William Shatner records heavy metal covers at 94

William Shatner, 94, has decided that retirement is for supporting characters. Instead, he is recording a heavy metal album built around covers of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden—an idea that sounds like a late-night dare until you remember that Shatner’s entire career is essentially a controlled experiment in how far voice, timing, and sheer will can bend an audience.

According to DNyuz, Shatner’s new project leans into his signature mode: not singing so much as prosecuting the lyrics. It’s the same spoken-word, theatrical cadence that turned his earlier musical curiosities into cult artifacts—now pointed at a genre that, beneath the leather and distortion, is already built for declamation.

Metal works for Shatner because the form is structurally compatible with overstatement. Sabbath’s riffs are blunt instruments; Priest is operatic; Maiden is narrative-heavy, full of gallows history and moral melodrama. It’s music that already assumes the world is a little too intense for polite conversation. Shatner’s delivery—half courtroom summation, half sci‑fi monologue—doesn’t fight that; it formalizes it.

There’s also a market logic here that doesn’t require a committee or a grant program. Niche audiences reward authenticity, but they also reward spectacle—especially when it’s self-aware. The “celebrity doing it wrong in the right way” phenomenon is a kind of cultural arbitrage: fans get the thrill of transgression (Captain Kirk doing Sabbath) without the cost of betrayal (Shatner has never pretended to be Ozzy). The result is kitsch that can—occasionally—flip into art, precisely because it refuses the usual sincerity filters.

In a saner world, a 94-year-old would be pressured into tasteful retrospectives and carefully managed legacy projects. Shatner’s alternative is more entrepreneurial: take the one asset that cannot be outsourced—his voice—and stress-test it against material that was never meant to be “appropriate.”

The entertainment industry will describe this as quirky. But the more interesting point is that it’s an example of cultural production without permission. Shatner doesn’t need a cultural ministry to certify his relevance; he just needs an audience willing to buy the experiment. Metal, built by outsiders and sustained by fans who distrust gatekeepers, is a fitting vehicle for a man who has spent decades turning ham into a craft.

If the album works, it will be because Shatner understands something many younger performers forget: style is not a costume. It’s a jurisdiction.