"Whatever insanity Pike is bellowing about, he can keep doing so as long as he keeps summoning the thunder like this." Jeff Treppel wrote that in Decibel on 8 June 2015, reviewing Luminiferous, the seventh album by High on Fire, and he meant it as praise, but it places the thunder somewhere above the stage and leaves the man bellowing underneath. We think the sentence points the wrong way. The thunder is not summoned. A particular pair of hands makes it, with a particular tuning and a habit of holding a chord a beat longer than anyone else in the room would dare, and that habit belongs to a person whose working life can be written down.
The roll of doom metal groups is kept by band names, because names are what go on sleeves and posters, but the weight pressed into those records was laid down by individuals, several of whom carried the same riff through three or four bands across four decades while the names around them changed. This page is about the doom metal artists themselves, the guitarists, singers, bassists, drummers and writers, each with the work that makes them matter and the dates that pin it down.
The thunder is not summoned. A particular pair of hands makes it.
The guitarists who set the weight
Injured at seventeen on his last day at a sheet metal factory, when a machine took the tips off the middle and ring fingers of his right hand, the fretting hand of a left-handed player, the Birmingham guitarist Tony Iommi went back to the instrument against what doctors had told him, capped the damaged fingers, strung the guitar as lightly as he could and, by the time Black Sabbath made Master of Reality in 1971, tuned it down to slacken the strings further. A slack string on a low tuning speaks late and rings long, and "Children of the Grave" and "Into the Void" turned that late, leaden speech into the grammar of a genre. Iommi was diagnosed with lymphoma in early 2012 and announced on 11 August 2016 that he was in remission. He played the last show of the original line-up at Villa Park in Birmingham on 5 July 2025.
Present in Los Angeles in 1978 and still there in 2019 when Saint Vitus released a self-titled album with Scott Reagers, the singer on its first two albums, back at the microphone, the guitarist Dave Chandler is the one member present on every record the band made, and he had already written most of Born Too Late when Reagers left in 1986. Season of Mist, the band's label since 2012, describes his guitar sound as full of reverb, feedback, flanger and apocalyptic distortion, the noise a cellar door makes when a shoulder is put to it and it will not give. The band has lost two of the three men who started it in 1978. The drummer Armando Acosta died on 25 November 2010, aged 58. The bassist Mark Adams, who had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, died on 23 May 2023, aged 64.
Matt Pike and the riff he never put down
Born on 3 June 1972 and settled in San Jose as a teenager, the young guitarist who joined a band called Asbestosdeath and stayed with it through its change of name to Sleep was Matt Pike. On Sleep's Holy Mountain, recorded with Billy Anderson and released by Earache in November 1992, he was twenty and already playing Iommi's riff as though it had been left to him in a will, on "Dragonaut", which Harmony Korine later put into his 1997 film Gummo, and on "From Beyond". Sleep then spent years on one hour-long piece that London Records refused to release, and broke up. Pike did not stop. In 1998 he formed High on Fire with the drummer Des Kensel and took the microphone as well as the guitar, faster and harder than Sleep had been, from The Art of Self Defense on Man's Ruin in March 2000 to Blessed Black Wings, recorded with Steve Albini and released by Relapse on 1 February 2005.
His life between the records is largely on the public record, put there mostly by Pike himself. In the summer of 2012 High on Fire withdrew from the Mayhem Festival, the travelling American metal package, because of his health, and he entered rehab for alcohol addiction; by December, back on the road with the band, he was talking openly about playing sober. In October 2018 the band dropped off a tour with Municipal Waste because he needed a partial amputation of a toe, and on 7 January 2019, three days before the Electric Messiah tour was due to open in Atlanta, High on Fire cancelled it, with a statement from Pike saying diabetes had put him at risk of losing a larger part of his foot. On 10 February 2019, at the 61st Grammy Awards, the band won Best Metal Performance for "Electric Messiah". Kensel announced in July 2019 that he was leaving. On 18 February 2022 Pike released a self-titled album under the name Pike vs. the Automaton.
"There's a little more anxiety. I've been playing a lot ... probably better than I ever have in my life."
