Skin Tension

Tabernacle ov Thee Flesh is a Brazilian avant-garde/experimental black metal project from Joinville, released via Ultra Gash Records, featuring Naboth E. Coli (vocals, keyboards), L. Borgia Rossetti (guitar, also of Esmectatons and Os Legais) and Leal Barroso (drums, also of Esmectatons and Zombie Cookbook). Their sole album Versículos de Autoflagelo (2021) comprises 25 short tracks forming one continuous suite steeped in free improvisation, jazz and noise traditions.

White Moth is a one-off 2010 studio collective assembled by Pyramids' R. Loren, splicing black-metal guitar churn, digital-hardcore breakbeats, no-wave saxophone, and musique-concrete textures into a single dense suite. The guest roster (Colin Marston, Sam Hillmer, Alec Empire, Lydia Lunch, Dälek, Christoph Heemann, Jacob Kirkegaard) reads like a cross-section of the American and European experimental underground rather than a touring band. It sits closer to a curated art-collaboration than a genre act, but its metal-guitar/electronics collision earns its avant-garde-metal chart placement.

Nirrti is a solo psychedelic black metal project based in Orlová, Czechia, signed to Depressive Illusions Records. The project's music has been described as eerie, dissonant, and 'progressive black metal played through the lens of psychedelics and jazz,' aiming to convey darkness, uncertainty, and glimpses of other dimensions rather than adhering to traditional black metal norms. Releases include 'Psychonautix' (2022), 'Palindromos' (2023), and 'Cyberpsychosis' (2024), the latter continuing the project's cyber/psychedelic conceptual throughline.

Stagnant Waters is a Franco-Norwegian avant-garde project built around multi-instrumentalist Camille Giraudeau (Smohalla), joined by vocalist Svein Egil 'Zweizz' Hatlevik (Fleurety, ex-Dødheimsgard) and woodwinds/drums player Aymeric Thomas (Pryapisme). Reviewers describe the music as jittering between free jazz, glitch electronics, black metal and mathy dadaist improvisation, with a 2024 comeback album, Rifts, following a 2012 self-titled debut.

NekRock is a one-person Russian (Moscow-based) avant-garde/electronic metal project, self-described as 'avant-aesthetique,' fusing cybergrind, black metal, and harsh noise with trance, house, and jazz elements.

Plebeian Grandstand is a French extreme-metal band formed in Toulouse in 2005, evolving from blackened mathcore into a dissonant hybrid of avant-black metal, chaotic hardcore, noise and experimental electronica. Their promo material frames the sound as 'avant-Black Metal, chaotic Hardcore, blown-out Jazz, corrosive Noise, experimental Electronica and death Industrial.' Releases include 'False Highs, True Lows' (2016) and 'Rien ne suffit' (2021), with a lineup that includes a dedicated modular synthesist.

Chicago's Murmur mutate black metal's frost into something stranger, threading Moog synths, jazz-inflected dissonance, and Midwest punk urgency through shrieked, tremolo-driven songwriting. Where peers double down on cold atmosphere, Murmur's albums (2010's Mainlining the Lugubrious, its 2014 self-titled follow-up) reach for space-rock sprawl and noise-rock grit instead. The result sits closer to post-black-metal's outer edges than to any orthodox scene.

Solo industrial black/death metal project of Charlie Davis (also vocalist/bassist of sludge band Beggar and of the punk project Wasted Death), based in London, England. Debut album Paroxysms (2022) fuses grinding, blast-beat black metal with mechanized industrial-dub textures, deliberate 'inhuman' digital glitches, and ritualistic chant-like vocal passages, drawing conceptually on Philip K. Dick's VALIS and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.

Kekal is an Indonesian avant-garde/experimental act formed in Jakarta in 1995, one of the first Southeast Asian extreme-metal bands to reach an international audience. Beginning in black/death metal, they transformed across their discography into a genre-collapsing project spanning progressive metal, jazz fusion, trip-hop, electronic/IDM, ambient and post-rock — the 2003 breakthrough 1000 Thoughts of Violence being the pivot. Since August 2009 the band has operated as a 'memberless' collective, with former members and volunteer contributors assembling new albums.

Creatvre is the solo project of French multi-instrumentalist Raphaël Fournier (Paris), who performs every instrument himself — guitars, bass, drums, synths, trombone, trumpet, and saxophone. His 2025 album Toujours Humain (released via I, Voidhanger Records) is described by critics as progressive black metal fused with electronica, industrial metal, and choral/symphonic elements, built around a 'cyber-industrial' concept of humanity dissolving into technology. The prior album Eloge de l'Ombre (2021) was named album of the year by Metal Hammer Spain.