Grayceon

Giant Squid are an American post-metal and progressive/doom band formed in Sacramento, California in 2002 and led by Aaron Gregory, known for oceanic and marine-biology concept records including Metridium Fields (2006) and The Ichthyologist (2009), released via labels including Translation Loss. Cellist and vocalist Jackie Perez Gratz, of Amber Asylum and Grayceon fame, joined the band in January 2007, deepening its chamber-tinged heaviness. The band shares members and a 2007 split 7-inch, 'Sutter's Fort,' with fellow Bay Area group Grayceon.

Mastodon is an American heavy metal band formed in Atlanta in 2000, fusing sludge and stoner metal with progressive rock, hardcore aggression and jazz-influenced drumming into an ambitious, concept-driven sound. Their breakthrough Leviathan (2004), a song cycle built around Moby-Dick, established them as one of the most original and influential American metal bands of the 21st century, and later records like Crack the Skye (2009) pushed further into psychedelic prog territory. The classic four-piece held together for 25 years until guitarist Brent Hinds split with the band in March 2025 and died in a motorcycle accident that August; three of the four members trade lead vocals, giving the band its distinctive multi-voiced attack.

Blood and Thunderplay in the dock

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Mutyumu (夢中夢, 'a dream within a dream') was a six-piece Japanese band active 2002–2010, blending post-rock, classical minimalism and heavy metal around operatic vocals, strings and piano alongside blast beats and screamed vocals. Contrary to secondhand descriptions of it as a solo project, sources consistently describe a full band led by vocalist Hatis Noit. Their two albums, 夢中夢 (2006) and イリヤ -Il y a- (2008, on Gyuune Cassette), fold folk melody and droning classical passages into a metal/post-rock framework, with the latter featuring guest contributions from World's End Girlfriend, before the band split in 2010.

maudlin of the Well (stylized lowercase, often abbreviated motW) was an avant-garde metal band from Boston formed in 1996 around the songwriting core of Toby Driver, guitarist Greg Massi and lyricist Jason Byron. Across the 1999 debut My Fruit PsychoBells... A Seed Combustible and the 2001 companion albums Bath and Leaving Your Body Map, they braided death and doom metal with jazz horns, clean female and male vocals, chamber textures and ambient passages. The group dissolved in 2002 and Driver reconstituted the project as Kayo Dot; motW later reunited to record the fan-funded Part the Second (2009).

The Blue Ghost / Shedding Qliphothplay 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.

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.

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.

Long-running unsigned Chicago 'pan-metal' quartet whose four albums (Vanlandingham and Zone 2006, Tsushima 2012, Emeritus 2016, Azimuth 2023) each pursue long-form, genre-hopping narrative songwriting — magisterial doom/prog riffage alongside jazzy slow-builds, kraut-trance rhythms, shoegaze-tinted codas, Americana melodicism and post-hardcore intensity, often within a single track. Metal Archives lists their genre as 'Various' for good reason.

Baroness are a sludge and progressive metal band formed in Savannah, Georgia in 2003 by John Baizley, who writes the songs and paints every cover in the band's colour-titled album cycle. Their records move between pummelling riffs and punk-rock screams and finger-picked acoustic passages with a bluegrass and Appalachian cast — "Cockroach en Fleur", "O'Appalachia", the Blue Record interludes — and the sound drifted steadily from early sludge toward the alternative-rock accessibility of Yellow & Green and the psychedelic space-rock of Gold & Grey. Widely credited across the scene: Baizley is also one of its most prolific cover artists, and the band's ties here run through Mastodon, Converge and the 2019 co-headline tour with Deafheaven and Zeal & Ardor.

A Portuguese progressive death/doom act from Vila Real, active 1997-2011 (as Thanatos until 2001), that pushed from straightforward death metal into an increasingly atmospheric, doom-tinged and progressive direction across five albums. Dual male/female vocals (Guilhermino Martins and Patrícia Rodrigues) traded off over jazzy detours, Middle-Eastern-flavored guitar-and-keyboard passages, and dreamlike, trance-inducing keyboard textures, drawing comparisons to Porcupine Tree and Lacuna Coil before disbanding in 2011.

L.play in the dock

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