Pylar

A New York art-world side project active from 2000-2003, pairing visual artist Rita Ackermann with Gang Gang Dance's Lizzi Bougatsos in a ritualistic, blood-and-paganism-themed 'art + metal' hybrid — chant-like incantations and wordless vocal panting over heavy, dirge-paced guitar/bass, with Orthrelm's Mick Barr guesting on guitar for Labia Minora. Functioned as much as a performance-art and visual-art collective as a band, releasing on Captain Trip and, posthumously, Locust Music.

Midnight Odyssey is the one-man cosmic/atmospheric black metal outlet of Brisbane's Dis Pater, running concept albums soaked in mythology since 2007. Its sprawling Biolume trilogy (2019-2023) folds synth-driven ambient drone, neoclassical arrangement, and doom-metal pacing around a core of raw, lo-fi black metal. The project regularly spins off pure ambient/ kosmische material and symphonic re-recordings alongside the metal proper, making atmosphere as central to its identity as riffs.

Prolific solo Australian project (Reservoir, Victoria) started in 1997 by sole member A DMN SHN, self-styled 'Pure Ancient Occult Egyptian Space Metal.' Across 28+ full-lengths on Shaytan Productions the project sets all 189 spells of the Egyptian Book of the Dead to music, blending industrial black metal with choral/orchestral ambience, dungeon synth, dark ambient and layered folk/ethnic instrumentation (mandolins, flutes, arghuls, violins) under funeral-doom passages and ritual chanting.

Giant Squid are an American post-metal and progressive/doom band formed in Sacramento, California in 2002 and led by Aaron Gregory, known for oceanic and marine-biology concept records including Metridium Fields (2006) and The Ichthyologist (2009), released via labels including Translation Loss. Cellist and vocalist Jackie Perez Gratz, of Amber Asylum and Grayceon fame, joined the band in January 2007, deepening its chamber-tinged heaviness. The band shares members and a 2007 split 7-inch, 'Sutter's Fort,' with fellow Bay Area group Grayceon.

A Finnish outfit, founded by bassists Mika A. A. Hyytinen and Topi Aarnio, built around the gimmick-that-works of having no guitarists at all — two bass players (4-to-12-string, baritone-tuned) carry all the riffing, joined by keyboards/samples and dual male/female vocals from Kari Husa and Anna Pienimäki. Their sole full-length, 2009's On Rituals and Correspondence in Constructed Realities (Season of Mist), moves from doom-metal roots into a cavernous, drone-heavy hybrid of gothic, black, and alt-rock with electro-folk and Baroque touches.

Belgian duo pairing vocalist Stephane Van Tricht with multi-instrumentalist Guillaume CZLT (also of Ôros Kaù and a founding member of Neptunian Maximalism), Sol Kia's debut Zos Ethos fuses raw black-metal violence with cosmic psych-doom, drone, and Middle-Eastern melodic color. The record unfolds as a single hallucinatory ritual rather than a set of discrete songs, favoring slow-building drone architecture and occult atmosphere over blast-beat velocity. It leans toward the ritualistic/psychedelic wing of avant-garde metal rather than technical or jazz-fusion experimentalism.

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Bethlehem are a German black/doom band formed in Grevenbroich in 1991 by Jürgen Bartsch and Klaus Matton. Their 1994 debut Dark Metal gave an entire subgenre its name, welding black metal's tremolo and shriek to doom's crawl plus violin, piano and keyboard for a uniquely desolate, avant-garde atmosphere. Later records pushed further into Suicidal/Depressive Black Metal territory and, briefly, electronic Neue Deutsche Härte.

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Orthodox is a doom/drone/avant-garde metal trio from Seville, Spain, formed in 2004 around bassist-vocalist Marco Serrato Gallardo and drummer Borja Díaz Vera, historically performing in hooded robes evoking Seville's Holy Week penitential brotherhoods. Starting from Black Sabbath-lineage doom on Gran Poder (2006, reissued on double vinyl by Southern Lord), the band moved through acoustic/orchestral, jazz-inflected territory before returning to heavier electric material on 2022's Proceed, recorded by Billy Anderson (Sleep, Melvins, Neurosis). Distinct from the unrelated Nashville metalcore band of the same name.

Formloff is a Norwegian two-piece formed in 2002 by Marius Blekspetl Sjøli and Bernt Karsten Sannerud, playing a doomy, progressive-leaning strain of avant-garde black metal. After four demos and a 2007 debut, Adjø Silo, the duo's 2012 sophomore album Spyhorelandet arrived on Eisenwald Tonschmiede, layering long free-flowing compositions, shifting time signatures, folk instrumentation like mandolin, cult-like chanting, and a guest saxophone turn over its dissonant black-metal core. Where much of the genre traffics in myth, Formloff's lyrics dwell on ugly, everyday personal histories, a thematic inversion critics have paired with labelmates-in-spirit like Ved Buens Ende and Virus.

Runhild Gammelsæter is a Norwegian vocalist who is also a professional biologist holding a Ph.D. in cell physiology. She first drew notice fronting the American doom band Thorr's Hammer, which she joined at 17 alongside Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson, and later co-formed the duo/trio Khlyst with James Plotkin. Her 2008 solo debut Amplicon (Utech Records) is built almost entirely from her own voice, warped with effects, with each track founded on a scientific, largely biologic theme conceived as a soundtrack to the cycle of the universe. Her voice ranges from the death-metal growls of her Thorr's Hammer work to unnerving, art-inflected experimental singing.