On 5 February 1993 Sub Pop released Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version, three tracks and seventy-three minutes of music recorded the previous August in Seattle by a guitarist and a bass player, with a percussionist heard on a single track. Pressed by the label that had carried grunge out of the Pacific Northwest, credited to a band from Olympia that had shrunk to a core of two men, and built from riffs slowed and repeated until they stopped behaving like riffs and began behaving like weather, the album arrived in the shops with no shelf waiting for it and no name for what it was. The name came later.
Drone doom metal is what is left when the doom riff, already the slowest material heavy music owns, is slowed further and held until the individual notes inside it stop mattering and the sustained, overdriven sound of the string itself becomes the composition. We treat it as the far end of the story told in doom, chapter by chapter: the place where tempo is no longer something to be dragged down but something abolished outright, where the drummer is optional, where a song is measured in quarter hours and a chord is judged by what happens inside it rather than by where it goes next.
Olympia, 1989, and the long tone behind it
Formed in Olympia, Washington in 1989 by Dylan Carlson with Slim Moon and Greg Babior, and named after the name Black Sabbath had used before they became Black Sabbath, the band that would become the fixed point of the whole genre began with an idea rather than a sound: take the riff on which Tony Iommi had built heavy metal, remove the momentum from it, and see what was still standing. Earth put out the EP Extra-Capsular Extraction on Sub Pop in 1991, and then went into the studio for the album that fixed the method in place.
The drone did not begin in Olympia, and the older line is worth stating plainly because Carlson has stated it himself. Between 1962 and 1966 the composer La Monte Young led an ensemble in New York that he called the Theatre of Eternal Music, in which he, Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad, John Cale and for a time Angus MacLise sustained long tones in carefully tuned intervals at high amplification. Cale carried that experience of held, amplified sound into the Velvet Underground, whose viola drones and feedback are the most direct descendant those sessions produced inside rock.
Carlson's route to that music ran backwards through rock. Speaking to The Creative Independent in July 2019, he described reaching Young and Terry Riley through the Velvet Underground, alongside the King Crimson records of 1969 to 1975, and in other interviews he has pointed as well to Indian classical music, the Gnawa musicians of North Africa and early blues, all of them musics built over a drone. None of that makes Earth a minimalist project with distortion added. It explains why a young guitarist believed a heavy metal riff could be held for half an hour without collapsing.
Earth 2 and the Sub Pop years
Recorded in August 1992 with Stuart Hallerman at Avast! Recording Company, with Carlson on guitar and Dave Harwell on bass, the album runs to three pieces: "Seven Angels" at fifteen and a half minutes, "Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine" at twenty-seven, and "Like Gold and Faceted" at just over thirty, the only track on which a percussionist, Joe Burns, is heard at all. What those seventy-three minutes do is easy to describe and was, in 1993, close to interminable: a riff with the outline of Sabbath still faintly visible inside it is played, allowed to ring, played again and allowed to ring longer, while the overtones pile up and the bass locks underneath at a pitch registered in the ribs before it reaches the ear. Reviewing it for AllMusic, Ned Raggett called it a record even the Melvins would find weird, and John Bush, writing for the same outlet, described a glacial, monolithic exercise that virtually created the drone and ambient metal subgenres.
The band from Olympia never repeated the experiment in so pure a form. Phase 3: Thrones and Dominions followed on Sub Pop in 1995 and Pentastar: In the Style of Demons in 1996, and after 1997 Earth went silent. Carlson was addicted to heroin in those years. He spoke about it to Dayal Patterson of Terrorizer in November 2005, saying that music had once been everything to him and that something destructive had taken its place. There was no new studio album until 2005, and by then the music Earth had set in motion had passed into other hands.
Earth did not invent the held note. It proved that a heavy metal riff could be held until it turned into one, and that what came out the other side was still heavy metal.
Burning Witch and the scream over the held chord
Assembled in early 1995 on Capitol Hill in Seattle around the guitarist Stephen O'Malley, with Greg Anderson on a second guitar in the early months, though he left before the band recorded anything, and a singer who went by the name Edgy 59, the band that answered Earth from inside the city's sludge underground, Burning Witch, recorded with Steve Albini in 1996 and released two EPs, Rift.Canyon.Dreams on Merciless in 1997 and Towers... on Slap-a-Ham in 1998, before playing its last shows that autumn. Southern Lord gathered both onto Crippled Lucifer in 1998.
What Burning Witch added was a human voice in open agony placed directly over riffs slowed almost to a halt, and that single decision dragged the drone back toward the oldest subject doom has, which is suffering. The guitars moved, barely, chord to chord at intervals of several seconds, the drums fell like a gavel on a sentence already passed, and Edgy 59 screamed across the gaps as though the silence between the chords were the thing doing him harm. These are dirges built to be unpleasant, and they are the missing link between the Melvins-derived sludge of the Pacific Northwest and the robed stillness O'Malley and Anderson would build next.