Matt Pike to JJ Koczan, The Obelisk, 5 December 2012
Produced by Kurt Ballou and released by eOne on 5 October 2018, Electric Messiah is the record to hear for what Pike's right arm does over the length of an album, from the four minutes of the title song, written in tribute to Lemmy of Motörhead, to the ten and a half of "Sanctioned Annihilation", which Andy O'Connor, reviewing the album for Pitchfork on 9 October 2018, heard as Pike's own Sabbath epic in the mould of the Dio years, a song that marches through the battle and comes down the far side of it like a column walking home across the field it has just taken. It reached number 127 on the Billboard 200. Coady Willis took the drums in 2021, and Cometh the Storm, recorded with Ballou and released by MNRK Heavy on 19 April 2024, carried "Karanlık Yol", an instrumental whose title is Turkish for "Dark Road".
Picture an anvil that has stood in one forge under one smith for forty years: a block of hard steel made to outlast any hammer brought against it, and still, where that one arm has come down on the same spot tens of thousands of times a year, the face has sunk into a shallow hollow, so that any bar of iron laid there bends towards the old curve before the first new blow has landed. Pike has been at his anvil for thirty-five years, from Asbestosdeath to Cometh the Storm, and the hollow is already there. The same downstroke falling on the same low string has worn a shape into the music, which is how JJ Koczan of The Obelisk could write in December 2012 that the band had gone six full-lengths without a real dud. A band name cannot do that. Only an arm can.
The voices in front of the riff
Taken on in 1981, when the Illinois guitarist Rick Wartell rebuilt his band's line-up around a second guitarist, Bruce Franklin, and heard first on the debut Trouble released through Metal Blade in 1984, the singer Eric Wagner was the band's principal lyricist, a Catholic-raised writer whose openly Bible-inspired words led the label to market the band as "white metal", a tag the band rejected. He sang with Trouble from 1981 to 1997 and again from 2000 to 2008, and later fronted The Skull with the former Trouble bassist Ron Holzner. Wagner died on 22 August 2021, aged 62, from complications of COVID-19.
Leading the Maryland band that became The Obsessed from 1976, then crossing the country to sing on Born Too Late in 1986, Mournful Cries in 1988 and V in 1990 with Saint Vitus, the singer and guitarist Scott "Wino" Weinrich has stood in front of slow riffs for half a century: in Spirit Caravan, whose first album came out in 1999, in Shrinebuilder with Al Cisneros in 2009, and in a revived The Obsessed from 2016, whose Gilded Sorrow appeared on 16 February 2024, through Ripple Music. Season of Mist's history of Saint Vitus calls him the band's ultimate voice in the eyes of a clear majority of its followers. Few have sung this music for longer.
The low end, the long count and the written page
Singing over his own bass since he formed Asbestosdeath in 1989, the San Jose bassist Al Cisneros, born on 23 September 1973, was in Sleep from its first days, as Pike was, and in 2003 he and the Sleep drummer Chris Hakius stripped that band down to its two lowest parts and called what was left Om. As a duo they made Variations on a Theme in 2005, Conference of the Birds in 2006 and Pilgrimage, recorded by Steve Albini at Electrical Audio and released by Southern Lord in 2007, a bass and a drum kit carrying whole albums with nothing else in the room. Hakius left on 31 January 2008 and Emil Amos replaced him.
Leif Edling founded Candlemass in 1984 and has been its main songwriter and its only constant member since, which makes the song, more than the bass, his instrument. The drummer carries the heaviest load for the least notice, because a glacial tempo has to be held exactly with no speed to hide a mistake in: Acosta held it for Saint Vitus, Hakius for Sleep and Om, Kensel for High on Fire for twenty-one years.
| Musician | Instrument | Bands | Start with | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tony Iommi | Guitar | Black Sabbath | Master of Reality | 1971 |
| Dave Chandler | Guitar, songs | Saint Vitus | Born Too Late | 1986 |
| Eric Wagner | Voice, lyrics | Trouble | Trouble | 1984 |
| Scott "Wino" Weinrich | Voice, guitar | The Obsessed, Saint Vitus | Lunar Womb | 1991 |
| Al Cisneros | Bass, voice | Sleep, Om | Pilgrimage | 2007 |
| Matt Pike | Guitar, voice | Sleep, High on Fire | Blessed Black Wings | 2005 |
Where the next hands come from
By the spring of 2026 every living musician profiled on this page had been at the work for more than thirty years, and Pike had Sleep, back on stages since April 2022, beside High on Fire. The younger players who took the tuning from them are making records of their own, and many of their names stand among the Modern Doom Metal Bands. Most of them tune down. Most of them learned why from a man who went back to the guitar with two fingertips missing.
