In September 1982 Heavy Metal Records released Death Penalty, the first album by Witchfinder General, a band formed three years earlier in Stourbridge by the singer Zeeb Parkes and the guitarist Phil Cope. It had been recorded in two days, on 10 and 11 April. It runs for about half an hour. The band broke up in 1984, and most who now name it among the first doom records found it years later.
Picture the card catalogue of a record library, a cabinet of narrow oak drawers each labelled with a decade in faded ink, and in the lowest drawers the oldest cards gone soft as cloth from forty years of handling, because every musician who has since tuned a guitar down and slowed a song to a dirge has pulled those cards, read the town, the label and the year typed on them, and filed them back a little more worn. The Stourbridge card is one of the softest. The top drawer is not yet full.
This page is that catalogue, opened one drawer at a time. We have set out the doom metal bands a newcomer needs first, and ranked elsewhere the names later bands most depend on; neither argument is repeated here. What follows is filing: a drawer for each decade, sorted by scene, and on each card the year of formation, the town, the label and the record to pull first.
And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.
Ecclesiastes 12:12, King James Version
The first drawer, 1976 to 1989: Stourbridge, Maryland, Texas, Stockholm
The trio from Stourbridge was not alone in the British drawer. Formed in Brockley, in south London, in 1978 by the singer Terry Jones and his son, the guitarist Alan Jones, and one of the very few doom bands inside the new wave of British heavy metal, the movement of young guitar bands that filled British clubs and small labels around 1980, Pagan Altar left only a self-released demo album from that era, bootlegged for years until Oracle Records issued it in 1998 as Volume 1.
Across the Atlantic the oldest card belongs to Potomac, Maryland. Founded there in 1976 as Warhorse by the guitarist and singer Scott "Wino" Weinrich and later renamed, The Obsessed recorded a debut album for Metal Blade in 1985 that the label never put out, and the tapes lay in a drawer of their own while Weinrich went west in 1986 to sing for Saint Vitus. Hellhound, a German label, finally released The Obsessed in 1990, and Columbia took the band on for The Church Within in 1994.
The Texas drawer holds a card worn nearly as soft. Founded in Arlington in 1987 by the guitarist John Perez, and first called Solitude after the songs of that name by Black Sabbath and Candlemass, the Texan quintet Solitude Aeturnus recorded Into the Depths of Sorrow at the Dallas Sound Lab in January 1990, then waited a year and a half for Roadrunner to release it in July 1991. Robert Lowe's voice rides above those riffs like a banner hoisted over a siege line, and Candlemass borrowed that voice between 2007 and 2012.
Stockholm filed two cards before the decade closed. The quartet that began in 1987 as Stormvarning and became Count Raven in 1989 released Storm Warning on Hellhound in 1990, and when the singer Chritus left for Saint Vitus the guitarist Dan Fondelius sang Destruction of the Void for Nuclear Blast in 1992. Sorcerer, formed in the city in 1988, left two demos and no album in its first life: the bassist Johnny Hagel left for Tiamat in 1992 and the band broke up that year. Its card was filed without an album. It stayed that way for twenty-three years.
The nineties drawer: funeral doom in Birmingham, New Jersey, Adelaide and Harlow
The nineties drawer is the heaviest in the cabinet. Formed in Birmingham in 1992, Esoteric entered Rich Bitch studios in June 1994 and came out with Epistemological Despondency, a double CD for Aesthetic Death on which the chords come down one at a time like sandbags dropped onto a lid already nailed shut, each blow burying the one before a little deeper, and which the histories of the style count among the first recorded shapes of funeral doom.
The American card came out of New Jersey. Founded in Lyndhurst in April 1992 by the guitarist Nick Orlando as Funereus, and settled in 1994 on a name taken from a demo song by the Finnish band Thergothon, Evoken released Embrace the Emptiness through Elegy Records in October 1998, and fourteen years later its Atra Mors became the hundredth release of Profound Lore. At the far end of the world Mournful Congregation formed in Adelaide in 1993 and reached The Monad of Creation, released by the Japanese label Weird Truth Productions on 16 March 2005.
Harlow, in Essex, filed the decade's last card. Founded there in 1994 by the singer and guitarist Patrick Walker, Warning released The Strength to Dream on the Miskatonic Foundation in 1999 and Watching from a Distance on the same label in 2006, the record Kerrang! later placed first on its list of the bleakest rock and metal albums ever made. None of these four names stands in the Top Doom Metal Bands, and none needs to. A ranking weighs debts. A catalogue only files.
A ranking weighs debts. A catalogue only files.
