Oathbreaker

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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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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The Canyon Observer are a Slovenian quintet formed in 2011 whose experimental post-metal fuses black metal, noise, doom and sludge with delicate atmospheric passages into something 'chaotic, deranged and powerfully disorienting'. Across the FVCK (2015) and NØLL (2018) LPs on Kapa Records they alternate crushing heaviness with hallucinatory atmosphere, staged live amid fog and strobes. Their experimentalism lives largely in noise and genre-collapse rather than any single exotic ingredient.

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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Dëgénéréscence is a French black metal project, active since 2019, centered on the musician known as Infämie, who handles vocals and all instruments. The project is affiliated with the Cërcle Mortüaire collective (alongside Feuille Morte, Mortuaire, Olatom Amespïrïa and others) and released albums such as Hélas ! Je n'étais pas fait pour cette haine... (2020) and ...Ainsi ! Nous dansâmes aux limbes détestées... (2022) through Drakkar Productions. Its sound is catalogued as depressive/atmospheric black metal shading into blackgaze, pairing raw riffing with piano-led, ambience-forward passages.

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.

The solo, day-to-day-reality-grounded counterpart project of Dallas, TX multi-instrumentalist Garry Brents (also of Cara Neir and Gonemage), formed 2021. Tagged Avant-garde Black Metal / Grindcore on Metal Archives, Homeskin is built around rapid, often sub-24-hour recording sessions, intentional tape-wobbling production, and a hazy, melancholic take on black metal shot through with post-hardcore, screamo and noise-rock influences. Brents deliberately ended the project at its 17th release, 'End's Daze Without Organs,' after a self-imposed 15-month arc.

Cries Methodicallyplay in the dock

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Shining is a Swedish depressive/suicidal black metal band formed by Niklas Kvarforth in 1996 — a genuinely distinct entity from the atlas's Norwegian blackjazz Shining (shining-norway). Musically it is rooted in DSBM with early doom influences, gradually adopting clean guitars, solos and odd meters as it drifted toward progressive extreme metal, its avant-garde credentials thinner than most atlas nodes. Its most 'experimental' dimension is arguably Kvarforth's notorious confrontational stagecraft (self-mutilation, razor-blade distribution). Personnel overlap with Mayhem and Arcturus is significant.

Al-Kamar is a Japanese blackgaze/depressive black metal project, essentially the solo work of a musician known as Tsukisima, begun in 2010 as a doujin circle arranging Touhou Project music before evolving into an atmospheric post-black/shoegaze sound that incorporates Vocaloid/voice-synthesis vocals. Live performances feature supporting musicians; the self-titled 2022 album marked a deliberate return to black metal roots.

Furia is a Polish black metal band formed in Katowice in 2003, fronted by Michał "Nihil" Kuźniak, considered one of the most influential and boundary-pushing acts in the Polish scene. The band's self-described "Nekrofolk" style fuses raw black metal with Polish folk, psychedelia and post-punk, drawing on the industrial/forested landscape of Silesia; Nihil and bassist Kamil "Sars" Staszałek also play together in MasseMord. Furia performed at Primavera Sound in 2014 and was nominated for Polityka's Passport award in 2023 for the album Huta Luna.