Thirty-seven minutes. That is how long the Brooklyn quartet formed in October 2019 around the singer and guitarist Riley Pinkerton, Castle Rat, needed in January 2025 to fund its second album on Kickstarter, and when the month-long campaign closed the pledges stood at $139,000. No doom band of the eighties could have put that question to its listeners and had the answer inside the hour, and the number argues the case of this page before a single record is named: the modern doom metal bands did not inherit an audience from the founders, they gathered their own.
By modern we mean the bands that made their first records, or remade themselves into doom, from roughly 2010 onward. The names of this generation already standing on our wider roll of doom metal groups, Pallbearer, Bell Witch, Khemmis, Windhand and Monolord among them, are left there. This page enters the next row: seven bands, each with its label, its year, the record to start with and two songs that do the work.
The picture we keep in mind for them is a hillside that foresters cleared a generation ago and planted again by hand. The stumps of the old timber are still in the ground, broad and grey, softening every winter into the sedimentary dark of the soil, and between them in straight rows stand the saplings, fifteen years in, thin in the trunk, each set at a measured distance from the next so that no tree steals another's light, and every one of them already taller than anything the saw left of the forest that stood there before. Stumps do not grow. Saplings do.
Height is not depth of root. Candlemass and Saint Vitus go down further than anything on this page. But the clearing was real: Reverend Bizarre broke up in 2007, Cathedral ended with The Last Spire in April 2013, and the ground the nineties bands had held stood open. What the new rows prove is reach, measured in places the founders rarely stood: second place on the year-end list of Decibel, the American metal monthly, and a Brooklyn quartet on the British albums chart for rock and metal.
Height is not depth of root. But the clearing was real, and what the new rows prove is reach.
Spirit Adrift, a full shelf in ten years
Begun in Mesa, Arizona, in 2015, in the months after its founder got sober, as a project he played almost alone, the one-man band that Nate Garrett called Spirit Adrift issued the EP Behind - Beyond in February 2016 and a first album, Chained to Oblivion, through Prosthetic that August. Only in 2017 did Garrett gather players for the stage, and the first concert came on 15 May 2017 at The Rebel Lounge in Phoenix, on a bill with Gatecreeper and Pallbearer.
The second album set the height of the row. Curse of Conception, released by 20 Buck Spin on 6 October 2017, finished second on Decibel's list of the best albums of 2017. Its label heard Metallica and Judas Priest in the opening of "Earthbound", and riffs and grand melodies entwined across the rest; on "Starless Age (Enshrined)" that entwining, in the label's description, is rope plaited around a leaden weight, the melody hauling the load uphill rather than decorating it.
In 2017 Spirit Adrift and Khemmis shared a split, Fraught with Peril, reworking traditional Appalachian songs. Divided by Darkness, released by 20 Buck Spin on 10 May 2019, opened on "We Will Not Die" and put "Hear Her" at its centre, and Enlightened in Eternity, out on 16 October 2020, ran to the ten minutes and forty-eight seconds of "Reunited in the Void". By the fifth album the band was based in Austin, Texas, and signed to Century Media: Ghost at the Gallows, its drums tracked at Electrical Audio in Chicago and everything else at a ranch studio in Cedar Creek, Texas, in the autumn of 2022, came out on 18 August 2023 with "Death Won't Stop Me" as its first single.
The sixth arrived with no warning. Infinite Illumination, released digitally by 20 Buck Spin on 10 April 2026 and in physical formats on 15 May, carries guest solos by Steve Jansson of Crypt Sermon, James Murphy and Arthur Rizk; the label called it the band's swansong, and its announcement, carried by The Obelisk, picked out "Born in a Bad Way" and "White Death". Ten years from the first EP to the last album. The shelf is full.
Epic doom, planted again
Two of the seven set the oldest shape in the music in new ground. Formed in Philadelphia in 2013, with a first demo out that June, and billed on its debut as an epic traditional doom five-piece, the quintet around the singer Brooks Wilson and the guitarist Steve Jansson released Out of the Garden in February 2015, opened by "Temple Doors" and "Heavy Riders". Crypt Sermon returned as a sextet for The Stygian Rose, produced by Arthur Rizk and released by Dark Descent on 14 June 2024, six songs from "Glimmers in the Underworld" to the eleven minutes of the title song tolling out at the end. In the label's reading the wall that record-shop filing had built between doom and heavy metal comes down on it, and Wilson said in the announcement that the band wanted loud, smashing drums and guitars that were aggressive and loud.
