The best sludge metal of the last fifteen years was not made by the bands who sound most like Louisiana in 1993. It was made by the bands who kept the hardcore under the weight and then let the weight wander off somewhere nobody expected, a French quartet into the grey estates of the Paris suburbs and a German duo into a world without bass guitars. That is the verdict. The rest of this page is the evidence, seven bands long.
Picture the crane at the back of a scrapyard, the one with an electromagnet on the end of its chain instead of a hook, swinging over the heap until the operator throws the switch and a whole saloon car comes up clear of the pile with a groan of torn steel, hangs in the air a second longer than looks safe while rust and engine oil rain off its sills, and then drops back onto the stack and flattens the roof of the car beneath it. Lift, hang, drop. That is the riff in modern sludge. The magnet does not care what the car was worth. It only cares that it is heavy enough to make a noise when it lands. The founders and the nineties frames are counted in the chapter this belongs to; what follows is the yard as it stands now, band by band, each with a label, a year, a record and two songs.
The magnet does not care what the car was worth. It only cares that it is heavy enough to make a noise when it lands.
Hangman's Chair and the three grey records
Formed in 2005 in Crosne, in the Essonne suburbs south of Paris, by musicians who had come up through hardcore punk, and joined in 2008 by the singer and guitarist Cédric Toufouti and the bassist Clément Hanvic alongside the founders Julien Chanut on guitar and Mehdi Birouk Thépegnier on drums, the four men from the Essonne hardcore scene called Hangman's Chair spent the first half of the 2010s as a sludge band in the plain sense of the word, and the records that prove it are not the ones it is filed under today. Hope /// Dope /// Rope came out on Bones Brigade in 2012, the start of what Chanut later called a trilogy. This Is Not Supposed to Be Positive followed on the Paris label Music Fear Satan on 15 September 2015, led by a video for "Dripping Low", and Lelo Jimmy Batista, writing for Vice France, heard it as Black Sabbath lost at a metro stop in the north of Paris.
A split with the Japanese band Greenmachine followed on the same label in February 2017. Banlieue Triste, released by Music Fear Satan in March 2018 and everywhere outside France by Spinefarm on 28 September 2018, finished the trilogy with "Naive" and "Tired Eyes", with a guest contribution from the synthwave musician Perturbator. The band still lifted the same wrecks. It had only learned to hold them in the air longer, over a grey housing estate, before letting them fall. In March 2023 it released the six minute single "Spleenwise" ahead of a European tour with Igorrr, and that July it played Dour Festival in Belgium. In mid-November 2025 Hangman's Chair announced a hiatus of indefinite length.
Mantar and Black Tusk: the loud end of the yard
Formed in 2012 by two old friends from Bremen, the guitarist and singer Hanno Klänhardt and the drummer Erinç Sakarya, the German duo whose name is the Turkish word for mushroom, Mantar, plays without a bass player on purpose, which ought to leave a hole in the bottom of the sound and instead leaves a crater where the bottom used to be. Death by Burning came out on Svart in 2014. Ode to the Flame, released by Nuclear Blast on 15 April 2016, is the place to start, with "Era Borealis" and "Cross the Cross". Pain Is Forever and This Is the End took the pair to Metal Blade on 15 July 2022, with the guitars recorded by Klänhardt in his own living room in Gainesville, Florida, in the summer of 2021 and the drums at Studio Nord in Bremen. An ocean between the two halves of the record, and still no bass player on either side of it. "Grim Reaping" and "Hang 'Em Low (So the Rats Can Get 'Em)" are the two to play at a volume the neighbours will remember. Post Apocalyptic Depression followed on Metal Blade on 14 February 2025, twelve songs and none of them much past four minutes.
The three friends who lived on the same street in Savannah, Georgia, and started jamming at the drummer's house at the end of 2004, called their band Black Tusk and their music swamp metal, after the wet heat of the town, and AllMusic took them at their word, describing the result as the murkiest, dirtiest sludge to come out of Savannah since Kylesa. Pillars of Ash was recorded with the producer Joel Grind in Portland, Oregon, in October 2014. The bassist Jonathan Athon died on 9 November 2014 of injuries from a motorcycle accident two days earlier, the band confirmed, and in December it said the album had been finished before his death. Relapse released it on 29 January 2016, and "God's On Vacation" went into the launch trailer for the video game Mortal Kombat XL. The Way Forward, released by Season of Mist on 26 April 2024, is the first with Chris Adams and Derek Lynch as members, and "Dance on Your Grave" and "Breath of Life" both got videos.
