No: Alice in Chains is a heavy metal band from the grunge years that let sludge into Dirt and the 1995 dog record without ever becoming a sludge band. The missing punk descent, the two-voice harmony and six studio albums from Facelift to Rainier Fog show where the line falls.
By Ilse Brandt
8 September · 10 min read
Explainers
Most of the lettering on doom metal sleeves was bought from a catalogue rather than drawn, from Victorian display capitals to phototype faces and a digital blackletter. We follow the typefac...
By Ilse Brandt
Essential Albums
Six sludge records that sank for reasons of paperwork rather than music: a shelved master, a band that split within a year, a label that went bust. Each comes with its date, label and two so...
By Gareth Llewellyn
Genre Histories
From a former military church in Göppingen to the 013 in Tilburg and a field outside Siegen, the doom metal festivals gave a slow music its fixed addresses. This is the history of Roadburn,...
By Ilse Brandt
Eirik Solvang
Black Metal
How Black Metal Vocals Got That Shape
Andrzej Sawicki
Blackened Death
The Death Metal Labels That Built the Genre
Rafael Quintero
Death Metal
Why Death Metal Became So Extreme
Gareth Llewellyn
Grindcore
The Underrated Sludge Metal Albums
Ilse Brandt
Doom Metal
The Doom Metal Fonts
Declan Rourke
Heavy Metal
Thrash Metal in the 1980s, Year by Year
| Date | Band | Album | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15 Sep 2026 | Mittags-Abgrund | Mittags-Abgrund | Full-length |
| 16 Sep 2026 | Soulers | The Straightforward Dream | Full-length |
| 18 Sep 2026 | Anthrax | Cursum Perficio | Full-length |
| 18 Sep 2026 | Blackment | Pandemonium Portrait | Full-length |
| 18 Sep 2026 | Hanging Garden | Dream Death | Full-length |
| 18 Sep 2026 | Krallice | Scour Order | Full-length |
| 20 Sep 2026 | Legion | Legion/Blissful Misery | Compilation |
| 23 Sep 2026 | Soulers | Watching the Whole Tragedy with Bated Breath | Full-length |
| 25 Sep 2026 | Lacrimas Profundere | Lay Me Down O Silent Fear | Full-length |
