On 13 January 2023 Napalm Records released The Coral Tombs, the first album in eight years by the German quartet Ahab, and it went on to reach number nine on Billboard's Top New Artist Albums chart and number fourteen on its Current Hard Music Albums chart. A funeral doom record about a submarine had surfaced on an American chart.
The records on this page were released between 1 January 2020 and the first days of June 2026, and the picture we hold them against lies on a sea floor. Within a generation of a ship going down the reef has claimed it: coral larvae settle on the rails and the ribs, lay down lime year on year over the rivets and the plate, and what rises there is alive, new and entirely its own, and yet it rises in the outline of the hull beneath, bow, deck and the stump of the mast, so that a diver hanging above it in the green light can still read the ship through the growth. Doom in the 2020s grew like that. Nothing here copies Black Sabbath or Candlemass, and every record here takes their shape.
What rises on the wreck is alive, new and entirely its own, and it still rises in the outline of the hull.
One record of the decade already stands among the relics in the albums list: Obsidian, which Paradise Lost released through Nuclear Blast on 15 May 2020, and we do not weigh it twice. Nor do we rank Future's Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate, the single piece of eighty-three minutes that Bell Witch released through Profound Lore on 21 April 2023, because it is the first part of a planned three and a verdict on a third of a work is a guess. What follows are eight records in order of release, each with its date, its label, its producer or studio, two songs and the reasons it stays.
2020 and 2021: new growth on the traditional hull
Produced and mixed by Randall Dunn and released by Nuclear Blast on 23 October 2020, in a season when no band on earth could carry a note of it onto a stage, Forgotten Days is the record on which the Arkansas quartet Pallbearer, with Brett Campbell and Joseph D. Rowland dividing the lyrics and the singing between them, laid eight songs across fifty-three minutes, from the title track that opens it to the twelve minutes of "Silver Wings" at its centre. Consequence of Sound called it arguably the best doom metal album of 2020, Kerrang! heard a genre being refreshed, and Metal Hammer placed it fourteenth among the year's best metal albums. Not every critic followed. Exclaim! missed the crushing riffs of the early records under what it heard as subdued progressions.
Recorded with Dave Otero and released by Nuclear Blast on 19 November 2021, Deceiver, the fourth album by the Denver band Khemmis, runs six songs from "Avernal Gate" to the eight minutes of "The Astral Road", and on the single "Living Pyre" Ben Hutcherson and Phil Pendergast raise their twin guitars over the riff like two sails set above a leaden hull, the harmony there to drive the weight forward and never to decorate it. Decibel placed it second among the forty best albums of 2021, and The Obelisk heard a band that soars and crushes in equal measure, intense without turning boorish and accessible without being made simple.
2022: a voice from the south and a net dragged along the bottom
Recorded in April and May 2021 at Inside Outside Studio in Volpago del Montello with Maurizio Baggio, who mixed it and mastered it with Matt Bordin, and released by Svart on 11 March 2022, Close is the third album by the quartet from Cittadella, Messa, and the one on which Alberto Piccolo took up an oud and a mandolin and the guest Giorgio Trombino a duduk and a saxophone beside Sara Bianchin's voice, across ten tracks with "Pilgrim" and "Rubedo" among them. Svart sold it as Stevie Nicks singing in front of Black Sabbath and described Iommi guitars giving way to oud and progressive solos. Metal Blade signed the band in October 2024, and The Spin followed on that label on 11 April 2025 and went to number two on Decibel's list of the year.
Produced, mixed and mastered by Arthur Rizk and released by Relapse on 3 June 2022, Summoning the Slayer is the record on which the Michigan quintet Temple of Void, five men who held day jobs, a firefighter and a charge nurse among them, dragged its death doom along the floor of the record like a dredge net along a harbour bed, and on "Deathtouch" and "Engulfed" it hauls up everything heavy the early nineties left lying down there. Decibel placed the album fortieth among the best of 2022. The closing "Dissolution", by the label's account, turns to the rock and singer-songwriter motifs of the seventies, a sung coda after the drag.
2023: deep water and a heathen land
Every branch these records grow from, traditional, death, funeral and folk, was fixed decades earlier by the records we set out as the Doom Metal Albums That Define the Genre. The reef is only legible because the hull is still down there. In 2023 two very different bands proved it.
