Archangel

Peeping Tom is Mike Patton's self-described 'version of pop music' — chart-radio hooks, trip-hop and hip-hop production run through his warped sensibility, named after Michael Powell's 1960 voyeur thriller. Its sole, self-titled album (Ipecac, May 30, 2006) took roughly six years to assemble, built by swapping song files through the mail with a rotating cast including Dan the Automator, Rahzel, Norah Jones, Massive Attack, Kool Keith, Amon Tobin and Bebel Gilberto. Widely called Patton's most mainstream-accessible work since Faith No More, it reached #103 on the Billboard 200 and #1 on the Heatseekers chart — the atlas's clearest case of an avant-metal lifer infiltrating pop rather than escaping it.

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こくまろみるく (Kokumaromilk) is a Japanese avant-garde outfit that dresses power and symphonic metal foundations in noise interludes, jazz-pop detours, and a vocalist who swings between saccharine-cute and unhinged within the same song. Reviewers place it alongside Sigh and Gonin-Ish in Japan's weird-metal lineage, praising its whiplash genre-shifts. Documentation outside Metal Archives is thin, so several details (full lineup, precise formation year) remain unconfirmed.

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One-man Vienna-based experimental progressive metal project helmed by David Angerer, whose 2026 album Palingenaeon plays like 'a film score at a party' -- neoclassical/symphonic prog metal stitched together with circus music, absurdist black comedy, and a loose concept about botched reincarnation. Extremely new and thinly documented outside a handful of prog/metal press write-ups.

Atrox is a long-running Norwegian avant-garde metal band from Trondheim (formed 1988, debut album 1997) that brands its sound 'schizo/psycho metal' — experimental, progressive metal built on sharp contrasts of light and dark, unorthodox structures, and intense, bizarre vocals. Rooted in an atmospheric death/doom origin, later albums on Season of Mist (Contentum, Terrestrials, Binocular, Monocle) push toward melodic yet unpredictable, keyboard-and-sample-textured territory in the vein of Arcturus and Manes. The band's guitar core (viNd and Rune Sørgård) has anchored it since 1997.

Paris's 6:33 build unpredictable, theatrical avant-metal around rotating lead vocalists and songs that swerve from grinning electronic pop hooks ('I'm a Nerd') to widescreen prog-metal bombast. Signed to Kaotoxin Records for 2015's Deadly Scenes, the band draws comparisons to Devin Townsend's maximalism and Diablo Swing Orchestra's genre-hopping theatrics. Multi-vocalist trade-offs and electronic texture keep the material feeling more like a revue than a conventional metal band.

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A Perfect Circle is an American rock supergroup formed in Los Angeles in 1999 by guitarist Billy Howerdel, a former guitar tech for Tool, Nine Inch Nails and the Smashing Pumpkins, and Tool vocalist Maynard James Keenan. Fronting a more melodic, art-rock-leaning counterpart to Tool, the band broke through with the platinum debut Mer de Noms (2000) and its David Fincher-directed single "Judith." The rotating lineup has drawn from across alternative rock, with Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha, session drummer Josh Freese, and bassist Matt McJunkins among its long-running members. After a long hiatus the group returned with Eat the Elephant (2018).

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Flagman is a funk-metal/avant-metal band founded in 2015 in Orlando, Florida by bassist-vocalist Sam Stewart and guitarist Cody Singleton, later relocating to Seattle, Washington. Their sound centers on Stewart's Les Claypool-indebted slap bass and theatrical, character-voiced vocals, wearing clear influences from Primus, Mr. Bungle, System of a Down, and Faith No More across releases like 'Thank You, Come Again' (2022), 'Tastes Incredible' (2024), and the industrial-tinged EP 'Before The Blast' (2025). Press coverage has also compared their more recent, blunter material to 'funky Chat Pile.'

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Age of Silence is a Norwegian avant-garde progressive metal 'supergroup' formed in Oslo in 2004 by keyboardist Andy Winter of Winds, drawing members from Mayhem, Arcturus, The Kovenant, and Solefald. Their sole album, Acceleration (2004, The End Records), pairs 'aggressive guitar grind' with Winter's gothic, classically-tinged piano and synths, occasionally veering into pure electronic beats, per a Sputnikmusic review. A follow-up EP, Complications – Trilogy of Intricacy (2005), preceded a long hiatus for the project.

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Puscifer is the shape-shifting studio-and-performance-art project of vocalist Maynard James Keenan, formed in Los Angeles around 2003 out of a fictional band gag from HBO's Mr. Show. Where his other bands Tool and A Perfect Circle deal in heavy rock, Puscifer wanders through electronic rock, trip-hop, art rock and post-industrial textures, wrapped in tongue-in-cheek desert-Americana theatrics. The core trio of Keenan, multi-instrumentalist/producer Mat Mitchell and singer Carina Round fuse music, live performance and visual art into a single conceptual whole.

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Drainbow is the Austin, Texas one-man vehicle of multi-instrumentalist Nicholas Sarcophagus, who writes, performs and records everything himself. Its debut full-length 'The Tower of Flints' (2020) careens between thrash riffing, doom weight, gothic atmosphere, jazz-tinged lounge interludes and ambient post-metal passages inside a single kaleidoscopic record. It occupies the DIY, one-person-band corner of the avant-garde metal scene, prioritizing eclectic mood-shifting over any single subgenre identity.