The Best Doom Metal Albums of All Time

The best doom metal album of all time is Epicus Doomicus Metallicus by Candlemass, second is Born Too Late by Saint Vitus and third is Forest of Equilibrium by Cathedral. We ranked them the way a cellar is kept under an old wine house, a vault cut into cold chalk where the keeper goes down the stone steps once a decade with a candle and a corkscrew, draws a glass from every bottle on the racks and pours down the drain whatever has thinned or soured, so that the only wine left in the dark is the vintage that was harsh when it was laid down and has grown heavier in every year the door stayed shut. Records are laid down the same way. Most of them turn.

Three tests decided what stays on the racks. A record must be doom from its first track to its last, the dragged tempo carrying the structure, and that test alone keeps the early Black Sabbath albums, the vines every bottle here grew from, out of the ranking. Its standing in the polls and reappraisals of later decades must sit at or above what the press made of it on release, and the further it climbed, the higher it ranks. And the writing must hold across the whole running time, judged only where critics agree. The wider canon is laid out in the records that matter. This page ranks.

The only wine left in the dark is the vintage that was harsh when it was laid down and has grown heavier in every year the door stayed shut.

First place: the bottle its label poured away

Recorded at Thunderload Studios in February 1986 with Ragne Wahlquist producing and released by the French label Black Dragon on 10 June 1986, the debut that the bassist Leif Edling built out of the ruins of his earlier band Nemesis sold so badly that Black Dragon dropped Candlemass before the year was out. Epic doom took its name from the title, Eduardo Rivadavia of AllMusic called its songwriting the strongest and most consistent of the band's career, Pitchfork scored its 2022 reissue 8.4, and Chris Chantler of Metal Hammer heard in its songs "a template for How To Do Epic Doom Metal", verdicts that meet on the same six songs. "Solitude" kicks the floor out from under the heavy metal of its year one leaden chord at a time, and "A Sorcerer's Pledge" closes the record as an eight-minute dirge. It is first on all three tests.

Second to fourth: harsh when they were bottled

Signed to the hardcore label SST, the Los Angeles quartet fronted by its new singer Scott "Wino" Weinrich recorded Born Too Late at Total Access Recording in Redondo Beach with Joe Carducci producing and released it in October 1986, thirty-four minutes that dragged the tempo its punk audiences had come for down through the floorboards. Critics years apart agree: Paul Kott of AllMusic described "Black Sabbath on Quaaludes and wearing lead suits underwater", and Chantler called it "a bleak, strung-out monument". The title track became the anthem of the genre, and "Dying Inside", in the account Decibel gave when it inducted the record into its Hall of Fame in 2010, is Dave Chandler's seven minutes about alcoholism. The Candlemass debut gave doom a name. This record gave it a song, and that is the whole distance between first and second.

Third was praised on release and still grew. Recorded at Workshop Studios in Redditch in July and August 1991 with Steve Gurney, credited as PBL, producing, and released by Earache on 21 October 1991, the debut of the quintet Lee Dorrian formed after walking out of Napalm Death slowed the grindcore label's catalogue until each riff seemed to be lowered into the ground on straps. The German monthly Rock Hard gave it nine out of ten on release, and in February 2006 Decibel made it the twelfth album in its Hall of Fame. "Ebony Tears" and "A Funeral Request (Ethereal Architect)" carry it. It started higher than Saint Vitus, and so it climbed less.

Alonso of Arragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appeared to be best in four things: old wood best to burn; old wine to drink; old friends to trust; and old authors to read.

Francis Bacon, Apophthegms New and Old, 1625

Fourth is the bottle that stayed corked longest. The trio that called itself Sleep recorded a single composition of more than an hour live to tape at Record Two in Comptche, California, in sessions AllMusic dates to 1994 and Third Man to 1996, and London Records refused to release it as delivered, had it remixed and edited by other hands and dropped the band, which broke up in 1998, though its members later said, by Pitchfork's account, that they were headed that way with or without London. After a cut version called Jerusalem in 1999, Tee Pee Records issued the full Dopesmoker on 22 April 2003, sixty-three minutes with the live "Sonic Titan" after it. Eduardo Rivadavia of AllMusic heard "an instant doom metal classic", and when Southern Lord reissued it in 2012 Pitchfork called it "one of the great major-label casualties". A single composition is a narrower test of the writing, and that alone keeps it fourth.

