Ryona Hime

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.

Inferno Sci-Fi Grind'n'Roll was an Italian grindcore/mathcore band from Rome, active 2002-2012, founded by five friends with disparate musical influences. Signed to Subsound Records, their sound mixed distorted, metallic grind/mathcore riffing with 'electro-noise sonorities' and unexpected quieter 'roots'-inflected passages, wrapped in sci-fi/pop-culture conceptual song titles.

German death metal/grindcore act from Halle (Saale), formed 2003, that evolved by its second album Retardierte Jahre Teil 2 - Bananas (2011) into an avant-garde/progressive project blending death/grind with female vocals, synths, electronic percussion, opera-style screams and absurdist lyrical themes about food and gluttony. The band renamed itself Mansfeld in 2020.

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Umbah is the solo avant-garde industrial death metal/cybergrind project of UK multi-instrumentalist Cal Scott (formerly guitarist of grind act Necrosanct), running since 1990 and released largely through I, Voidhanger Records. Extremely prolific (dozens of albums across sci-fi/absurdist concept releases like 'Continuum,' 'Xominod,' and 'Obliticus'), the project fuses industrial death/grind with harsh electronics and jazz-tinged arrangements into what reviewers call 'techno-organic metal.'

Zelophilia is the solo studio project of Lou Kelly, based in Ukiah, California, releasing one full-length, Lust, Loathing & Love, in December 2011. Blends death metal, hardcore, and mathcore with baroque classical touches and absurdist, humor-laced songwriting.

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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This Trifixion (Piacenza/Brembio, Italy, 1988-1995) began as straightforward death metal on its 1991 demo before lurching into genuinely deranged avant-garde territory by 1993's Sindrome of a New Flesh and the posthumously-released Abschurfungepoch (1995, Ematofagia) - goth-industrial death metal punctuated by mandolin, atmospheric keyboard interludes, psych-rock jams, and an electronic-dance-music left turn on one closing track. It is one of the earliest and strangest entries in the avant-garde death metal lineage, its ambition outrunning its cohesion by most reviewers' accounts.

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.

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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Fear Factory is an American industrial metal band formed in Los Angeles in 1989, widely credited as pioneers of the style for fusing death-metal growls and machine-gun riffing with clean vocals, synthesizers and electronic sampling. Their sound centers on Raymond Herrera's machine-precise drumming and Dino Cazares' staccato, down-tuned riffing, colored by Rhys Fulber's keyboards; breakthrough album Demanufacture (1995) wrapped this in a Terminator-inspired man-versus-machine concept, and its 1997 companion Remanufacture reworked the record entirely into electronica. Gene Hoglan drummed for the band from 2009 to 2012, appearing on Mechanize (2010).

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