Creativity Quote by Josh Silver

Calling your own “least selling record” a “great album” is a quiet act of defiance against the only scoreboard the industry reliably respects. Josh Silver is talking about Slow, Deep and Hard, Type O Negative’s bruising early statement, and he’s drawing a clean line between value and visibility. The intent isn’t to dunk on commerce; it’s to reclaim authorship. He’s refusing to let sales figures be the final edit of the band’s history.

The phrasing matters. “Even though” sets up an expected apology, then swerves into conviction. Silver acknowledges the metric that haunts musicians - units moved, chart position, the back-office verdict - and treats it like irrelevant gossip. “Probably” adds a wry shrug, the kind of offhand uncertainty that signals he doesn’t keep trophies and receipts in the same drawer. That casualness is the subtext: the band’s identity wasn’t built to win the clean, measurable game.

Culturally, it hits because metal has always had a complicated romance with mainstream success: crave the bigger stage, distrust what it does to the music. Calling an underperforming record “great” taps into the fan logic that turns “cult” into a compliment and “ahead of its time” into a second life. It also reads like a message to new listeners discovering the catalog backwards: don’t confuse later popularity with artistic arrival. Sometimes the rawest version of a band is the one least rewarded at the register - and that’s precisely why it matters.