Thorr's Hammer

Minnesota trio Worn Mantle emerged from an earlier, unnamed doom/post-metal project to craft sprawling, noise-caked blackened death/doom, stretching songs well past the 15-minute mark and drifting, per Decibel, into 'guitar-driven psychedelic ambience' between passages of black/death intensity and doom/sludge weight. Their self-titled 2022 debut and 2023 follow-up Hole have built them a quiet but attentive following in the deep underground doom scene.

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Burning Witch was an American doom/sludge metal band formed on Capitol Hill in Seattle in early 1995 from the ashes of the doom/death band Thorr's Hammer, active until 1998. Known for extremely slow tempos, dense feedback and Edgy 59's alternately mournful and tortured vocals, the group is best remembered as a formative pre-Sunn O))) project for guitarist Stephen O'Malley. Their EP recordings were gathered on the compilation Crippled Lucifer, released in 1998 on Southern Lord Records, the label O'Malley co-founded with fellow Seattle musician Greg Anderson.

Church of Misery are a Japanese doom band formed in Tokyo in 1995 around constant member and bassist Tatsu Mikami. They wed Black Sabbath-style doom to psychedelic rock, with nearly every song themed around real serial killers and mass murderers, complete with spoken-word samples. Prolific tourers and split-release partners, they issued Houses of the Unholy (2009) on Rise Above/Metal Blade and toured Europe alongside Sourvein in 2006.

Goatsnake is an American stoner/doom metal band from Los Angeles, formed in 1996 after the dissolution of The Obsessed, whose rhythm section of bassist Guy Pinhas and drummer Greg Rogers teamed with guitarist Greg Anderson (also of Sunn O))), Burning Witch, and Thorr's Hammer) and vocalist Pete Stahl. Known for a soulful, bluesy take on low-and-slow doom, they released their debut album '1' in 1999. After breaking up in 2001 they later reunited, issuing the album Black Age Blues on Southern Lord Recordings in 2015.

Zaraza is a Montreal industrial death-doom duo formed in 1993 by Polish emigre Jacek Furmankiewicz and local noise artist Brian Meagher, built around drum machines, samplers and dueling death-grunt/operatic vocals rather than a conventional metal lineup. Their 1997 debut Slavic Blasphemy fused doom/death heaviness with the bombast of industrial acts, and was named a top album of the year by Chronicles of Chaos webzine. The band split in 2006, reunited in 2015, and released a third album, Spasms of Rebirth, in 2017.

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Celtic Frost were a hugely influential Swiss extreme-metal band formed in 1984 by Tom Gabriel Fischer (Tom G. Warrior) and Martin Eric Ain out of the ashes of Hellhammer. Across landmark records — Morbid Tales, To Mega Therion and especially the wildly eclectic Into the Pandemonium (1987), which laced metal with orchestral, operatic, industrial and gothic elements — they became a foundational avant-garde/proto-black/proto-death act, closing their career with the doom-drenched Monotheist (2006). Warrior carried the sound forward into the later band Triptykon; the group is a genuine, distinct pioneer, not a redundancy with any atlas node.

Overmars was a French post-metal band active from 2001 to 2011, formed in Lyon around vocalist Xavier Théret, guitarists Antoine Simon and Pierrick Marin, bassist Marion Leclerc, drummer Benjamin Pic, and keyboardist Tiphaine Coudert. Their 2005 debut Affliction, Endocrine... Vertigo (Candlelight Records) fused doom, industrial, gothic rock, death and black metal into an oppressive, droning, oftentimes sludgy whole, while 2007's Born Again stretched that approach into a single 40-minute piece that NME later named among its 'Twenty Heaviest (Metal) Records of All Time.'

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Squalus are an avant-garde sludge/doom quartet from Pacifica, California, formed in 2015 by Aaron Gregory, Zack Farwell, Andy Southard and Bryan Beeson -- all former members of Giant Squid -- after that band went on hiatus. Rejecting guitar entirely in favor of two basses, keyboards, and samples, the band built its debut album The Great Fish... (2017, Translation Loss Records) as a song-cycle retelling of Jaws with lyrics spliced from Peter Benchley's novel. They followed with the split LP Mass and Power alongside Shadow Limb (2018, Translation Loss Records).

0N0 is a Bratislava, Slovakia doom/death trio built around Twisted (aka Saboska, guitars/vocals/programming, the project's founder since 2005), Acidmilk (guitars, vocals) and Sarkast (vocals), who joined in 2013 to turn Twisted's solo vision into a full band. Their sound welds drop-tuned doom-death riffing to industrial discord, blast-beat intensity and field-recording textures, drawing comparisons to Gorguts, Meshuggah, Godflesh and Blut aus Nord. Still unsigned, they've built a cult reputation through releases like 'Reconstruction and Synthesis' (2016) and 'Unwavering Resonance' (2022) and a 2019 split with fellow atmospheric-doom act Owl.

Khanate was an American drone/extreme doom supergroup formed in New York in 2000 by guitarist Stephen O'Malley and bassist James Plotkin, with vocalist Alan Dubin and drummer Tim Wyskida. Their glacial music paired extremely slow tempos and harsh layers of feedback with Dubin's torturous shrieking, debuting with a self-titled album on Southern Lord Records in 2001. The band split in 2006 before a surprise return with the album To Be Cruel, released via Sacred Bones Records in 2023.