Fifth to seventh: vintages nobody bought

Recorded late in 1992 and released by the Italian label Avantgarde Music on 15 June 1994, more than a year after its makers had dissolved the band, Stream from the Heavens by the Finnish trio Thergothon has since settled under the whole of funeral doom like silt under a slow river. The canon caught up later: Chantler put it among the ten essential doom metal albums for Metal Hammer, hearing "a glacial Lovecraftian nightmare". "Everlasting" and "Elemental" are the ways in. Only Candlemass climbed further, and the three tests added together put it fifth.

The band Patrick Walker formed in Essex in 1994, Warning, recorded Watching from a Distance at Rosenquarz Studio in Lübeck in the spring of 2006, released it through The Miskatonic Foundation that December and split for the second time in January 2009. The record kept gathering weight without them: Kerrang! put it first among the bleakest rock and metal albums ever made in 2019, finding the "depths of anguish" conjured by Walker "still utterly, utterly unmatched", and Metal Hammer ranked its title track first among the most heartbreaking doom songs. That track and "Bridges", the third of its five songs, are the two to hear. No younger bottle stands this close to the top.

Recorded at Academy Studios between December 1994 and January 1995 with Robert "Mags" Magoolagan producing and released by Peaceville on 15 May 1995, The Angel and the Dark River, the third album by the Yorkshire sextet My Dying Bride, kept gaining for three decades: IMPALA, the European association of independent labels, certified it gold in 2011 for more than 75,000 copies sold in Europe, and in 2023 Rolling Stone placed its twelve-minute opener "The Cry of Mankind" fifty-seventh among the greatest metal songs. "From Darkest Skies" is the second song to hear. Where the Peaceville bands stand in the history of doom metal is told elsewhere; a gold disc sixteen years after release is the curve the second test rewards.

Eighth to tenth: the back racks

The last three passed all three tests with a shorter climb. Eighth is Dopethrone by the Dorset trio Electric Wizard, recorded at Chuckalumba Studios with Rolf Startin and released by Rise Above on 25 September 2000, seventy-one interminable minutes carried by "Funeralopolis" and the title track. Terrorizer named it the album of the decade in 2009. Nine years in the rack, then the glass was drawn, and in 2018 Metal Hammer placed it thirty-first among the hundred greatest metal albums of the century.

Ninth is Into the Depths of Sorrow by the Texas band Solitude Aeturnus, released by Roadrunner in July 1991 and produced by Danny Brown with the band, with Robert Lowe singing over the guitars of John Perez and Edgar Rivera on "Opaque Divinity" and "White Ship". AllMusic gave it four and a half stars, and its climb shows in a career: Lowe sang for Candlemass itself from 2007 to 2012.

Tenth is In the Rectory of the Bizarre Reverend, recorded by the Finnish trio Reverend Bizarre at Red House in Turku between March and June 2001 and released by Sinister Figure in 2002, seventy-four minutes running from "Burn in Hell!" to the twenty-one minutes of "Cirith Ungol". AllMusic gave it four and a half stars, and within two years it was back in the shops with a second disc, Return to the Rectory.

What the cellar leaves on the steps

Nothing released in the 2020s is ranked: a bottle corked six years ago has not yet been down the steps once. The nearest records left outside the ten are the 1984 debut by Trouble and Pentagram's Relentless, close enough to tenth place that a reader could reverse the order.

The keeper goes back down with the candle every decade, and the racks will move when the next glass is drawn. For the albums of the genre taken one at a time, as a reference rather than a verdict, turn to the Essential Doom Metal Albums, Record by Record. Until then the order stands.

Sources and notes

• Decibel: Saint Vitus, Born Too Late (Hall of Fame, J. Bennett, 1 March 2010)
• Louder: 10 essential doom metal albums (Chris Chantler, Metal Hammer)
• Pitchfork: Sleep, Dopesmoker (Grayson Haver Currin, 10 May 2012)
• Metal Archives: Warning, Watching from a Distance (Wayback Machine copy, August 2024)
• Metal Archives: Reverend Bizarre, In the Rectory of the Bizarre Reverend (Wayback Machine copy, August 2024)
• Wikisource: The Works of Francis Bacon, Volume 1 (Basil Montagu edition, 1884), Apophthegms