Orgone

Between the Buried and Me are an American progressive metal band formed in 2000 in Raleigh, North Carolina, spanning progressive metalcore, technical death metal and avant-garde metal. Their genre-hopping suites mix death growls and cleans with sweep-picked leads that draw on bluegrass and jazz, plus ambient 'space music' passages and acoustic balladry.

Azure Emote is an avant-garde death metal project founded in New York in 2003 by illustrator/vocalist Mike Hrubovcak (Monstrosity, Vile) as an outlet 'to express personal negativity without the genre limitations often present within Extreme Metal.' Built around a core band with guitarist Ryan Moll, bassist Kelly Conlon, drummer Mike Heller and violinist Pete Johansen, the project layers in shifting rosters of guest musicians — female vocalists, saxophone, harmonica, keyboards — to give nearly every song its own distinct color. Releases including The Gravity of Impermanence (2013) and The Third Perspective (2020) have come out on Selfmadegod Records.

Cephalic Carnage are an American deathgrind / technical death metal band formed in Denver, Colorado, in 1992, self-styled as 'Rocky Mountain hydro-grind.' AllMusic describes their sound as a 'crazy concoction of truly experimental grindcore, death metal, and jazz,' with occasional surf rock, flamenco interludes and violin-and-sax ambient jams. They signed to Relapse Records in 2000, and drummer John Merryman contributed to John Zorn-adjacent avant circles via Trey Spruance's Secret Chiefs 3.

Sepultura is a Brazilian metal band formed in Belo Horizonte in 1984 by brothers Max and Igor Cavalera, and the most internationally successful heavy metal act to emerge from Brazil. Their late-1980s records helped codify a raw strain of thrash and death metal before Chaos A.D. (1993) and Roots (1996) pivoted the band toward a percussive groove metal laced with Brazilian tribal rhythms and indigenous instrumentation. Max Cavalera's 1996 departure fractured the classic lineup, but guitarist Andreas Kisser and bassist Paulo Jr. carried the band forward with American vocalist Derrick Green from 1997 onward.

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Moral Collapse is a Bengaluru, India extreme-metal project founded in 2020 by guitarist/vocalist Arun Natarajan, forging old-school death metal in the vein of Nile and Morbid Angel that is repeatedly derailed by dissonant, Dillinger Escape Plan-style riffing, free-jazz saxophone/violin, and glitchy ambient interludes. Session drummer Hannes Grossmann (ex-Necrophagist, Obscura, Alkaloid) anchors both the 2021 self-titled debut and 2023's Divine Prosthetics, records stacked with guest guitar spots from Kevin Hufnagel (Gorguts, Dysrhythmia) and Death's Bobby Koelble. The project splices Indian percussive texture and free-improv passages into an otherwise brutal technical-death chassis.

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Opeth are a Stockholm band formed in 1990 who spent three decades welding death metal to 1970s progressive rock — Mikael Åkerfeldt growling over one riff and crooning over the next, with acoustic guitar, mellotron and knotty jazz-leaning chord changes given as much room as the heaviness. Steven Wilson's production on Blackwater Park (2001) and the entirely clean, mellotron-soaked Damnation (2003) pushed the prog half to the front, and by Heritage (2011) the growls were gone altogether in favour of jazz rock, Camel and Swedish folk. The Last Will and Testament (2024) brought the death vocals back after sixteen years inside a narrated 1920s will-reading concept record, with Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson on flute and narration. Theirs is the rare case where the experiment became the mainstream success, and the audience followed them into the strange parts anyway.

Die Apokalyptischen Reiter are a long-running Weimar, Germany act (formed 1995) whose sound resists easy categorization, fusing melodic death metal, folk metal, power/symphonic metal and Neue Deutsche Härte with punk energy and, in later albums, jazz and ambient touches. Their 2017 album 'Der Rote Reiter' was recorded and released entirely in German, marking a deliberate turn toward their home-language folk-metal identity. The band has toured internationally for three decades and remains active on Nuclear Blast/The End Records.

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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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.

Effluence is the one-man 'free death' project of California multi-instrumentalist Matt Stephens, begun in 2020 and released through his own Putrefactive Recordings. The music welds brutal and technical death metal and goregrind to free-jazz improvisation and noise, a chaotic, through-improvised sound Stephens coined 'free death' and is widely credited with pioneering. His jazz training surfaces in the frantic piano and horn runs threaded through the blast beats.