Al-Kamar

Elagabalus is a Baltimore, Maryland avant-garde black metal duo formed in 2014 by Dustin Swanson (bass, vocals, synth) and Ben Price (drums, vocals, guitar). Across Damnatio Memoriae (2015), Antiquarian Black MIDI (2017), and Dark Money (2018), the project layers synthesizers over black-metal instrumentation, drawing press comparisons to Neurosis, My Bloody Valentine, Godflesh, and Nirvana. Dark Money is tagged 'doomgaze/shoegaze' on Bandcamp and explores themes of financial corruption and power through a cinematic, synth-heavy sound.

Dëgénéréscence is a French black metal project, active since 2019, centered on the musician known as Infämie, who handles vocals and all instruments. The project is affiliated with the Cërcle Mortüaire collective (alongside Feuille Morte, Mortuaire, Olatom Amespïrïa and others) and released albums such as Hélas ! Je n'étais pas fait pour cette haine... (2020) and ...Ainsi ! Nous dansâmes aux limbes détestées... (2022) through Drakkar Productions. Its sound is catalogued as depressive/atmospheric black metal shading into blackgaze, pairing raw riffing with piano-led, ambience-forward passages.

Laster is a Dutch avant-garde black metal trio from Utrecht, active since 2012, that has steadily dissolved conventional black metal form into a hybrid of art rock, new wave, and shoegaze. Their Dutch-language lyrics dwell on love, distress, and identity across albums like Ons vrije fatum and Andermans mijne. In 2023 they toured Europe as support for Japanese avant-garde metal veterans Sigh.

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A one-person Saudi Arabian project that has released an extraordinarily prolific run of blackgaze/atmospheric-black-metal albums since 2024, pairing raw black metal with synth textures and long-form ambient passages. Track and album titles swing between clinical/medical imagery and Arabic-language poetry, giving the catalog a disorienting, diaristic quality. Entirely self-released on Bandcamp under Creative Commons licensing.

Alcest is a French band formed in 2000 in Bagnols-sur-Cèze by multi-instrumentalist Neige (Stéphane Paut), initially as a solo black metal project. Widely credited with pioneering blackgaze and post-black metal, the band pairs black metal's tremolo and blast-beats with the shimmering, ethereal textures of shoegaze and dream pop to evoke Neige's recurring theme of a luminous 'other world.' Since 2009 Alcest has been a duo of Neige and drummer Winterhalter, releasing albums such as Souvenirs d'un autre monde (2007), Les Voyages de l'âme (2012) and Kodama (2016) on Prophecy Productions before moving to Nuclear Blast.

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London's Sea Mosquito wrap raw black metal in ambient synth haze and echo-drenched production, favoring atmospheric wash over riff-forward songwriting - tremolo guitar and drums function as background texture behind cascading, almost lead-like drumming. Their 2025 album Majestas (I, Voidhanger Records) explores religious ecstasy across cultures, with harsh vocals occasionally giving way to spoken passages in English and Arabic. They sit closer to psychedelic/atmospheric black metal than to the death-metal-adjacent avant-garde acts on this chart, but the noise-and-texture-first approach is exactly the kind of unorthodox BM the label built its name on.

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Blut aus Nord is a French avant-garde black metal project from Mondeville, formed 1994 by Vindsval, evolving toward dissonant, industrialized and 'black hole metal' territory on The Work Which Transforms God (2003) and MoRT (2006). Later work such as Hallucinogen (2019) shifts into shoegaze-y, melodic and psychedelic territory. The band explicitly rejects black-metal orthodoxy in favor of an atmospheric 'artistic concept.'

Anonymous avant-garde black metal project from Bonn, Germany, active since 1999 and released through the German DIY label Zeitgeister Music. The person behind it has never revealed their identity; early records leaned on spoken-word poetry and grandiose German baritone vocals rather than harsh screams, and 2013's 'Weisse Nacht' was described by Avantgarde-Metal.com as sounding 'like a bright shoegaze album played the black metal way.' The project blends black metal with doom, ambient keyboard textures, and industrial elements across six releases since a 1999 demo.

Nostalghia is the one-man atmospheric/post-black metal project of Alex Becerra, based in Mexico City. Moved toward a more avant-garde, blackgaze-inflected post-black metal sound on The Last Path and Duelo (both 2023).

Deafheaven is an American band formed in San Francisco in 2010 by vocalist George Clarke and guitarist Kerry McCoy, and the most prominent US exponent of blackgaze — a fusion of black metal's tremolo blizzards and shrieked vocals with the luminous washes of shoegaze and post-rock. Their second album, Sunbather (2013), released on Jacob Bannon of Converge's label Deathwish Inc. and produced by Jack Shirley, became one of the most critically acclaimed and divisive metal records of its decade, its pink cover art a byword for the genre's crossover appeal. Later albums swung between the harsher New Bermuda (2015) and the fully clean-sung Infinite Granite (2021) before returning to extremity on Lonely People with Power (2025).

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