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Empalot were a French experimental band formed in the Landes in 1998 by Gojira's Joe and Mario Duplantier with friends from Joe's high-school thrash band. Self-described as "terroir metal," they welded alternative metal, jazz fusion, funk rock and avant-garde noise to burlesque, self-deprecating theatre, with members costumed as axes, clouds and flowers on stage. Conceived as the festive antithesis of Gojira, the group toured France between 1999 and 2004 and released a single studio album, Tous aux Cèpes (2002), before going on hiatus. The Duplantier brothers performed under the aliases Vensceslas Podoldo and Daniel Pestous.

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Cleveland's Mushroomhead formed in 1993 and built a reputation on horror-movie masks, a rotating cast of vocalists trading rap, croon, and growl, and a sound Wikipedia characterizes as alternative/industrial/nu/experimental metal steeped in hip-hop, gothic rock, and techno textures. Their theatrical stagecraft and 'X Face' branding are frequently noted as predating similar imagery used by Slipknot. Longtime vocalist Jason Popson also fronts the extreme metal project Pitch Black Forecast alongside former Strapping Young Lad/Death drummer Gene Hoglan.

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St. Petersburg dark-cabaret metal quartet fronted by vocalist Darya Pavlovich (performing as 'Rorria'), whose voice swings from clownish grotesque chants and animal growls to a crooning contralto over guitar-and-keyboard interplay that critics liken to Diablo Swing Orchestra and Rammstein's Mutter. Built on a tongue-in-cheek conceit of being 'made of tardigrades,' the band leans into horror-circus theatrics with vintage synths, theremins, and kazoos, and is best known publicly for a viral metal cover of the LazyTown novelty hit 'We Are Number One.' Their 2026 album Hush was reviewed as pushing past creature-feature camp toward more sophisticated, psychologically-driven territory.

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The Book of Knots is a Brooklyn experimental art rock studio collective formed in the spring of 2003 at Joel Hamilton and Tony Maimone's Studio G, with Matthias Bossi and Carla Kihlstedt completing the core quartet. The group built a trilogy of themed concept albums: the self-titled debut (Arclight, 2004) about failed sea voyages, Traineater (Anti-, 2007) about crumbling Midwestern rust belt towns, and Garden of Fainting Stars (Ipecac Recordings, 2011) about flight and space travel. Their records feature a rotating cast of guest vocalists and musicians including Tom Waits, Mike Watt, Mike Patton, David Thomas, Blixa Bargeld, and Jon Langford.

Puscifer is the shape-shifting studio-and-performance-art project of vocalist Maynard James Keenan, formed in Los Angeles around 2003 out of a fictional band gag from HBO's Mr. Show. Where his other bands Tool and A Perfect Circle deal in heavy rock, Puscifer wanders through electronic rock, trip-hop, art rock and post-industrial textures, wrapped in tongue-in-cheek desert-Americana theatrics. The core trio of Keenan, multi-instrumentalist/producer Mat Mitchell and singer Carina Round fuse music, live performance and visual art into a single conceptual whole.

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Melted Bodies are an avant-garde metal quartet from Los Angeles who fuse thrash/death-metal riffing with pop-leaning synths, programming and post-punk elements. Frequently compared to System of a Down and Mr. Bungle, they pair theatrical, satirical vocals with body-horror multimedia and chaotic live shows. Their debut album is Enjoy Yourself.

Atrox is a long-running Norwegian avant-garde metal band from Trondheim (formed 1988, debut album 1997) that brands its sound 'schizo/psycho metal' — experimental, progressive metal built on sharp contrasts of light and dark, unorthodox structures, and intense, bizarre vocals. Rooted in an atmospheric death/doom origin, later albums on Season of Mist (Contentum, Terrestrials, Binocular, Monocle) push toward melodic yet unpredictable, keyboard-and-sample-textured territory in the vein of Arcturus and Manes. The band's guitar core (viNd and Rune Sørgård) has anchored it since 1997.

Negative Øhio is a noise/experimental duo of Gigakoops (Ohio) and Nightmare Lyre (Norway), begun in 2016. Self-tagged across an eclectic sprawl — jazz fusion, industrial, dark ambient, digital hardcore, queercore, dada, and avant-garde metal — the project favors abrasive, self-consciously limitless production married to absurdist, Dada-inflected humor.

Silentist is the Portland project of pianist/drummer Mark-Evan Burden (formerly of Glass Candy and Get Hustle) with vocalist August Alston, fusing classical minimalist composition with death-metal blast beats and horror-film theatricality. Across a self-titled 2008 LP and the 2009 'The Tunnel' 7-inch on Zum Audio, austere piano patterns collide with jazzy atmospheres and howled, tortured vocals. The project has been dormant since 2009.

San Francisco shape-shifters who smuggled funk, hip-hop, synth-pop, thrash, lounge and film-score bombast into stadium-sized alternative metal, peaking commercially with The Real Thing (1989) and creatively with the gloriously perverse Angel Dust (1992). When Mike Patton was poached from Mr. Bungle in 1988, the band became the primary launchpad for his sprawling avant-garde universe — making Faith No More the closest thing this atlas has to a mainstream gateway drug. Few bands did more to convince metal that genre borders were optional.

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