Meshuggah

XHOHX are a duo who describe their own music, in their own words, as "Chaotic and Organic No Wave, Poly-rhythmic and Atonal Music" — which is both accurate and about as much help as it sounds. Ramon Ribas Coca plays guitar and programs the drums, Oregolakatzor plays bass, and the result is heavy avant-rock built out of angular, disharmonic riffing that never repeats a bar it could complicate instead. Reviewers reach for Ruins, the Flying Luttenbachers and Univers Zero, and hear an industrial edge that comes from the rhythmic construction rather than from any electronics — the programmed drums are deliberately played straight, close enough to a human kit that the review noting them also notes you cannot really tell. Growled shouts surface between the instrumental passages. Two albums in eleven years, then a 2013 split with Ahleuchatistas recorded either side of the Atlantic, and not much since.

Behold... The Arctopus is an American instrumental metal band from Brooklyn, New York City, formed in 2001 by guitarists Colin Marston and Mike Lerner. Their technical, dissonant style draws on both metal and 20th-century classical music, built around Marston's 12-string Warr guitar (which spans bass and guitar range and is played by tapping) alongside a conventional electric guitar and drums. The band released the full-lengths Skullgrid (2007) and Horrorscension (2012), with a rotating drum chair over the years.

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Extol is a Norwegian extreme metal band formed in 1993 in Bekkestua, celebrated for a restless fusion of technical and progressive death metal with black metal, thrash, and melodic, prog-rock sensibilities. Emerging from the Christian metal underground, they evolved sharply across records from the blackened death of Burial (1998) to the genre-defying, atmospheric The Blueprint Dives (2005) and the reunion-era self-titled album (2013). The core is built around the Espevoll cousins Peter and Christer alongside longtime drummer David Husvik and multi-instrumentalist Ole Børud. After their hiatus, members Christer Espevoll and David Husvik went on to co-found the international progressive metal band Azusa.

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Gojira are a French metal band from Ondres, formed in 1996 as Godzilla and renamed Gojira in 2001. They fuse technical death metal, groove, progressive and post-metal into a percussive, pinch-harmonic-driven style, wrapped in lyrics about spirituality, philosophy and the environment. Their lineup of the Duplantier brothers with Christian Andreu and Jean-Michel Labadie has been unchanged since the rename; they became the first French band to top the Billboard Hard Rock Albums chart and, in 2024, the first metal band to perform at an Olympic opening ceremony.

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Dark Angel are an American thrash metal band formed in Downey, California in 1981, whose extremely fast, lengthy, tempo-shifting songs earned them the nickname "the L.A. Caffeine Machine" and the motto "too fast, my ass." They are widely credited as one of the progenitors of technical/progressive thrash — Time Does Not Heal (1991) was famously advertised with "246 riffs" — and their second album Darkness Descends (1986) is cited as a major influence on the later death, doom and groove metal scenes. The band launched the career of drummer Gene Hoglan, who joined in late 1984 and went on to Death, Testament and Devin Townsend's projects.

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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.

Strapping Young Lad is Devin Townsend's industrial/thrash/death metal band, active 1994–2007 with a stable lineup of Townsend, guitarist Jed Simon, bassist Byron Stroud and drummer Gene Hoglan (also of Dark Angel, Death, Testament). Built on polyrhythmic riffing and blast beats, the band is best known for a hyper-dense, multitracked "wall of sound" production style critics compared to Phil Spector and Frank Zappa, drawing on the harsh industrial/noise lineage of Foetus and White Noise. City (1997) was the critical breakthrough; The New Black (2006) leaned back into the band's tongue-in-cheek black humor before their 2007 disbandment.

Starkweather is a Philadelphia band formed in 1989, widely credited as an early architect of metalcore and a direct influence on mathcore and sludge-adjacent bands like Converge, Coalesce, and The Dillinger Escape Plan. Their sound fuses dissonant, tempo-shifting metalcore with sludge metal and death-metal drumming, most fully realized on 2005's Croatoan (produced by Pierre Remillard of Cryptopsy/Gorguts fame). Bassist Liam Wilson played on Croatoan before/during his long tenure as bassist of The Dillinger Escape Plan.

Fredrik Thordendal's Special Defects is the solo project of Meshuggah lead guitarist Fredrik Thordendal, whose lone album Sol Niger Within (1997) is a landmark of avant-garde metal. Structured as one continuous 43-minute composition indexed into 29 tracks, it grafts Meshuggah's mathematical rhythmic language onto the fluid, Allan Holdsworth-inspired jazz-fusion soloing Thordendal is known for. The record's dense, free-associative sprawl draws comparisons to John Zorn's Naked City and features a cast of Swedish improvisers.

Killer Be Killed is an American heavy metal supergroup formed in 2011 by Greg Puciato (The Dillinger Escape Plan) and Max Cavalera (Soulfly), later joined by bassist/vocalist Troy Sanders (Mastodon) and drummer Ben Koller (Converge). Conceived by Puciato and Cavalera in the vein of Cavalera's 1990s project Nailbomb, the band signed to Nuclear Blast and released its self-titled debut in 2014, with drums by Dave Elitch. Elitch left in 2015 and was replaced by Koller, who plays on the second album, Reluctant Hero (2020).

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