Hail Architeuthis!

Real Loud is a New York sextet billed as an 'antiphonal chamber metal' ensemble, staging mirrored pairs of electric bass, guitar and drums across the stage for four commissioned premieres on its 2021 self-titled debut (New Focus Recordings). The record spans Meshuggah-inspired mixed-meter riffing, no-wave-tinged fervor and two more ambient, spatialized pieces built from ringing harmonics and hollow echo. It reads as contemporary-classical composers writing idiomatically for a metal band's instrumentation.

Forbidden Subjectsplay in the dock

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Mamiffer is an American experimental band based in Seattle, Washington, founded in 2007 by Faith Coloccia out of ideas from her former group Everlovely Lightningheart. It began as her solo project and grew into a duo with Aaron Turner (of Isis and Sumac), who became her creative partner and later husband; the two also co-founded SIGE Records. The music intertwines ambient, drone, and post-rock composition with piano and ethereal vocals, and the band is known for collaborative albums and rotating guest musicians.

Jodis is a minimal drone/doom trio featuring Aaron Turner (vocals), James Plotkin (guitar) and Tim Wyskida (drums). The band is a modern exploration of restrained sonic minimalism and tonal/textural density, coupling Plotkin and Wyskida's sparse, mercurial rhythmic interplay with Turner's monolithic ambience and distressed vocals. They released two albums on Hydra Head Records: Secret House (2009) and Black Curtain (2012).

Caspian are an instrumental band from Beverly, Massachusetts, formed in 2003, and they use post-rock's crescendo shape as a container for far more than post-rock. Three guitars, pedal steel, synthesizers and tape loops build the quiet halves; the loud halves reach genuine post-metal weight, PopMatters calling Dust and Disquiet (2015) a 'prog-metal melee, equal parts resplendent and eviscerating' full of 'distorted clangor, rife with feedback and guitar squeals'. Around the edges sit things the genre usually leaves out — programmed voices, beats and loops, a crooning trumpet, piano and glockenspiel, and on later records obscured vocal melody and outright screams cutting through the shimmer. Where their peers treat atmosphere as the destination, Caspian treat it as one instrument among several, which is why the records keep changing texture from track to track instead of repeating the same slow build.

Palms is an American post-metal and dream-pop band formed in 2011 by three former members of Isis — bassist Jeff Caxide, drummer Aaron Harris, and guitarist/keyboardist Bryant Clifford Meyer — together with Deftones vocalist Chino Moreno. Their self-titled debut album was released on June 25, 2013 through Mike Patton's Ipecac Recordings, trading Isis's sludgy heaviness for lush, shoegaze-inflected atmospheres. A 10th-anniversary edition in 2023 added the previously unreleased tracks "Opening Titles" and "End Credits".

Ecliptic is the solo experimental-death/drone-noise vehicle of Michael Baer, active since 2017, originally based in San Diego and now Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Distinct from an older Virginia melodic black metal band of the same name (dormant since 2010), this Ecliptic is a prolific bedroom-auteur catalog of noise-drone singles, serialist sound pieces and black/death-tinged full-lengths like 'Undulating Echoes of Stirring Subconscious' (2019), with newer material (2024-2026) branching into related side projects. Sits in the experimental death/drone underground rather than any established scene lineage.

Under the Ghosts banner, Nine Inch Nails set aside industrial rock for near-wordless dark ambient. Ghosts I–IV (2008, self-released, Grammy-nominated) was described by Reznor as "a soundtrack for daydreams," compared to Brian Eno and Robert Fripp. Ghosts V: Together (2020) is warmer and more soothing, likened to Eno and William Basinski; its companion Ghosts VI: Locusts (2020) turns dissonant and "industrialised," built from musique-concrète bleeps and film-noir horns into what one review called "a soundscape of impending collapse."

Timeless Necrotears is a Barcelona, Spain solo/duo project built around Christian L. Becker (guitars, synths, vocal effects), joined on some releases by Pablo Bermejo (additional vocals). The project's Bandcamp tags itself as experimental dungeon synth, doom metal, dark ambient and 'dystopia,' and it is extraordinarily prolific, releasing dozens of thematically-linked concept albums (the recurring 'Jurzikum,' 'She-Droid' and 'Planet' cycles) since the mid-2010s alongside a couple of 1990s-era demo reissues. The sound leans on long-form synth atmospheres punctuated by slow, doom-adjacent riffing rather than conventional song structure.

Charming Timur is a Helsinki, Finland one-man project self-described as "a one man musical Soothing Apocalypse" spanning experimental metal, industrial and atmospheric music. Albums like "Focused Rage" (2017) blend nu-metal riffs and chaotic screaming with post-rock vibes and electronic atmospheres — the artist's own description is wanting it to sound like "the entire universe rip itself apart and yet it would sound beautiful at the same time." The project's identity behind the name could not be confirmed from any directly-fetched source; bassist Damjan Kapor guests on most of Focused Rage.

Psychotic Depressionplay in the dock

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House of Low Culture is an American drone/dark ambient and experimental project fronted by Aaron Turner (Isis, Sumac), active since 2000 and named after a song from Isis's Sawblade EP. Its music marries warm cinematic tones with murky, sub-nautical textures, and its lineup has drawn on figures from the wider Hydra Head/experimental-metal orbit. Since 2010 the project has centered on Turner alongside his Mamiffer bandmate and wife Faith Coloccia, with Kevin Micka joining in 2020.