Einvera

God of Shamisen is a Santa Cruz, California band formed in late 2004 and led by Tsugaru-shamisen player Kevin Kmetz, billed as the world's first rock band to combine metal, funk, and progressive rock with the Tsugaru-shamisen, a fretless lute from Northern Japan. Its lineup features Kevin Kmetz (shamisen), Lee Smith (drums), Karl Schnaitter (guitar), and Mark Thornton (bass). The band shares members with experimental band Estradasphere: drummer Lee Smith moved to Santa Cruz in 2004 to join Estradasphere as their permanent drummer, and Kmetz also worked with the group. Their second album, Smoke Monster Attack (2010), was produced by Billy Anderson and Mark Thornton.

Die Apokalyptischen Reiter are a long-running Weimar, Germany act (formed 1995) whose sound resists easy categorization, fusing melodic death metal, folk metal, power/symphonic metal and Neue Deutsche Härte with punk energy and, in later albums, jazz and ambient touches. Their 2017 album 'Der Rote Reiter' was recorded and released entirely in German, marking a deliberate turn toward their home-language folk-metal identity. The band has toured internationally for three decades and remains active on Nuclear Blast/The End Records.

Sepultura is a Brazilian metal band formed in Belo Horizonte in 1984 by brothers Max and Igor Cavalera, and the most internationally successful heavy metal act to emerge from Brazil. Their late-1980s records helped codify a raw strain of thrash and death metal before Chaos A.D. (1993) and Roots (1996) pivoted the band toward a percussive groove metal laced with Brazilian tribal rhythms and indigenous instrumentation. Max Cavalera's 1996 departure fractured the classic lineup, but guitarist Andreas Kisser and bassist Paulo Jr. carried the band forward with American vocalist Derrick Green from 1997 onward.

Roots Bloody Rootsplay in the dock

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Candy Cane were a Tampere/Helsinki, Finland act formed in 1995 that spent a decade as an indie/post-punk quartet before a 2006 lineup change pushed them into avant-garde black and death metal shot through with hardcore and jazz. Their later albums Fay-ra-Doowra (2007) and Jaula (2009) brought in guest saxophone, cello, mandolin and violin alongside the core lineup of Marko Neuman, Miikka Salonen, Tomi Isoviita, Jussi Lehtinen and Raine Näsi. The band split in 2013 after releasing a 2010 split LP with Oranssi Pazuzu on Verdura/Firebox Records.

Kponyungoplay in the dock

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The Deserts of Traun (stylized TRAUN) is an experimental, multi-genre metal project from Santa Barbara, California, founded and largely composed by drummer Dave Murray, formerly of Estradasphere. Its self-titled 2003 debut features Murray on numerous instruments alongside contributions from Estradasphere guitarist Jason Schimmel and others, blending metal, jazz, progressive rock and soundtrack styles. Murray later carried the project's polyrhythmic-metal sensibility into High Castle Teleorkestra.

Untu is the metal incarnation of Gamelan Suara Baru, a Javanese gamelan collective founded in Los Angeles in 2014 by composer Sean Hayward that later relocated its performing core to Surakarta/Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Its 2019 debut album 'Rats of Oran,' based on Albert Camus' 'La Peste,' fused a death-metal band with a full traditional gamelan ensemble rather than using gamelan as mere texture.

Free Salamander Exhibit is an avant-rock band from Oakland, California, formed by former members of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. Comprising roughly four-fifths of that group's lineup plus additional players, the band pursues an art-prog / rock-in-opposition sound built around an arsenal of homemade instruments alongside guitars, bass, and drums. Their debut album, Undestroyed, was released December 13, 2016 on the Web of Mimicry label.

Grayceon are a San Francisco progressive-metal trio formed in 2005, built around Jackie Perez Gratz's electric cello and vocals alongside Max Doyle's guitar and Zack Farwell's drums, releasing through Vendlus and later Profound Lore on records such as All We Destroy (2011). The cello-forward lineup fuses thrash and doom heaviness with chamber-folk melody. Perez Gratz also plays in Giant Squid, with whom Grayceon shared a 2007 split, and has collaborated widely across the Bay Area scene, including with Neurosis.

Between the Buried and Me are an American progressive metal band formed in 2000 in Raleigh, North Carolina, spanning progressive metalcore, technical death metal and avant-garde metal. Their genre-hopping suites mix death growls and cleans with sweep-picked leads that draw on bluegrass and jazz, plus ambient 'space music' passages and acoustic balladry.

Pyrithe are a Pittsburgh, US experimental sludge/post-metal band whose 2022 Gilead Media debut Monuments to Impermanence smears sludge and doom across noise, ambient, post-rock, hardcore and black-metal extremes. The trio treat the studio as a junk-shop orchestra, folding a Finnish kantele, coconuts, egg-shakers and literal trash into their whirlwind, avant-garde compositions. It is a savage, absurdist 'strange symphony' that stays coherent despite trying to do everything at once.