Recorded over separate weekends at Rama Studios in Mannheim with Jens Siefert, who had made the band's two previous albums with it, because almost every member now had children at school and a job beside the music, The Coral Tombs took its story from Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and sent Ahab down after Captain Nemo for sixty-six minutes, with Chris Noir of Ultha splitting the opening lines of "Prof. Arronax' Descent into the Vast Oceans" with Daniel Droste and Greg Chandler of Esoteric singing the drowning at the close of the final track, "The Mælstrom". Two reviewers converged on the weight. JJ Koczan of The Obelisk heard a sound bleak, extreme and duly funereal, sunk further down than sunlight goes, and Gary Davidson of Echoes and Dust heard a sheer atmospheric pressure unfolding further, the crushing weight still in place and flashes of tremolo picking breaking through on "Mobilis in Mobili". Both singled out "Colossus of the Liquid Graves".
Every song is a little story itself and a piece of the whole puzzle
Daniel Droste of Ahab, interviewed by Gavin Brown, Echoes and Dust, 14 April 2023
Produced by Wayne Adams at Blank Studios and Bear Bites Horse in February and March 2023, mixed by Tom Dalgety and released by Nuclear Blast on 3 November 2023, This Heathen Land, the third album by the English quintet Green Lung, drove the organ and the riff through "Mountain Throne" and the six and a half minutes of "One for Sorrow" and went to number one on both the UK Rock and Metal Albums chart and the Independent Album Breakers chart. Kerrang! gave it the full five Ks, and Sleazegrinder of Classic Rock heard thunderous doom rock, full of spectacle, bombast and fog-choked atmosphere. A band first talked into being over a few ales at Desertfest London in 2016 had put a doom record at the top of a British chart.
2024 and 2025: the old rites, kept
Produced, mixed and mastered by Arthur Rizk at Redwoods Studio in Philadelphia, sleeved in its singer's own painting and released by Dark Descent on 14 June 2024, The Stygian Rose is the record on which the Philadelphia sextet Crypt Sermon, with Brooks Wilson at the microphone and Tanner Anderson now on keyboards, carried six songs from "Glimmers in the Underworld" to the eleven minutes of the title track tolling out at the close. Angry Metal Guy and The Obelisk put it on the same border, the epic doom of Candlemass and Solitude Aeturnus crossed with traditional heavy metal.
Seven years after Hypnagogia, the New Jersey band that has kept one interminable tread since 1992, Evoken, went back to the producer of Quietus and Antithesis of Light, Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal, and Profound Lore released Mendacium on 17 October 2025: eight tracks named for the hours of the church's daily liturgy, from "Matins" to "Compline", following a fourteenth century Benedictine monk confined to his cell by illness while something hideous comes through a tear in the world. The label presented it as a return to the dirge and dread of those two older records, and Koczan, reviewing it for The Obelisk that November, wrote that the band lands harder for the emotional weight the songs carry. Each passage is lowered onto the listener like the stone lid of a sarcophagus eased shut a finger's width at a time.
The reef in June 2026
| Released | Band | Album | Label | Producer or studio | Two songs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23 October 2020 | Pallbearer | Forgotten Days | Nuclear Blast | Randall Dunn | "Forgotten Days", "Silver Wings" |
| 19 November 2021 | Khemmis | Deceiver | Nuclear Blast | Dave Otero | "Living Pyre", "The Astral Road" |
| 11 March 2022 | Messa | Close | Svart | Maurizio Baggio, Inside Outside Studio | "Pilgrim", "Rubedo" |
| 3 June 2022 | Temple of Void | Summoning the Slayer | Relapse | Arthur Rizk | "Deathtouch", "Engulfed" |
| 13 January 2023 | Ahab | The Coral Tombs | Napalm | Jens Siefert, Rama Studios | "Prof. Arronax' Descent into the Vast Oceans", "Colossus of the Liquid Graves" |
| 3 November 2023 | Green Lung | This Heathen Land | Nuclear Blast | Wayne Adams, mixed by Tom Dalgety | "Mountain Throne", "One for Sorrow" |
| 14 June 2024 | Crypt Sermon | The Stygian Rose | Dark Descent | Arthur Rizk, Redwoods Studio | "Glimmers in the Underworld", "The Stygian Rose" |
| 17 October 2025 | Evoken | Mendacium | Profound Lore | Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal | "Matins", "Compline" |
Five months into 2026 the growth has not slowed. Sub Pop released a self-titled tenth album by Sunn O))) on 3 April, Spirit Adrift closed its shelf with Infinite Illumination on 10 April, and Khemmis has a self-titled fifth album due from Nuclear Blast on 12 June. Every record in the table stands on a hull laid down long before any of these musicians picked up an instrument, and the hulls themselves, one entry at a time, are charted in the Essential Doom Metal Albums, Record by Record. The coral is new. The ship is not.
