Ashbreather

Dagtum is a Filipino death metal trio from Pateros formed by veterans of the local extreme-metal underground, including Adam Carlo Along of Legion and brothers Ronaldo Jr. and Ronnel Vivo of Basalt Shrine. Their 2021 debut Revered Decadence (Eastbreath Records) folds dissonant, sludge-thickened death metal into jazz-inflected improvisation and creepy, horror-soundtrack atmosphere, drawing comparisons to Gorguts, Ulcerate and Portal.

Avarice Enshrinedplay in the dock

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Ehnahre is a Boston, Massachusetts experimental extreme metal ensemble formed in 2006 by former Kayo Dot members Ryan McGuire and John Carchia, fusing contemporary classical composition, aleatoric music, and doom/death metal extremity. The group avoids original lyrics, instead setting texts by modernist poets to dense, largely through-composed pieces built from extended technique and free improvisation.

Ingurgitating Oblivion are a German death metal band (active as such since 2002, roots in 1997) built around founder-guitarist Florian Engelke. Their later work, especially Vision Wallows in Symphonies of Light (2017) and Ontology of Nought (2024), moved into progressive, dissonant, avant-garde death metal, lacing Gorguts-style dissonance with jazz guitars, vibraphone, piano and musical saw, and drawing openly on Ligeti, Bartok and jazz. With Defeated Sanity's Lille Gruber on drums for the pivotal 2017 record, they became a fixture of the explorative death-metal underground.

Gojira are a French metal band from Ondres, formed in 1996 as Godzilla and renamed Gojira in 2001. They fuse technical death metal, groove, progressive and post-metal into a percussive, pinch-harmonic-driven style, wrapped in lyrics about spirituality, philosophy and the environment. Their lineup of the Duplantier brothers with Christian Andreu and Jean-Michel Labadie has been unchanged since the rename; they became the first French band to top the Billboard Hard Rock Albums chart and, in 2024, the first metal band to perform at an Olympic opening ceremony.

Strandedplay in the dock

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Blood Incantation are an American death-metal band from Denver, Colorado, formed in 2011 around guitarist-vocalist Paul Riedl and drummer Isaac Faulk. Their 2016 debut Starspawn, on Dark Descent Records, drew wide acclaim for its cavernous, progressive, cosmically themed death metal; they later moved to Century Media and stretched their palette across the fully ambient synth album Timewave Zero (2022) and the sprawling Absolute Elsewhere (2024). They rank among the most celebrated acts of the modern death-metal revival.

Chaos Echœs formed in Gueberschwihr, Alsace, in 2011, months after the split of blackened death metal trio Bloody Sign, built around guitarist Kalevi Uibo and drummer Ilmar Uibo alongside bassist Stefan Thanneur. Metal Archives tags the project 'Experimental Death Metal/Drone/Jazz,' and reviewers describe albums like Transient and Mouvement as death metal stretched into psychedelic, free-jazz-inflected drone territory, drawing comparisons to John Zorn's Moonchild. Their 2018 release Sustain was a collaboration with free-jazz saxophonist Mats Gustafsson. The band was active until 2019, releasing through Sentient Ruin and Nuclear War Now! Productions.

Black Mantraplay in the dock

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Neural Indent is the solo, guitarless death/goregrind project of M.S. (Matt Stephens), who builds brutal death-metal vocals and grind structures entirely out of synths, keyboards, bass, and drum programming. Released mostly through Putrefactive Recordings, the project has been described as a spiritual sequel to fellow guitarless act Effluence, swapping riffs for synth textures that critics compare to Demilich filtered through Tangerine Dream, with occasional free-jazz/gorenoise detours. It sits at an unusual intersection of brutal death metal and synth-driven experimentalism rather than any conventional metal instrumentation.

Brainless Infant (FULL EP)play in the dock

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Rivers of Nihil are a Reading, Pennsylvania band who wrote a four-album cycle with one season each, and turned the autumn record into the one everybody names first. Where Owls Know My Name (2018) put a saxophone in the middle of a technical death metal album — three solos and atmospheric passages from Burial in the Sky's Zach Strouse, with cello and trumpet around them — and it landed because the songs were already long, cinematic and keyboard-shaded, with somewhere for a horn to go. Brody Uttley's keys and programming carry that atmosphere; Adam Biggs moved from bass to lead vocals in 2022, and the self-titled 2025 album was written with no dedicated frontman at all. The saxophone stayed, which is the tell: the band deliberately refused to be 'the sax band' and kept using it anyway, as one more colour rather than a gimmick to retire.

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.

A Chicago/Minneapolis improv-death quartet (with members of Zebulon Pike, Celestiial, and Obsequiae) whose albums are single continuous live improvisations rather than composed songs, splicing death metal's blast-and-growl violence with doom lumber, free-jazz harmolodics, and drone-thick ambience. The band cites John Zorn's Naked City and Ornette Coleman's harmolodic concepts as explicit touchstones, assigning time-boxed solo/duo segments to a stopwatch instead of a setlist. 2025's 'Enter the Misanthropocene' pushed further into jazz noodling and grind intensity relative to its drone-heavier 2022 debut.

Frost Suffocationplay in the dock

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