Terra Tenebrosa

Seattle avant-garde doom/post-black metal band formed in 2012 around vocalist Joy Von Spain, melding melodic black metal, glacial doom, and psychedelic sludge into operatic, ghost-story atmospherics. Signed to Prophecy Productions, their catalog (Moros, Black Somnia, Ligeia) has been called too glacial for sludge, too disjointed for black metal, and too melodic for noise — a genuinely hard-to-pin-down hybrid.

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Reverorum ib Malacht is a Swedish black metal outfit formed by Karl Hieronymus Emil Lundin and Karl Axel Mikael Mårtensson, evolving out of earlier projects PTC and Symphonia Sacrosancta Phasmatvm. Both members converted to Roman Catholicism between 2007 and 2009, and the band has since styled its output as 'Roman Catholic Black Metal,' blending droning dark ambient passages, sampled Latin liturgy, church bells, and organ with distorted black metal. Their album De Mysteriis Dom Christi is a deliberate title-inversion of Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas.

Todesstoß is the solo experimental black metal vehicle of German musician, poet and painter Martin Lang, active out of Munich since the early 2000s. Releases like Hirngemeer and the 46-minute single-track Ebne Graun fold harmonica, funeral-doom pacing and abrasive electronic texture into a deliberately disorienting, self-willed strain of black metal, released via I, Voidhanger Records.

Khlyst is an American experimental drone/doom project formed in New York in 2006, built around guitarist James Plotkin (Khanate, OLD, Phantomsmasher), Norwegian vocalist Runhild Gammelsæter (Thorr's Hammer), and drummer Tim Wyskida (Khanate, Blind Idiot God). Their sole album, the dually-titled "Chaos Is My Name" / "Kaos er mitt navn," was released by Hydra Head Records in October 2006. Across eight Roman-numeral-titled pieces it alternates Gammelsæter's shrieked, free-form vocals with eerie ambient guitar and percussion soundscapes.

Locrian are an American experimental trio formed in late 2005 in Chicago by André Foisy and Terence Hannum, with drummer Steven Hess joining permanently in 2010. AllMusic characterizes their sound as an eclectic mixture of black metal, electronics, drone and noise rock, shot through with ambient and industrial textures and dystopic, apocalyptic imagery. In 2012 they made the collaborative album Bless Them That Curse You with Mamiffer, released on Profound Lore alongside Sige and Utech.

Cloak of Altering is the avant-garde black metal solo alias of Dutch multi-instrumentalist Maurice "Mories" de Jong, begun in 2011 as a continuation of his earlier black metal band Ophiuchus and run alongside his other projects Gnaw Their Tongues, De Magia Veterum, Aderlating and Seirom. Where De Magia Veterum is his straight black-metal outlet, Cloak of Altering fuses 'mutated symphonic black metal' with breakcore-derived electronics and industrial noise, inviting comparisons to Blut Aus Nord and An Axis of Perdition. Albums such as Plague Beasts (2014) and Manifestation (2015), released via Crucial Blast, circle cosmic and occult themes across sprawling, drone-heavy tracks.

Gnaw Their Tongues is the solo project of Dutch composer Maurice de Jong (a.k.a. Mories), established in 2004 and originally conceived under the name Dimlit Hate Cellar. The music fuses noise, dark ambient, black metal, drone, and industrial into oppressive, orchestral-sounding walls of dread, with the project name drawn from the Book of Revelation 16:10-11. De Jong is prolific to the point of running several parallel aliases (De Magia Veterum, Aderlating, Cloak of Altering, Seirom), and Gnaw Their Tongues alone accounts for over seventy releases across labels including Crucial Blast, Consouling Sounds, and Candlelight.

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Sunn O))) is an American drone metal band formed in 1998 by guitarists Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson, who took their name and initial inspiration from Seattle drone pioneers Earth. Known for glacially slow, massively amplified guitar tones performed in robes amid dense fog, the duo built a shifting cast of collaborators around vocalist Attila Csihar and released landmark records including Black One (2005) and Monoliths & Dimensions (2009). Anderson and O'Malley co-founded Southern Lord Records in 1998, the label that anchors much of the experimental-metal underground. Their collaborative streak extends to albums with Boris (Altar), Ulver (Terrestrials) and singer Scott Walker (Soused, 2014).

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.

Haiku Funeral is a ritualistic industrial/black-metal-adjacent project born in a Marseille studio on Halloween 2008, built around Bulgarian multi-instrumentalist Dimitar Dimitrov (electronics, keyboards, vocals) and American bassist/vocalist William Kopecky, with Finnish drummer David Lillkvist also credited on record. Their sound is a hallucinogenic blend of occult drone, droning doom, and cinematic/ritual ambient, colored by theremin, e-bow, spring-drum, children's harp, and sitar - one reviewer singled out the sitar-and-tribal-percussion 'Cherni Shamani' as evoking cyber-shamanic trance. Six albums deep (most recently Drown Their Moons in Blood, 2021, via Aesthetic Death), they occupy a genuinely fringe niche between black metal atmosphere and psychedelic ritual ambient.

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