Sunn O))) and Southern Lord: the amplifier becomes the instrument
Formed in Seattle in 1998 by O'Malley and Anderson, and named after the Sunn amplifier brand in a deliberate play on the name of the band whose records had shown them the way, the duo that walked out of Burning Witch and left the drum kit behind, Sunn O))), began as open homage. The Grimmrobe Demos, recorded that year and issued by Hydra Head in 1999 in an edition of 500 copies, carries a twenty-one minute track titled "Dylan Carlson", a loose reading of Earth's "Ouroboros Is Broken". In April 1998 Anderson had founded Southern Lord so that he and O'Malley could control their own releases. Within a decade the label carried the return of Earth and most of the bands that fill the rest of this chapter.
ØØ Void came out on 26 June 2000, produced by Scott Reeder at Grandmaster Studios in Hollywood, four tracks of fourteen to fifteen minutes each, and with it the two guitarists settled the method they have refined ever since: no drummer, walls of amplifiers turned toward the audience, monks' robes, fog thick enough to swallow the players, and a volume the body registers before the ear does. The robes and the fog are the part photographers remember. The volume is the part that matters.
The glaciers creep
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mont Blanc, 1816
Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,
Slow rolling on
We have to be precise about what that volume does, because it is the whole point and the easiest thing to caricature. Struck once and sustained through a bank of cabinets, a Sunn O))) chord does not travel across a room so much as advance over it the way a glacier advances down a valley: never visibly from one moment to the next, a few centimetres in a day, and yet with the entire mass of the ice pressing behind that slow front, grinding the valley floor flat, tearing loose the boulders in its path and carrying them for miles. The tempo is gone. The motion is not. What the listener hears across ten minutes is the chord changing from inside, overtones rising and dying away, beats forming between two strings a fraction out of tune with each other, and that change is as real as the movement of the ice and just as impossible to catch in the act.
Recorded between 2007 and 2009 with Randall Dunn and Mell Dettmer, and released by Southern Lord on 18 May 2009 in Europe and 26 May in North America, Monoliths & Dimensions is the record on which the robed pair stopped playing only to their own amplifiers. Attila Csihar of Mayhem delivers the vocals, the trombonists Julian Priester and Stuart Dempster and the composer Eyvind Kang bring brass and strings in around the drone, a Viennese women's choir led by Jessika Kenney joins them, and Dylan Carlson himself plays guitar, which closed the circle opened by a demo track bearing his name ten years earlier. The four pieces run from under ten minutes to "Aghartha" at seventeen and a half. The reception reached well past the metal press: an average of 88 on Metacritic across sixteen reviews, a perfect score from Drowned in Sound and five stars from The Guardian.
Khanate: weight dropped instead of held
Formed in New York in 2000, the quartet that put the drone back inside a working band, Khanate, joined O'Malley to two veterans of the New Jersey band OLD, the singer Alan Dubin and the bassist James Plotkin, and to Tim Wyskida, drummer of Blind Idiot God. The self-titled debut came out on Southern Lord in 2001, produced by Plotkin, five tracks across fifty-six minutes opening with the thirteen minutes of "Pieces of Quiet" and peaking in the eighteen of "Under Rotting Sky". Things Viral followed in 2003 and Capture & Release in 2005, and on 24 September 2006 the band split, with Plotkin citing a lack of commitment from certain members.
The difference between Khanate and Sunn O))) is the difference between weight held and weight dropped. Where the robed duo sustains, the New York four strike a chord and let it decay almost to nothing, each chord let fall like a sack of wet sand onto bare boards and the silence after it measured as carefully as the blow, while Wyskida marks the impacts and Dubin forces words through the gaps in a strangled howl. That is also where Khanate stands apart from funeral doom metal, which slows the melody but keeps it, and keeps the grief dignified; Khanate keeps neither. The four came back in May 2023 with To Be Cruel on Sacred Bones, three pieces of around twenty minutes each, with guitar and drums recorded at Orgone Studios in England, bass and vocals at Thousand Caves in Queens, and the mix made by Randall Dunn with Plotkin and O'Malley.
The method travels: Boris, Corrupted, Nadja, Moss and Om
Formed in Tokyo in 1992, the trio that took its name from a song on the Melvins album Bullhead, Boris, released Absolutego on its own Fangs Anal Satan label in 1996: a single track of sixty-five minutes in which Melvins-weight riffs are slowed until they set solid. Amplifier Worship followed in 1998, and the line from those two records to Seattle was made formal on 31 October 2006, when Southern Lord, Inoxia and Daymare released Altar, the joint album with Sunn O))), with Kim Thayil of Soundgarden among the guests, and a limited two-disc edition adding a twenty-eight minute piece recorded with Dylan Carlson himself.
In Osaka the band that refuses interviews, Corrupted, formed in 1994. In a 2002 statement the band said it had never given an interview and did not let professional photographers take its picture, preferring to speak through sound, lyrics and artwork, and the lyrics it chose are mostly in Spanish. Paso inferior came out on Frigidity Discos in 1997, Llenándose de gusanos on HG Fact in 1999, and El mundo frío in 2005, one composition of seventy-two minutes in which long passages of harp are set against the band's slow, heavy riffs. The band self-released Pray for the Hollow Sun in 2024.
