then. Hardcore fans will recognize the Iron Maiden logo — however, the current version is a bit heavier than it used to be.
If you use the new version of Metal Lord in an OpenType savvy application, you’ll see magic stuff going on: letters occasionally flip, tuck, and grow little flags to fit nicely together, but not so much as to be distracting. You’ll find lots of punctuation, symbols, fractions, and numeric ordinals following the classic metal font style — to the delight of typographic maniacs.
Crucifixion Font
Smackdead — Black Metal Typeface
Introducing another scary dark metal font, Smackdead. Smackdead is deeply inspired by the black metal style and a horror theme, so it’s perfect for various themed designs, horror posters, heavy metal album covers, different flyers, merchandise, etc.
Hopefully, your language doesn’t matter: the font includes uppercase and lowercase characters, punctuation, numerals, and multilingual support. Literally, everything to spread your love for death metal and scary style.
Who Asks Satan Font
Jotunheim Typeface
Jotunheim is a metal font inspired by ancient runes. It features three different styles. Style 1 features the most simple and legible letters. Style 2 is a bit more complex, which adds extra authenticity at the cost of legibility, and Style 3 is the most intricate.
I’d recommend mixing up the different versions to achieve exceptional results for your designs in the old Scandinavian style. Jotunheim includes uppercase multilingual letters, numbers, and simple punctuation. Some letters also have mirrored versions, which you can toggle with Caps Lock.
Voice In My Head — Metal Font
Big Fish DD — Rock Metal Font
Stay true! Stay metal! Big Fish DD is a decorative metal font inspired by punk rock music. It is quick-drawn with rapid strokes for an intense underground look, so it’s noticeable in every letter.
This metal font combines minimalism and a scary expression, so the variety of projects where it would fit is incredible. For example, with Big Fish, you can create posters, music album covers, prints, signages, t-shirt prints, and even rock band branding if you like. Like other metal fonts from this selection, it contains uppercase and lowercase letters, numerals, and punctuation (extended set).
Metal Vengeance Font
Vindica Rebel Brush Font
Checking free metal fonts for a high-end one may be tricky, but this brush font is definitely something worthy to stop your searches. Every stroke is a piece of absolute energy, which can make any artwork worth an ovation.
Vindica was created with unconditional love for metal fonts and brush typography so that it can convey a bold mood thanks to its expression and tons of glyphs included. Pick it for a hoodie print, different posters & cards, or to complement your website or app designs, and you’ll surely fear the final image! In a positive sense, of course.
Darkgone — Gothic Blackletter Font
Sword Font Logo Creator
Sword is a display metal font family with OpenType features inspired by tattoo art, biker culture, and heavy metal lettering from the 90s. It works well with the normal-size text, but it looks better for large displays, short words, and a black background. Perfect for many creative products such as logos, tattoo design, t-shirt prints, streetwear, headlines, etc.
Sword includes a complete set of letters A-Z, as well as multilingual support, currency figures, numerals, and punctuation. Each letter has 5 alternate glyphs for lowercase, 4 alternate glyphs for uppercase, and 4 alternates for each number — have you ever met metal fonts with a toolset like this?
Zepplines
Stunegart Metal Font + Decorative Bonus
Among all the death metal fonts that merit your attention, Stunegart would always be number 1. In any circumstances. It brings the best of 80s metal groups and biker wear, leather coats in particular, and can be as versatile as none of the other heavy metal fonts on this list.
You can use Stunegart for alcohol labels, streetwear branding, various prints, packaging designs, logos, tattoos, and merchandise. The font includes uppercase and lowercase characters, punctuation, numerals, and a whole bunch of bonus decorative elements in a heavy metal style.
Avestrava Tattoo
Lordish
Lordish is a unique gothic font imbued with the dystopian aesthetic of the dark wave bands and the classic horror genre. This font includes uppercase & lowercase letters, punctuations, and international characters, so creating grim signage in any language won’t be a problem.
Even though it looks a little scary, Lordish is versatile. It will be a great choice for tattoos, prints, movie posters, embroidery on clothing, and jewelry. Or you can give this metal font a go if you simply intend to create something following the medieval gothic style.
