"Dopethrone have been steadily on the rise over the last ten years, their brand of scuzzy doom and dark humor leading them toward the front of the pack." That was how Emily Bellino, introducing a video premiere in Decibel on 7 May 2018, explained the rise of Dopethrone less than three weeks before the band's fifth album, and we think the sentence hands the credit to the wrong thing. Formed in 2008 in Hochelaga, in the east of Montreal, by the guitarist and singer Vincent Houde and a bassist known as Vyk, the trio that answered to a joke for a name did not invent its humour and was not carried anywhere by it. It inherited the joke, and what the magazine heard as one band's dark wit was only the newest hand on a page that has been passing through this music for decades.
Houde said as much in the interview beneath Bellino's introduction. "Our band started as a joke," he told her, explaining that he and Vyk had spent their high school years on black metal and cannabis, and that nobody imagined the band would ever play outside Montréal. Asked by It's Psychedelic Baby Magazine in February 2025 where the name came from, he said the band loved the album of the same title by Electric Wizard but had not named itself after it, and had simply thought the name would be funny. Reviewing the band's sixth album in May 2024, Distorted Sound still wrote that it was named after that record. The story had already been copied wrong.
A doom metal meme is a chain letter copied out by hand. Somebody finds a sheet on the doormat carrying a promise and a threat, sits at a kitchen table and copies it out in ink for the names on his list. With every copy a word slips: a spelling corrected by a tidier hand, a line dropped because the wrist grew tired at midnight, the name of a new town written in over one that no longer means anything, so that after forty copies the letter still carries its promise and its threat while no two sheets in circulation read alike. The only sentence nobody dares to touch is the one in the middle, the slow, leaden instruction the whole chain exists to pass on, and in doom that sentence is the riff. The letter survives because it drifts. A copy made word for word is the one that dies in a drawer.
The jokes this genre tells about itself travel exactly that way: a band name bent out of another band's name, a record title bent out of an older record, a pop song dragged until it sounds like a funeral, a compilation series named after the plant. What doom looks like is followed in the chapter this belongs to. Here we follow the letter itself, the hands that copied it and the word that changed in each copy.
The letter survives because it drifts. A copy made word for word is the one that dies in a drawer.
The first sheets: a Norwegian title and a Dorset record
Recorded at Chuckalumba Studios between May and June 2000 and released by Rise Above on 25 September 2000, Dopethrone, the third album by the Dorset trio Electric Wizard, poured its twenty-minute title track into the record like tar into a trench and left it to set, a riff so thick with distortion that it seems to subside under its own weight while the song is still playing. In a 2011 feature by Malcolm Dome for Metal Hammer, Jus Oborn traced the title song to a story he had heard about someone with a sofa made entirely of dope, and said the band took drugs in the studio. Terrorizer named it the album of the decade in December 2009. The sheet was in circulation.
The copy made in Montreal took its name from one sheet and its subject from another. The Norwegian sheet came first. The duo Darkthrone released Transilvanian Hunger through Peaceville on 17 February 1994, and Darkthrone, Houde has said, is where his band's name came from. Put that name and that habit in the same classroom and the band name writes itself. Oborn had bent the same name first: he told It's Psychedelic Baby Magazine in 2013 that his album title was a play on Darkthrone. Houde told Decibel he does not think his band sounds anything like Electric Wizard.
| Year | Sheet | Label | What changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1994 | Darkthrone, Transilvanian Hunger | Peaceville | The name that would later be bent |
| 2000 | Electric Wizard, Dopethrone | Rise Above | A title that plays on Darkthrone |
| 2008 | Dopethrone formed in Montreal | None | A title becomes a band |
| 2018 | Dopethrone, Transcanadian Anger | Totem Cat | A song called "Wrong Sabbath" |
| 2024 | Dopethrone, Broke Sabbath | Totem Cat | Black becomes Broke |
Wrong Sabbath, then Broke Sabbath
The copies that came after the name reached for the oldest sheet in the pile. Recorded and mixed by Jean-Baptiste Joubaud at Studio Lantiez in Montreal and released by Totem Cat Records on 25 May 2018, Transcanadian Anger, the fifth album by the Montreal trio of Houde, Vyk and the drummer Shawn, hung a title that echoes Darkthrone's over eight songs running from "Planet Meth" and "Wrong Sabbath" to "Miserabilist", sung with a guest named Julie, a record The Obelisk called a "Weedeater-gone-bad-drugs sludge assault". That June the band carried it to Hellfest in France. On the founding letter of the genre, the name of Black Sabbath, one word had been crossed out.
