How A Prank Involving H&M And Fake Nazi Metal Bands Confused The Internet

It's probably going to be something of a headache-inducing day for the folks at Swedish multinational clothing company H&M, after the organisation apparently found itself the target of an elaborate prank executed ostensibly to protest its use of heavy metal imagery in its apparel.

It all started late last night (AEST), when a group calling themselves Strong Scene Productions posted to Facebook that they were working "in support of" H&M to highlight "the talents and forgotten jewels of global underground metal music" in a new line of clothing.

Bands such as LANY (France), Mortus (Mexico), Mystic Triangle (US) and Grey (Germany) were cited as being among the newly promoted artefacts, alongside "extreme metallers" Motmros and "neo-folkers" The One, with tracks from several of the acts even being included in a trailer for the "Heavy & Metal" line, as well as having standalone songs available on YouTube.

This is when alarm bells should have started sounding, for multiple reasons: the gratuitous neo-Nazi imagery adorning LANY's press release, replete with Hitler's face, as well as Crepuscular's Back To Womb cassette apparently spreading its contents between "Side Holocaust" and "Side Fuhrer"; the fact that Mystic Triangle apparently released an album called Drink The Devil's Blood & Inhale Cocaine, which, while not out of the realm of possibility for the genre, is a little on the nose; or how literally every single reference to any of these bands has only appeared online within the past few weeks, tops (with the exception of Mystic Triangle, which appears to be the name used by a little-known Canadian artist).

To be fair, some alarm bells did ring, especially with regard to the kind-of-obviously fake nature of the bands, but, suddenly, the internet was awash with articles from all manner of outlets, furiously asking whether H&M had commissioned Strong Scene to create an elaborate web of Nazi-sympathiser metal bands to move clothes.

The answer, to wit, is not really — items such as a "Mortus" T-shirt and a bomber jacket sporting the LANY and Mystic Triangle logos did exist in the company's clothing line before all this took off, but the backstories and videos and consequent controversy is either an actual guerrilla marketing campaign gone horribly awry or an incredibly dedicated prank based on its perpetrators' deep distaste for a multinational corporation trying to profit off fringe culture — and, for the moment at least, things seem to be leaning towards the latter.

Either way, H&M appears to have been totally blindsided by the whole thing, with a spokesman at the company's corporate office conveying confusion to a Metal Injection representative and asking for links for proof, while a Twitter response indicated they were still trying to figure out what was going on this morning.

Strong Scene, for their part, have been much louder than H&M, perhaps assuming they could bewilder their critics into submission, offering up two Facebook posts in relatively quick succession that seem to contradict each other.

First, Strong Scene claimed to be "a new and rising record label, hungry to bring you great new bands".

"Even if our campaign has been a bit controversial, we are serious and taking the scene by storm!" they wrote.

About four hours later, however, they denied being a label — rather claiming, now, to be a "one-time improvised collective art project in the vein of Spinal Tap, Monty Python and the Yes Men" — and re-iterated that they had never actually used the word "collaborate" in reference to their work with H&M, innocently stating that their only goal was "to create pieces of music inspired by their new spring collection".

So, to recap the apparent chain of events: H&M releases vaguely metal-themed clothing, "art collective" gets inspired to create outrageously comprehensive back-stories for the fake bands because ART, somewhere along the line Nazis become involved, add a pinch of internet, and suddenly people think H&M deliberately made up totalitarian musicians to move their clothing.

Alternatively — since we don't want it to eventually come to light that H&M was involved in this whole thing and thus look really stupid later — if this is a marketing campaign that has gone screaming off the rails thanks to an errant artist's decision to throw Nazi imagery into H&M-commissioned backing content for fake bands, then it's an even more confusing idea than the notion that some pissed-off metal fans would go to these sorts of lengths to embarrass an organisation in the first place.