The 2000s drawer: Southampton, Germany, Turku, Liverpool
The first card of the new century is an odd one. Formed in Southampton at the end of 2000, a trio with no bass guitarist, Moss recorded Cthonic Rites at Chuckalumba Studio in 2005 with Jus Oborn of Electric Wizard producing, released it on Aurora Borealis that Christmas, and moved to Rise Above for Sub Templum in 2008, songs of around twenty minutes in which the low frequencies seem poured into the speaker cabinets like hot tar and left to set, interminable by design.
Germany filed its card in 2004. Founded that year by the guitarists Christian Hector and Daniel Droste and named after the captain of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Ahab released The Call of the Wretched Sea on Napalm Records in 2006. In Turku in 2007, Kimi Kärki, who as Peter Vicar had played guitar in Reverend Bizarre, formed Lord Vicar with Chritus, the first singer of Count Raven, and Fear No Pain, released by The Church Within Records in 2008, carried the epic line of the first drawer straight into this one.
The Liverpool card is the one most recently worn soft. Founded in 2006 as a two-piece by the guitarist and singer Jon Davis, and kept going through a change of drummer, a run of bassists and nearly a year of silence before the Horseback Battle Hammer EP of 2010, Conan took the tempo of doom and the down-tuned mud of sludge and fused them into what the band calls caveman battle doom: a riff swung like a battering ram by men who stopped counting the blows long ago and listen only for the gate to split.
The 2010s drawer: Conan builds a room, and the epic line returns
Monnos, released by Burning World Records in 2012, was the first Conan album, and the trio's set that year at Roadburn, the Dutch festival for heavy and psychedelic music, came out as Mount Wrath: Live at Roadburn 2012. Then the band found a house to work in. Chris Fielding, the producer who joined on bass in 2013, ran Skyhammer Studio in Cheshire, and there the Liverpool trio hammered out Blood Eagle for Napalm Records in 2014, Revengeance, released on 29 January 2016, and Existential Void Guardian, released on 14 September 2018.
Two older lines came back to life in the same decade. Sorcerer, the Stockholm card filed without an album, re-formed in 2010 with the singer Anders Engberg and released In the Shadow of the Inverted Cross on Metal Blade in 2015. In Philadelphia a band formed in 2013 took the epic doom of Candlemass and Solitude Aeturnus as a language still spoken: Crypt Sermon released Out of the Garden on Dark Descent Records in February 2015 and The Ruins of Fading Light on 13 September 2019. A card typed in 2013 already reads like one from the lowest drawer. That is the point of it.
The drawer still open: 2020 to April 2026
The newest drawer holds few new names and many new cards filed behind old ones. Conan released Evidence of Immortality, recorded at Foel Studio in Wales, through Napalm Records on 19 August 2022, Fielding left in 2023, and on 25 April 2025 the trio released Violence Dimension, its sixth album and its first for Heavy Psych Sounds, still produced by Fielding. Reviewing it in the June 2025 issue of Metal Hammer, Perran Helyes heard Davis crying out every word "like he's scaling a castle wall", and on 26 April 2025 Adam Robertshaw of Distorted Sound heard each chord strike "like a volcanic eruption". On 25 April 2025, the day Violence Dimension came out, Pagan Altar released Never Quite Dead through Dying Victims Productions, its first album with the singer Brendan Radigan. Terry Jones, the singer who had founded the band with his son, died of cancer on 15 May 2015.
| Band | Formed | Town | Pull first | Label, year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Witchfinder General | 1979 | Stourbridge | Death Penalty | Heavy Metal Records, 1982 |
| The Obsessed | 1976, as Warhorse | Potomac, Maryland | The Obsessed | Hellhound, 1990 |
| Solitude Aeturnus | 1987 | Arlington, Texas | Into the Depths of Sorrow | Roadrunner, 1991 |
| Esoteric | 1992 | Birmingham | Epistemological Despondency | Aesthetic Death, 1994 |
| Evoken | 1992, as Funereus | Lyndhurst, New Jersey | Embrace the Emptiness | Elegy, 1998 |
| Warning | 1994 | Harlow, Essex | Watching from a Distance | The Miskatonic Foundation, 2006 |
| Moss | 2000 | Southampton | Cthonic Rites | Aurora Borealis, 2005 |
| Ahab | 2004 | Germany | The Call of the Wretched Sea | Napalm, 2006 |
| Conan | 2006 | Liverpool | Blood Eagle | Napalm, 2014 |
| Crypt Sermon | 2013 | Philadelphia | Out of the Garden | Dark Descent, 2015 |
The rest of the open drawer is still being typed. Warning, without a new album since 2006, had signed to Relapse Records in July 2025, and on 7 April the band announced Rituals of Shame for 19 June. The catalogue ends at a top drawer with room left in it, and the musicians who typed these cards are filed on their own in the Doom Metal Artists Behind the Bands.