Formed in Toronto in 2013 and carried to Finland in 2022 when the singer Sarah Ann Kitteringham and the guitarist Shon Vincent moved there, the sword-and-sorcery five called Smoulder names the Texans of Solitude Aeturnus among its forebears. After Times of Obscene Evil and Wild Daring on Cruz del Sur in April 2019 came Violent Creed of Vengeance, on the same label on 21 April 2023, mixed by Rizk, with the novelist Michael Moorcock speaking on "Victims of Fate" and the nine minutes and fifty-one seconds of "Dragonslayer's Doom" to close.
Scripture and confession
The second inheritance is darker. The nineties had found the outer limit of sheer weight in the English trio whose story is told in electric Wizard and the Heaviest Record of the Nineties; two of the modern bands went looking instead for the limit of what a slow song can confess.
Begun in San Francisco in 2009 as the solo project of the singer Kristina Esfandiari, whose lyrics keep returning to her charismatic Christian upbringing, King Woman recorded Created in the Image of Suffering and released it through Relapse on 24 February 2017. Relapse sold it as "a surrealistic Black Sabbath fronted by Mazzy Star", and Pitchfork placed it among the ten best metal albums of that year. "Utopia" is the door into the record and the glacial eight minutes of "Hierophant" the weight behind it. Celestial Blues, released by Relapse on 30 July 2021, turned the scripture inside out: its first single, "Morning Star", is, as Esfandiari told Heavy Consequence in June 2021, "basically a song about Lucifer", the fallen angel's side of the story, and "Boghz" followed as the last single before release.
Founded in Portland, Oregon, in 2012 by the musician who signs his records A.L.N., the one-man project Mizmor joins black metal to doom and drone and builds pieces long enough to bury verse and chorus under the stone. Cairn, released on 6 September 2019, is four pieces in just under an hour, and its title is its method: a cairn is raised by walkers one stone at a time, each adding weight without knowing the final height, and the eighteen minutes of "Cairn to God" are raised the same way, shriek laid on riff and riff on drone. Prosaic, released by Profound Lore on 21 July 2023, runs from the fourteen minutes of "Only an Expanse" to the thirteen of "Acceptance"; Stereogum, reviewing it in July 2023, heard black metal and doom brought into union there by instinct rather than technique.
From the rows to the charts
Formed in 2005 south of Paris and carried across the 2010s from sludge towards the slower, greyer music it tags as cold doom, the French quartet Hangman's Chair signed to Nuclear Blast for A Loner, released on 11 February 2022 with "An Ode to Breakdown" and "Cold & Distant", every dirge on it dragging the grey of a housing estate stairwell behind the riff. Saddiction, also on Nuclear Blast and released on 14 February 2025, entered the French rock and metal chart at number 13. That November the band announced an indefinite hiatus. Not every sapling in a row takes.
The Brooklyn quartet from the first line of this page is the tallest sapling on the slope by the measures the charts keep. Castle Rat bills itself as medieval fantasy heavy metal and plays it in costume; Louder, reviewing its second album in September 2025, filed the same music as fantasy doom. Into the Realm, released by King Volume on 12 April 2024, carried "Fresh Fur" and "Dagger Dragger", and The Bestiary, released by King Volume with Blues Funeral on 19 September 2025, with "Wolf I" and "Serpent" among its singles, entered the official British rock and metal albums chart at number 11 and was named among the fifteen best metal albums of 2025 by Rolling Stone.
| Band | Formed | Start with | Label | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spirit Adrift | 2015 | Curse of Conception | 20 Buck Spin | 2017 |
| Crypt Sermon | 2013 | The Stygian Rose | Dark Descent | 2024 |
| Smoulder | 2013 | Violent Creed of Vengeance | Cruz del Sur | 2023 |
| King Woman | 2009 | Created in the Image of Suffering | Relapse | 2017 |
| Mizmor | 2012 | Prosaic | Profound Lore | 2023 |
| Hangman's Chair | 2005 | A Loner | Nuclear Blast | 2022 |
| Castle Rat | 2019 | The Bestiary | King Volume, Blues Funeral | 2025 |
The slope in May 2026
Count the rows this spring. Spirit Adrift has finished, its shelf closed by the sixth album. Hangman's Chair has stopped. Mizmor, Crypt Sermon, Smoulder and Castle Rat have each put out a record since the spring of 2023. The stumps between them have not moved and will not, and every row on this slope was measured out from where they stand.
How the slow riff travelled from Birmingham at the end of the 1960s to this hillside, one dirge and one decade at a time, is set out as the whole thing, start to finish. Begin with the Arizona record from 2017 and walk uphill.