A band can remove the drummer, the melody, the chorus and even its own face from the record. What it cannot remove is the weight, and the weight is the only thing that keeps this music inside metal.
Started in Toronto in 2003 as a studio project of the guitarist Aidan Baker, and turned into a duo in 2005 when the bassist Leah Buckareff joined so the music could be played live, Nadja took the drone in the opposite direction from Khanate, toward saturation rather than silence. Touched, first issued in 2003 and reissued by Alien8 in 2007, Radiance of Shadows and Thaumogenesis, both from 2007, set slow, dirge-like doom riffs inside layers of processed guitar and electronics, and Baker, who prefers to call the music ambient doom, is also fond of a word he coined for it, dreamsludge.
In England the trio from Southampton, Moss, formed in 2001 as vocals, guitar and drums with no bass player at all, and wrote songs that usually run to around twenty minutes on themes taken from H. P. Lovecraft and the occult. Cthonic Rites came out on Aurora Borealis in 2005, Sub Templum on Lee Dorrian's Rise Above in 2008 and Horrible Night on Metal Blade in 2013.
The most unusual descendant came out of Sleep, whose rhythm section, the bassist Al Cisneros and the drummer Chris Hakius, formed Om in 2003 and built a band on the bass guitar alone. Variations on a Theme in 2005 and Conference of the Birds in 2006, both on Holy Mountain, and Pilgrimage on Southern Lord in 2007 repeat a single overdriven bass figure the way a rosary is worked bead by bead through a leaden hour, with Cisneros chanting over it in the cadence of a liturgy. Hakius left in January 2008 and Emil Amos of Grails took the drums for God Is Good, engineered by Steve Albini and released by Drag City in 2009, and for Advaitic Songs in 2012.
| Year | Band | Record | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1993 | Earth | Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version | Sub Pop |
| 1996 | Boris | Absolutego | Fangs Anal Satan |
| 1998 | Burning Witch | Crippled Lucifer | Southern Lord |
| 2000 | Sunn O))) | ØØ Void | Hydra Head / Rise Above |
| 2001 | Khanate | Khanate | Southern Lord |
| 2005 | Corrupted | El mundo frío | HG Fact |
| 2006 | Sunn O))) and Boris | Altar | Southern Lord / Inoxia / Daymare |
| 2009 | Sunn O))) | Monoliths & Dimensions | Southern Lord |
| 2023 | Khanate | To Be Cruel | Sacred Bones |
| 2026 | Sunn O))) | Sunn O))) | Sub Pop |
Where drone doom stops being metal
The clearest answer to where this music ends was given by the man who started it. When Earth returned with Hex; Or Printing in the Infernal Method on Southern Lord in October 2005, produced by Randall Dunn, Carlson had a drummer in Adrienne Davies, a steel guitarist in Dan Tyack, a trombonist in Steve Moore, and track titles drawn from the text of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. The distortion had largely gone, and Pitchfork called it a surprisingly beautiful instrumental album. The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull in 2008, the two volumes of Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light in 2011 and 2012, Primitive and Deadly in 2014 and Full Upon Her Burning Lips on Sargent House in 2019 kept moving in that direction, slow and heavy in feeling, and only intermittently metal records at all.
Sunn O))) tested the same border from the other side. Soused, produced by Walker and Peter Walsh, set his voice and his writing over the band's amplifiers, and the same year brought Terrestrials, made with Ulver. In both, the drone has become a setting for someone else's music rather than the music itself, which is exactly the point at which a metal record turns into something else.
Our line, then, is this. Drone doom is metal for as long as the sound comes from guitars or bass driven into distortion at a volume meant to be felt, the memory of the doom riff is still audible inside the held chord, and the music is organised around weight rather than around texture or mood. Take away the distortion and what remains is drone music in the tradition of La Monte Young, older and honourable, but no longer ours; take away the riff and what remains is ambient work with the volume up. Earth 2, ØØ Void, Crippled Lucifer, Monoliths & Dimensions and the Khanate records sit inside that line. Hex and Soused sit on it, one foot either side.
Thirty-three years on
Thirty-three years after Earth 2, the founders are still recording, and the circle has closed in a way nobody planned. Sunn O))) followed Life Metal and Pyroclasts, both made with Steve Albini and released in 2019, with a self-titled album that Sub Pop, the label of Earth 2, set for release on 3 April 2026: six tracks across nearly eighty minutes, recorded at Bear Creek Studio in Woodinville, Washington in January 2025 and produced with Brad Wood. Khanate has To Be Cruel behind it, Corrupted returned in 2024 with its first album since 2011, and Boris put out three albums in 2022 alone, W, Heavy Rocks and Fade.
The younger bands show a method still in use rather than preserved behind glass. Big|Brave, from Montreal, has recorded for Southern Lord and released nature morte on Thrill Jockey in 2023. The rest of the doom family, and the border each branch draws with this one, is on the subgenre map. What drone doom metal proved, from Olympia onward, is that a riff can be held until it seems to stand still and go on crushing everything in front of it. The tempo was the first thing to go. The weight never went.
