Drone Doom
Located in 2 routes
Doom reduced to its absolute essence: massive, sustained, distorted guitar tones held for minutes at extreme volume, with riffs slowed almost to stasis. Tempos are glacial or beatless, often with no conventional drumming; the music is a slowly mutating wall of low-frequency drone, feedback and overtones built on stacked amplifiers (Sunn O))) named themselves after the amp brand). Pieces stretch 10–40 minutes. Vocals, when present, are sparse — guttural rasps, monastic chants or buried howls. The effect is meditative, monolithic and physically heavy, prizing texture and resonance over melody or rhythm.
History
The style begins with Dylan Carlson's Earth in Olympia, Washington, whose Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version (Sub Pop, 1993) stripped doom to pure sustained drone. Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson built Sunn O))) (Southern Lord label) as an explicit homage — even taking a song title from Earth's 'Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine' for a side project — and turned amplifier worship into robed, fog-drenched ritual on ØØ Void (2000), Black One (2005) and Monoliths & Dimensions (2009). Japan's Boris explored the same monolithic territory from Absolutego (1996). Khanate, O'Malley's brutal project with vocalist Alan Dubin, pushed it toward agonized minimalism, while Canada's Nadja and others extended drone into ambient and shoegaze. The scene cross-pollinated with noise, ambient and contemporary classical.
Defining artists
Essential listening
- Seven Angels(1993) — EarthSpotifyYouTube
- Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine(1993) — EarthSpotifyYouTube
- Rabbits' Revenge(2000) — Sunn O)))SpotifyYouTube
- It Took the Night to Believe(2005) — Sunn O)))SpotifyYouTube
- Big Church [megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért](2009) — Sunn O)))SpotifyYouTube
- Absolutego(1996) — BorisSpotifyYouTube
Sources
- Wikipedia — Drone metal
- Earth 2
- Sunn O)))
- Bandcamp Daily — The Bandcamp Guide to Earth
- The Wire / Pitchfork — Sunn O))) Monoliths & Dimensions coverage