Winterquilt

Sleep Paralysis is a 2025 avant-garde black metal project from San Diego by Stephen Knapp, also known for the dissonant black metal band Cerulean, released via I, Voidhanger Records. The self-titled debut is a concept album about fever dreams, anxiety and sleep paralysis, blending dissonant black metal with jazz, classical, chiptune and vaporwave elements across 11 tracks. The project's only credited guest is Lorenzo Kemp, who contributes a guitar solo on one track.

The Sprawlcosm was a Vienna, Austria act active 1999-2005 (performing as Sprawl until 2001) that fused black metal's blast beats and shrieked vocals with industrial/EBM electronics, oriental-tinged scales, and jazz-adjacent touches. Their sole full-length, Cybionic Black Art (Silverhead Records, Dec 2000), juxtaposed programmed industrial textures and harsh black metal aggression with acoustic guitar and symphonic keyboard passages.

Doedsmaghird is an avant-garde/industrial black metal project formed in 2022 by Yusaf 'Vicotnik' Parvez of Dodheimsgard - its name a literal anagram of its parent band - with fellow Dodheimsgard guitarist Camille Giraudeau co-writing the material. Debut album Omniverse Consciousness (Peaceville, 2024) pushes Dodheimsgard's electronic and industrial tendencies further still, layering glitchy synth textures, samples, and choirs over blasting black metal, and has been described by press as Dodheimsgard's 'more grim and malevolent twin.'

Heart Of Hellplay in the dock

BandcampSpotify

compare profiles →

Dargar is a Los Angeles-based experimental black metal studio project by Pete Majors (vocals/guitars, also of Harassor) and James Brown III, aka Horus (programming/mixing/editing; the solo USBM artist behind the Rising Beast label/archive). The project's name is an inside joke referencing Marc Singer's 'Dar' (The Beastmaster) and Sam Elliott's 'Gar' (Mask). Songs were built by having Horus program drum-machine beats in GarageBand, Majors improvise guitar/vocals over them, then Horus sample and loop those fragments into finished compositions — yielding a lo-fi, glitchy, ambient-tinged black metal sound. The debut was recorded in 2006 and released on cassette in 2012 (100 copies); a second collection, The Shores of Space, followed in 2017.

Jumalhämärä ('Twilight of the Gods') is an experimental black metal band from Lahti, Finland, active since 1996 and currently signed to Ahdistuksen Aihio Productions. Their sound folds droning sustained tones, Gregorian-chant choirs, and folk-tinged interludes into a black metal chassis, most audible on the 18-minute Songless Shores EP where bell tones give way to psychedelic drift.

Resignaatio (full album)play in the dock

BandcampSpotify

compare profiles →

Solo raw black metal project of Ottawa multi-instrumentalist Jessica Kinney, running since 2016 across roughly eight releases including full-lengths and splits. The sound layers harsh, noise-caked black metal against warped, decayed ambient passages, earning press comparisons to Sutekh Hexen, Gnaw, and dark-ambient artist The Caretaker. Albums build a recurring retro-futuristic, dystopian mythos described by Vice as 'Metropolis meets Victorian death cult.'

Descent Into Suburban Hellscapeplay in the dockcompare profiles →

Hail Spirit Noir is a Greek band from Thessaloniki (formed 2010) that welds 1970s psychedelic and progressive rock — vintage organ, synth and mellotron textures — onto a modern second-wave black metal frame. Founded by Haris and Theoharis, both veterans of the prog outfit Rex Mundi and the avant/symphonic project Transcending Bizarre?, the band cultivates an occult, horror-tinged atmosphere across concept albums, drifting further into synth-forward territory on Eden in Reverse. Frequently filed alongside Oranssi Pazuzu and Arcturus as psychedelic/avant-garde black metal.

Self Spiller is a one-off avant-garde metal studio project helmed by Agalloch bassist Jason William Walton, assembling contributions from fourteen musicians worldwide into the 2015 album 'Worms in the Keys.' Compared to a collision of Mr. Bungle's California and Arcturus' La Masquerade Infernale.

Crystalline Thunderbolts Pierce the Sacred Mountain is a synth-driven raw black metal / dark ambient project of prolific Dutch multi-instrumentalist Maurice 'Mories' de Jong (Gnaw Their Tongues, Cloak of Altering, De Magia Veterum, Obscuring Veil, Aderlating, Seirom). Releases like Blessed Hands Touch the Ophanim Under the Golden Rainbows (2023) and Shine Like the Suicidal Madness of the Sacred Amethyst (2024) are built from 'wild keyboard music exclusively' — chaotic, saturated electronic textures layered with black-metal atmosphere and grandiose, scripture-tinged song titles about celestial beings. It's tagged avant-garde/symphonic/black metal on metal.academy and functions as one more mutation in de Jong's sprawling, genre-blurring catalog.

Liturgy is an American avant-garde black metal band from Brooklyn, founded in 2005 and led by composer-guitarist-vocalist Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix. The project is built around a self-authored 'transcendental black metal' philosophy and ranges from blast-driven maximalist black metal to the glitch/IDM electronics of The Ark Work and the choral, orchestral scope of later records like 93696. Critically prominent, The Ark Work was named the #1 avant-garde album of 2015 by both Spin and Rolling Stone.