Heavy Metal Blight
Sadis Typeface + Extras
Sadis is a death metal font inspired by gothic philosophy and heavy metal lettering. The previews look so scary and uncomfortable but don’t fear and give this magnificent typeface a go!
It contains uppercase and lowercase characters, multilingual support, plus swashes and stylistic alternatives. So there are plenty of tools to play with and carry out a stunning project. Whether it’s a horror movie poster, album cover, tattoo, stationery, or packaging — this heavy metal font will be a great choice.
LJ Power Metal Font
XXII Daemon
There is no way to escape the grim fascination of the Daemon, a death metal font with runic elements. It reminds you of the symbol of the Blair Witch, Twanas, and metal albums from the 90s.
Daemon comes with a basic letter set and a few symbols and signs often used in the extreme music sector – classical stuff like pentagrams and crosses, drips, roots, and branches. Like the previous heavy metal fonts on this list, Daemon is suitable for any related projects. And if it’s a logo, I recommend using Adobe Illustrator.
Death To Metal Font
Morracle Brush Font
If you are already missing the light, Morracle can give you a break. It’s a free metal font with an elegant vibe inspired by ink hand-drawing! Nothing to fear, only the elegant aesthetics are in the spotlight.
In this pack, you get source files in TTF and OTF formats, web fonts support, bonus shapes in AI, EPS, and PNG, and even a video tutorial you can check out for a hint if you’re new at this generosity fair! You can use this bold heavy metal font to create a tattoo design, a logo, an album cover, or even product packaging.
Evanescent Metal Font
Ironpunch
Imbued with metal fonts aesthetic and classic designs in blackletter, this very heavy metal font should have any of your thrashing punk or biker designs — screaming, headbanging while throwing up the metal horns! Well, you see for yourself what effect it makes.
From the technical side, Ironpunch is a design treasure, coming in OTF and TTF formats with a brand new bonus set of splatter brushes for Adobe Illustrator. It’s an all-caps font, but has this ever stopped you from making something incredible? Like themed merchandise designs, sportswear, or metal music posters.
Grind And Death
Eternal Font
Eternal is a handmade heavy metal font with a bold style and strong lines. It is suitable for any design needs, yet it will particularly fit any music-related projects: posters, tickets, album covers, merchandise, even decor, rock band branding, and more.
This metal font is minimalist and easy to implement into multiple concepts, particularly thanks to the rough edges highlighting its fierce spirit with some degree of underground elegance. That’s why you are good to go if you want it featured in designs that are non-related to music!
Frequently Asked Questions
As there are different metal music sub-genres, there are different metal fonts too. Those can be heavy metal fonts with grim characters, like Stunegart. Or some gothic types inspired by horror movie titles, jam-packed with scary elements, ex. Sword or Killviners. Last but not least, there are death metal and Scandinavian-inspired fonts with a strong scary feeling and an ethnic style. Here the perfect font to try will be Jotunheim.
You can use many fonts to create a robust heavy metal or horror look, so consider checking all kinds of them: blackletter & gothic types, horror fonts featuring scribbles and blood-drawn letters, or the traditional heavy metal fonts from the 80s.
If you are confused by such a rich choice, here are the most prominent death metal fonts with a distinctive vibe: Anemouth, Dramaga, Yourever, Killviners Metal Font, XXII Daemon, and Sadis. Each is unique, so you can choose depending on your project’s queries.
A heavy metal font can be hand-written, with characters resembling scribbles, like in Northen (Deathcore) or Smackdead. It can also be based on a gothic blackletter font with a distinctive look and purposefully aged carefully. If it’s what you need, try some free fonts: Killviners, Aviorte Blackletter, or Zepplines.
Consider using heavy metal fonts with an extended set of letters and extra characters — this will allow you to create any logo or album cover design. For example, you can use Lordish, an elegant gothic font, or XXII Daemon, a perfect font for horror-genre projects, music posters, or any other scary designs.
There are different fonts for the heavy metal music genre. Blackletter fonts are considered the gold standard. However, there are many exceptions. For example, branching types like Yourever, sans serif fonts, like Brothers of Metal or Heavy Metal Blight, and hand-drawn or brush fonts: Vindica Rebel, Smackdead, and Crucifixion.
