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Cloak of Altering is the avant-garde black metal solo alias of Dutch multi-instrumentalist Maurice "Mories" de Jong, begun in 2011 as a continuation of his earlier black metal band Ophiuchus and run alongside his other projects Gnaw Their Tongues, De Magia Veterum, Aderlating and Seirom. Where De Magia Veterum is his straight black-metal outlet, Cloak of Altering fuses 'mutated symphonic black metal' with breakcore-derived electronics and industrial noise, inviting comparisons to Blut Aus Nord and An Axis of Perdition. Albums such as Plague Beasts (2014) and Manifestation (2015), released via Crucial Blast, circle cosmic and occult themes across sprawling, drone-heavy tracks.

Worhs began around 2009-2010 as the one-man black metal project of Paris musician WLWD (Willow), releasing debut album 'Le Temps des Blasphèmes' in 2014 before evolving into a queer-fronted duo with multi-instrumentalist Nijmaa, who joined as a session drummer on 'Ballerine Sourde' (2018) and became a full co-composer. The project blends black metal with post-punk, psychedelia, industrial noise, and noise pop, growing more accessible and compositionally complex across releases up to 'La Grande Poisseuse' (2024).

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Gnaw Their Tongues is the solo project of Dutch composer Maurice de Jong (a.k.a. Mories), established in 2004 and originally conceived under the name Dimlit Hate Cellar. The music fuses noise, dark ambient, black metal, drone, and industrial into oppressive, orchestral-sounding walls of dread, with the project name drawn from the Book of Revelation 16:10-11. De Jong is prolific to the point of running several parallel aliases (De Magia Veterum, Aderlating, Cloak of Altering, Seirom), and Gnaw Their Tongues alone accounts for over seventy releases across labels including Crucial Blast, Consouling Sounds, and Candlelight.

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Todesstoß is the solo experimental black metal vehicle of German musician, poet and painter Martin Lang, active out of Munich since the early 2000s. Releases like Hirngemeer and the 46-minute single-track Ebne Graun fold harmonica, funeral-doom pacing and abrasive electronic texture into a deliberately disorienting, self-willed strain of black metal, released via I, Voidhanger Records.

Choronzon is a merger of two unrelated American projects — Florida black-metaller P. Emerson Williams and San Francisco industrial artist Demitria Monde Thraam — who discovered each other online in 2002 and combined forces. What resulted, starting with 1998's Samoth-signed Magog Agog, is ritualistic, electronics-soaked black-industrial metal conceived explicitly as ceremonial music for occult initiates. Williams' background in London's FoolishPeople theatre troupe, where he literally played the demon Choronzon on stage, leaks into everything the band does.

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Berlin sibling duo — TMK and his sister MRK, active since 2008 — self-describing their sound as 'Massive Berlin Theatre': raw black metal (tremolo picking, blast beats, programmed drums) layered with synths, drones, occasional techno beats and clean female/male vocals plus spoken word modelled on Weimar-era cabaret, frequently likened to 'black metal meets The Threepenny Opera.' Key release: Reduzierter Allgemeinzustand (2021 remaster of a 2009 recording).

Oranssi Pazuzu is a Finnish psychedelic black metal band formed in 2007 in Tampere. Their sound fuses black metal with psychedelic rock, space rock, krautrock, dark ambient and electronic textures into a hypnotic, boundary-dissolving whole, a synthesis critics have struggled to categorize. Across six studio albums, from Muukalainen puhuu (2009) to the acclaimed Muuntautuja (2024), they have become one of the most celebrated exports of Finland's experimental heavy underground.

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Umbrtka is a prolific Czech black/doom/industrial project from Plzeň, active since 1999 and centered on a self-invented industrial deity presiding over the city's factories, railways and scrapyards. Their 'grey metal' sound layers dissonant black metal with field recordings, mechanical noise and surreal spoken-word narration. František 'Franta' Štorm — closely associated with Czech black metal pioneers Master's Hammer — served as a past vocalist.

Liturgy is an American avant-garde black metal band from Brooklyn, founded in 2005 and led by composer-guitarist-vocalist Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix. The project is built around a self-authored 'transcendental black metal' philosophy and ranges from blast-driven maximalist black metal to the glitch/IDM electronics of The Ark Work and the choral, orchestral scope of later records like 93696. Critically prominent, The Ark Work was named the #1 avant-garde album of 2015 by both Spin and Rolling Stone.

Vampillia is a Japanese 'brutal orchestra' from Osaka, a roughly ten-piece ensemble of twin guitars, violin, piano, dual drummers and a DJ built around vocalist Possession Mongoloid, fusing black metal, noise, classical and ambient into narrative-structured albums. The band's collaborator list runs unusually deep for an underground act: they released the full-length 'xoroAHbin' with The Body in 2017, recruited Mayhem/Sunn O))) vocalist Attila Csihar for their 2013 single 'Circle', and are one of the core constituent acts of the black-metal/techno project Violent Magic Orchestra.

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