Homeskin

A UK bedroom-solo prog/avant-garde metal project by Leia Camilla that started as a full cover of Metallica's St. Anger before sprawling into mathcore, grindcore, metalcore, blackgaze, atmospheric metal, and ambient free improvisation. Related side-outlets DXO (ambient/noise/improv) and the short-lived black metal project Ljós extend the same restless, genre-hopping approach.

Avant-garde black metal / digital hardcore project founded 2018 by Viktor Sohm (also of Vienna outfit PRLLNKRCHN) in Vienna, Austria. Debut EP Serotonin (2019) fused blackgaze atmosphere with dissonant black metal; the follow-up album NorAdrenalin (2021, reissued by Total Dissonance Worship) pushed further into deconstructed-club and digital-hardcore territory, blending distorted guitars with club-beat electronics around themes of trauma and existentialism.

Avhath is a Jakarta blackened-crust quintet that fuses d-beat hardcore beatdowns with post-black metal riffing and a blackgaze-adjacent haze that's earned them Metal Archives' 'Post-Black Metal/Crust/Shoegaze' tag. Twice AMI Award winners for Best Metal Production, they've built a dense split/EP discography with regional peers and, in 2024, a full collaborative record with fellow Indonesian experimentalists KUNTARI.

Hallowed Groundplay in the dock

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Deafheaven is an American band formed in San Francisco in 2010 by vocalist George Clarke and guitarist Kerry McCoy, and the most prominent US exponent of blackgaze — a fusion of black metal's tremolo blizzards and shrieked vocals with the luminous washes of shoegaze and post-rock. Their second album, Sunbather (2013), released on Jacob Bannon of Converge's label Deathwish Inc. and produced by Jack Shirley, became one of the most critically acclaimed and divisive metal records of its decade, its pink cover art a byword for the genre's crossover appeal. Later albums swung between the harsher New Bermuda (2015) and the fully clean-sung Infinite Granite (2021) before returning to extremity on Lonely People with Power (2025).

Dream Houseplay in the dock

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Tokyo four-piece formed around 2017 by guitarist Adel and drummer Kazuma, later completed by vocalist Nana Yokota and bassist Junichi, fusing black metal blast beats and screamo intensity with a blurred, melodic shoegaze wall of sound (blackgaze). Debut album Doukei (2020) and follow-up Reikoku (2023) were both reissued for European/vinyl distribution via Gerpfast Record in 2025. Reviewers describe an intentionally raw, unpolished production framing gloomy, emotionally introspective post-metal songwriting.

胎海 (Taikai)play in the dock

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Oathbreaker are a Belgian band formed in Ghent in 2008, evolving from crust/screamo into the atmospheric post-black metal of their acclaimed 2016 album Rheia on Deathwish Inc. Fronted by Caro Tanghe, whose delivery ranges from fragile singing to full-throated screams, they are part of Amenra's Church of Ra collective. Rheia was recorded by Jack Shirley, the engineer behind Deafheaven's records, situating the band squarely within the modern blackgaze lineage.

Plebeian Grandstand is a French extreme-metal band formed in Toulouse in 2005, evolving from blackened mathcore into a dissonant hybrid of avant-black metal, chaotic hardcore, noise and experimental electronica. Their promo material frames the sound as 'avant-Black Metal, chaotic Hardcore, blown-out Jazz, corrosive Noise, experimental Electronica and death Industrial.' Releases include 'False Highs, True Lows' (2016) and 'Rien ne suffit' (2021), with a lineup that includes a dedicated modular synthesist.

In their early era Sólstafir, formed in Reykjavík in 1995, played raw, epic Icelandic black/viking metal in the vein of Bathory and Enslaved: cold tremolo riffing, harsh vocals and pagan atmosphere. The debut full-length Í Blóði og Anda ("In Blood and Spirit", 2002) crystallized this sound, and its follow-up Masterpiece of Bitterness (2005, Spinefarm) began folding in the progressive and post-metal textures that would later define the band. This era established Sólstafir as one of Iceland's most distinctive extreme-metal exports before their gradual drift away from black metal orthodoxy.

Í Blóði og Andaplay in the dock

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Solo industrial black/death metal project of Charlie Davis (also vocalist/bassist of sludge band Beggar and of the punk project Wasted Death), based in London, England. Debut album Paroxysms (2022) fuses grinding, blast-beat black metal with mechanized industrial-dub textures, deliberate 'inhuman' digital glitches, and ritualistic chant-like vocal passages, drawing conceptually on Philip K. Dick's VALIS and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.

Wiegedood are a Belgian black-metal trio formed in Ghent in 2014, part of the Church of Ra collective built around Amenra. Their sound is relentless, tremolo-driven atmospheric black metal, first laid out across the De Doden Hebben Het Goed album trilogy on Consouling Sounds before the harsher There's Always Blood at the End of the Road (2022). The lineup unites guitarist/vocalist Levy Seynaeve (also Amenra's bassist) with Oathbreaker's Gilles Demolder and Wim Coppers.