It’s Metal Week on MTV2 this week (presumably due to the new Metallica album release this week), and it has resulted in various things being played that I’ve not heard in bloody ages. However, the list of metal bands that they are playing is depressingly narrow, and missing a large number of quite obvious bands. Outlets for Metal videos are surprisingly small now, which is perhaps why many bands simply don’t bother.

But then, it makes you wonder what the point of the likes of Kerrang TV are. So, related to all this, here are ten metal tracks – that have videos – that I’m not expecting to see on MTV2 this week.

A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me, or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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Constantly quoted as one of the most important and influential metal bands of the past decade, more technically adept than almost anyone else…and never played. So here is the video for their latest – savage – single from new album obZen.

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Another important band, again ignored by the music channels. They even edit down their (usually) epic singles, too – this track was an eleven-minute monster whittled down to five minutes for this video. Not to everyone’s taste, this band, but this is one of the more accessible tracks and a good place to start if you haven’t heard their prog-tinged metal before.

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This comes from another unbelievably influential album – the industrial-death metal masterpiece that is Demanufacture – that kickstarted nearly an entire swathe of bands into using electronics within their metal. None ever quite got it as right as these guys, though.

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Well, actually, there was one who came close. That nutcase Devin Townsend has had numerous projects over the years, but it was his SYL project – and in particular the City album – that showed just how much of a musical genius he is. This track is the best-known track from it, and seems to streak past at hyperspeed – although that might just be the insane drumming.

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Gothic-metal legends PL celebrate their twentieth anniversary this week with a big gig in London supported by My Dying Bride and Anathema – and after a few years in the doldrums their recent critical resurgence, you’d think, might result in seeing them on music channels. Not so, so this video rarely got seen, at least over here.

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I can’t remember the last time I saw Type O on TV, either. Actually, thinking about it, it might have been on Hallowe’en. Still, this lush, sweeping track is bloody marvellous, and a damned sight better than some of their more, er, tongue-in-cheek material of the same era, and also considerably better than the lazy, half-arsed material they have released on the last couple of albums.

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More middle-of-the road melodic metal nowadays, In Flames used to be at the vanguard of the (many) death metal bands that sprung out of Gothenburg in Sweden during the nineties. Not quite as interesting as they used to be, this track comes from the album Reroute to Remain, which was the first to showcase their more melodic, almost poppy side, but still retained a real crunch that subsequent albums have lacked.

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Yeah, so we may have lost track of who is in the band nowadays (their wiki page details the revolving door policy), but when after 25 years they were still releasing tracks as kick-ass as this, I’ve no complaints. One of the legendary thrash bands, these, and tracks like this suggest that in at least some corners of the world this genre is still in rude health.

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Another Brazilian band, and they are at points probably even less compromising than the mighty Sepultura ever were. No tribal elements here – just brutal, straight-out bellowed death metal. They’ve been around quite a while, too, but their most recent two albums are a considerable step up from previous output.

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Finally, the band in this list that are probably the least likely of all to ever be featured on MTV2. Described as “blackened death metal” – in other words somewhere between the Black and Death Metal genres – the punishing sound is surprisingly listenable, although their heavily anti-Christian lyrics sometimes are somewhat over the top and are simply inviting parody. Still, this track, from their latest album The Apostasy is fantastic.