Six years later the word was crossed out again. Released by Totem Cat on 24 May 2024, recorded and mixed once more by Joubaud, mastered by Brad Boatright at Audiosiege and carrying artwork credited to Houde himself, Broke Sabbath is the band's sixth full-length album, seven songs closing on "Sultans of Sin", the longest the eight and a half minutes of "Rock Slock". Two readings of it meet in New Orleans. Tom Fordham of Distorted Sound heard Electric Wizard's distortion driven by the groove of New Orleans sludge, and David J McLaren of The Sleeping Shaman heard the filth of EyeHateGod and a larynx-shredding delivery closer to Carcass than to Oborn. Where they part is Dorset, which McLaren heard clearly only from the third track, so the sheet reads as copied with a heavier pen: the older lettering shows through in places, elsewhere the ink has gone through the paper.
The hand holding the pen has changed as well. By Houde's account to It's Psychedelic Baby Magazine in February 2025, he is the only founding member left: Vyk, who began the band with him, had to leave, and a friend named Mike took over the bass at the start of 2024. In the same interview Houde said plainly that he had used heroin while the band made Dark Foil, its second album, released in May 2011. He also gave his own account of where the band's humour comes from: "the best jokes always come from tragedy." We take him at his word, and it is not the account the 2018 introduction gave.
A pop song at the pace of a cortege
The letter has also escaped doom altogether, and the copy that travelled furthest had no doom band in it. In August 2010 a Florida producer named Nick Pittsinger, posting on SoundCloud as Shamantis, put up "U Smile 800% Slower", Justin Bieber's "U Smile" stretched from three minutes and sixteen seconds to around thirty-five minutes with the program PaulStretch. By 17 August it was all over the internet. On 18 August Pittsinger told Entertainment Weekly it had begun as a joke, and the producer Matt Shadetek, writing on the Dutty Artz blog that day, called the result "glacially beautiful digital sludge". A teenage love song was dragged at the pace of a cortege until its chorus sank into fog, and the joke that went round the internet was doom's own: make anything slow enough and it will sound like a funeral.
It will not. The Bieber stretch kept the slowness and lost the riff, the one sentence the chain exists to carry, and thirty-five minutes of fog is a copy with the middle line smudged out. That is why it stayed a novelty while the bands went on copying.
Reefers, doom worship and a handle from Antarctica
Formed in Chicago in 2005 and playing without a singer, the instrumental quartet Bongripper turned the pun into a whole title page: The Great Barrier Reefer in 2006, Hate Ashbury in 2008, Satan Worshipping Doom in 2010, Miserable in 2014. The first of those records is a single piece of seventy-nine minutes, which the band told The Sleeping Shaman it set out to make longer than Sleep's Dopesmoker, one riff laid on another like sediment until the older record lay buried beneath the new one.
The compilation series is the chain letter in its most literal form. Released on Bandcamp on 24 January 2019 with Blues Funeral Recordings, the first volume of Weedian gathered twenty-one tracks that its curator described as tilted heavily towards doom, and the project, whose Bandcamp address carries 420, the number cannabis culture uses as a code, has since run to more than eighty compilations, many of them a "Trip to" a single place, California, Minnesota, Ukraine, each one a fresh sheet with a new town written in.
What the copy keeps
Read the table again and the argument with the 2018 introduction settles itself. Dopethrone did not reach Hellfest on a sense of humour. It got there on the one line the chain never let anyone alter, the dirge in the middle of the page, copied from a Dorset record and set under a name bent out of Norwegian black metal, and the jokes around it, "Wrong Sabbath" and Broke Sabbath among them, are only the words that drifted on the way.
The lettering those drifting words are printed in is another hand again, and it is followed in the Doom Metal Fonts.
No one signs a chain letter, and no one can call one back. The Montreal trio took the sheet in 2008 and sent it on in 2024 with its title bent twice and the riff intact. Somebody else holds it now. The instruction in the middle still tolls at the same slow pace.
