Ehnahre

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.

Montreal trio blending sludge and death metal weight with jazz-inflected saxophone, ambient dronescapes, and psychedelic textures across long-form concept albums. Their 2022 record Hivemind unfolds as a continuous sci-fi narrative about first contact with an insectoid hivemind, drawing comparisons to early Mastodon, Dvne, Neurosis, and Oranssi Pazuzu. Formed from the ashes of Montreal band The Wild Hunt in December 2016, the band restructured as a three-piece in January 2021 with all members sharing vocal duties and reaching for non-traditional instrumentation.

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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.

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Vaults of Zin is a Denton, Texas quartet fusing Magma-style zeuhl rhythm-section interplay with sludgy, doom-weighted metal guitar and modular-synth freakouts. Largely instrumental and built from long-form, prog-length pieces, their two albums (self-titled 2011, Kadath 2016) sit at the psychedelic, heavy end of the American avant-prog underground, drawing comparisons to Kayo Dot and Maudlin of the Well.

Epistasis is a New York-based experimental black metal quartet distinguished by Amy Mills' vocals and trumpet, splicing modern-classical dissonance (cited influences: Bartok, Ligeti, Part) and avant-jazz color into abrasive, atmospheric black metal. Their 2014 Crucial Blast album 'Light Through Dead Glass' was engineered by Martin Bisi (Sonic Youth, Swans) and drew press comparisons to Ved Buens Ende and Virus for its dissonant, jagged songwriting. Drummer Alex Cohen also plays in Pyrrhon and Malignancy, and Mills has guested on trumpet for Castevet and Psalm Zero — none of which are in the current atlas.

Avant-garde metal sextet from Poznań, Poland, founded in 2019 by guitarist Marcin Tuliszkiewicz and drummer Krzysztof Kulis. Their self-titled debut (10 January 2025) fuses black/death metal harshness with dark jazz, doomy drone and trumpet (Magdalena Andrys), driven by dual vocals between clean singer Julita Dąbrowska and growler Michał Sosnowski.

Long-running Czech experimental/progressive metal outfit from the Ostrava/Karvina area (Moravian-Silesian Region), active on and off since 1994. Their sound folds jazz-tinged flute, female vocals, and philosophical spoken-word passages into a technically knotty doom-death base, an approach laid out most fully on 1999's Sole Light Point in Void Tangle of Luminous Rays of Incompatible Directions.

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.

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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.

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.

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