Sludge is hardcore that learned to wait. The waiting is not the gentle part of it. The waiting is the moment the weight leaves the ground.
Ilse Brandt, doom editor, KaosMetal
Cough and Lord Dying: the long drag
Founded around 2005 in Richmond, Virginia, and heard by AllMusic as roughly equal doses of doom and sludge, the Virginia band Cough released Ritual Abuse on Relapse in 2010, shared a split with Windhand in April 2013 and then handed its next album to Jus Oborn of Electric Wizard, who produced it and recorded it with Garrett Morris of Windhand. Still They Pray came out on Relapse on 3 June 2016: eight songs, six of them past seven and a half minutes, each one dragged across the yard like a wreck on a chain, from the near eight minutes of "Haunter of the Dark" at the start to the four minutes of the title song at the end. The closer is the one place on the record where the crane lets go early.
Portland, Oregon, supplied the most restless entry. The band built around the guitarist and singer Erik Olson, Lord Dying, released Summon the Faithless on Relapse on 9 July 2013, toured with Red Fang and Black Tusk, and recorded Poisoned Altars with Joel Grind of Toxic Holocaust in the spring of 2014 for release by the same label on 27 January 2015; the title song and "An Open Sore" are the pair to know. Mysterium Tremendum followed on eOne on 26 April 2019, eleven songs opening on "Envy the End", and Clandestine Transcendence, produced by Kurt Ballou at his God City Studios, arrived on MNRK Heavy on 19 January 2024. The bands who have only just walked into the yard with a first record under the arm are counted in the New Sludge Metal Bands.
Whores. and Dopethrone: noise and tar
Formed in Atlanta in 2010 around the singer and guitarist Christian Lembach, the trio with the least radio friendly name on this page, Whores., spent six years on short records, Ruiner for Brutal Panda in 2011 and Clean in 2013, before Gold. came out on eOne on 28 October 2016: ten songs in thirty-five minutes, recorded and mixed by Ryan Boesch, who produced it with Lembach, and placed tenth among the year's metal albums by Rolling Stone. "Playing Poor" opens it. "I See You Are Also Wearing a Black T-Shirt" is the finest song title of the decade and is over in two and a half minutes. War. followed in April 2024, after the single "Sicko" that February, and Boesch recorded, mixed and mastered that one too.
From the Hochelaga district of Montreal comes the trio that shares its name with the Electric Wizard album of 2000, Dopethrone, led by the guitarist and singer Vince, which named its fourth album, Hochelaga, after its own neighbourhood and released it on Totem Cat on 13 April 2015, then put out Transcanadian Anger on the same label on 25 May 2018, recorded and mixed in Montreal by Jean-Baptiste Joubaud. Eight songs, and the titles alone read like a raid on a pharmacy: "Planet Meth", "Killdozer", "Snort Dagger". Start with the first two. The closing "Miserabilist" brings in a guest singer credited only as Julie and runs past six minutes, the longest the magnet hangs anywhere on the record.
Seven cars off the pile
| Band | From | Start with | Label | Year | Two songs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hangman's Chair | France | Banlieue Triste | Music Fear Satan | 2018 | "Naive", "Tired Eyes" |
| Mantar | Germany | Ode to the Flame | Nuclear Blast | 2016 | "Era Borealis", "Cross the Cross" |
| Black Tusk | USA | Pillars of Ash | Relapse | 2016 | "God's On Vacation", "Born of Strife" |
| Cough | USA | Still They Pray | Relapse | 2016 | "Haunter of the Dark", "Still They Pray" |
| Lord Dying | USA | Poisoned Altars | Relapse | 2015 | "Poisoned Altars", "An Open Sore" |
| Whores. | USA | Gold. | eOne | 2016 | "Playing Poor", "I See You Are Also Wearing a Black T-Shirt" |
| Dopethrone | Canada | Transcanadian Anger | Totem Cat | 2018 | "Planet Meth", "Killdozer" |
Read down the start column and the verdict at the top of the page holds. All seven start records came out between 2015 and 2018, and not one of these bands sounds like another beyond the leaden fact of the drop. One plays without the instrument everyone assumed sludge could not live without. One went grey. One gave its songs titles that read like a pharmacy raid. The people at the controls, the singers and guitarists who pulled the lever on these records, are the subject of the Sludge Metal Artists Worth Following. The dirge does not change. The current goes on, the car comes up, the whole yard holds its breath.
Then it drops.
