Sludge Metal

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Sludge metal generally combines the slow tempos, heavy rhythms and dark, pessimistic atmosphere of doom metal with the aggression, shouted vocals and occasional fast tempos of hardcore punk.

Post Sludge / Atmospheric Sludge metal This metal movement takes influences from post-rock as well as from sludge metal. While it is in many ways similar to post-rock, post-sludge metal tends to include lower-tuned guitars, darker themes and tones, and heavier drums. Post-sludge stresses emotion, contrasting the ambiance of post-rock with the weight and bombast of metal. Vocals are deemphasized or non-existent, and lyrics tend to be equally abstract: often thematic or philosophical in nature. It was originally a largely American phenomenon, but also included in its development some Japanese bands. Bands like Neurosis, Isis, Cult of Luna, and Pelican write lengthy songs (typically five or six per album) that can range from light and guitar-driven to extremely heavy, drum and bass-driven.

Atmospheric Sludge Metal

Post-metal as with atmospheric sludge is a genre that uses metal music to create a sound that draws heavily on atmospheres and textures.

This approach was used by many sludge metal bands including ISIS, Neurosis and Pelican, combining post-rock techniques with sludge metal. Bands in other genres including black metal and doom also combined those styles with atmospheric elements to create metal best described as atmospheric black metal or atmospheric doom metal (or atmospheric folk metal etc). Those bands are listed in MMA under atmospheric sludge metal, atmospheric black metal, doom metal or whatever core style best describes them.

A number of bands originally rooted in those styles moved away from their original sludge (or other) metal roots, increasingly focusing on the post-metal elements of their sound. Others were never based on those styles of metal and took their influences directly from post-rock, adding metal elements to create a more abrasive and expansive sound. These bands are listed as post-metal.

Post-metal is captured as a child-sub of sludge metal on MMA to reflect the stylistic origins of many post-metal bands in atmospheric sludge metal, albeit those origins have largely been left behind.

Sub-genre collaborators:
  • Bosh66 (leader)

sludge metal top albums

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CULT OF LUNA A Dawn To Fear Album Cover A Dawn To Fear
CULT OF LUNA
4.74 | 10 ratings
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CULT OF LUNA Mariner (with Julie Christmas) Album Cover Mariner (with Julie Christmas)
CULT OF LUNA
4.79 | 8 ratings
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NEUROSIS Souls at Zero Album Cover Souls at Zero
NEUROSIS
4.48 | 22 ratings
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CROWBAR Sonic Excess In Its Purest Form Album Cover Sonic Excess In Its Purest Form
CROWBAR
4.62 | 9 ratings
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CROWBAR Broken Glass Album Cover Broken Glass
CROWBAR
4.46 | 14 ratings
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ISIS Panopticon Album Cover Panopticon
ISIS
4.35 | 64 ratings
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MASTODON Crack The Skye Album Cover Crack The Skye
MASTODON
4.31 | 107 ratings
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JULIE CHRISTMAS Mariner (with Cult Of Luna) Album Cover Mariner (with Cult Of Luna)
JULIE CHRISTMAS
4.69 | 4 ratings
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MASTODON Leviathan Album Cover Leviathan
MASTODON
4.24 | 98 ratings
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INTRONAUT Prehistoricisms Album Cover Prehistoricisms
INTRONAUT
4.33 | 17 ratings
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ISIS Oceanic Album Cover Oceanic
ISIS
4.24 | 53 ratings
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FLOOR Floor Album Cover Floor
FLOOR
4.59 | 4 ratings
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sludge metal Music Reviews

SUMAC The Healer

Album · 2024 · Atmospheric Sludge Metal
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siLLy puPPy
American / Canadian band SUMAC has made quite a splash in the metal underground in the last ten years with its bizarre mix of post-metal, droning and free improvisation industrial feedback techniques. This project was founded in 2014 in Vashon, Washington by vocalist / guitarist Aaron Turner who has participated in a multitude of acts including Doolhof, Drawing Voices, Greymachine, The Hollomen, House of Low Culture, Isis, Jodis, Lotus Eaters, Mamiffer, Old Man Gloom, Ringfinger, Split Cranium, Summer of Seventeen, Thalassa, Twilight and Unionsuit and soon recruited drummer Nick Yacyshyn (Baptists, Cooked and Eaten, Erosion, Genghis Tron, Hard Feelings, Rotting Hills,, A Textbook Tragedy) and bassist Brian Cook (Botch, Onalaska, Roy, Russian Circles, These Arms Are Snakes).

Together this power trio has cruised through the last decade delivering a brash barrage of atmospheric sludge metal in the vein of Isis and other sludge legends however after the collaborative efforts with the Japanese free improv noise guru Keiji Haino, the band has turned to the more experimental, free form and avant-garde which began with 2018’s “Love Shadow” and has slowly ratcheted up the freak show ever since. The band’s latest effort THE HEALER may be about as therapeutic as sleeping on a bed of nails in a burning house yet features the band’s most extravagant journeys into the world of free form noise, feedback freakery and avant-garde extremism. With four tracks that ooze past the 76 minute playing time with the opening “World Of Light” and closing “The Stone’s Turn” hovering around the 25-minute mark, SUMAC has let its freak flag fly full staff in a relentless musical menagerie of sound.

Talk about a long arduous journey where every juncture is spring loaded with crazy sludgy feedback that reverberates to kingdom come and back, the band ventures into moments of hardcore, pure noise as well as death metal and drone metal static overload. Sounding something like a mix of Isis, Eyehategod, Maudlin of the Well, Russian Circles and well, 1960s AMM, this band unleashes a noisy complex labyrinthine procession through a never-ending series of musical motifs that morph into something completely different without losing the sludge metal tones and timbres that keep it firmly planted in that camp. Discordant chords and atonal guitar squeals flitter alongside irregularly timed percussive outbursts, bass bantering and moody growling vocals with a pageful misanthropic demeanor reminiscent of classic Iron Monkey or early Neurosis. This is not an album to experience casually as it will leave you agitated and on the edge of your seat as it wends and winds through volitive unpredictable terrain.

Listening to THE HEALER is a true test in devotion to a craft that is as idiosyncratic and eccentric as a convention of those who love to consume furniture foam. It’s a knotty ugly affair that excels in nurturing all the most ugly and grating elements of sludge metal and couples them with nebulous indecipherable compositional flow, yet this whole chaotic stew is appealing in its unappealing nature. Far from mindless improv, THE HEALER is constructed of chunks of ideas that sort of metamorphose into a new batch of ideas with some stitching together in the context of sludge metal and others dabbling in chaotic noise swirls and droning monotony. While it comes off as pure free improv, the album is actually laced with musicality not only in the chord progressions and cyclical post-metal looping effects but also through order of seemingly chaotic embellishments.

Overall SUMAC delivers the ultimate difficult music listening album with THE HEALER as it ventures into territory that few metal bands have dared tread. The sounds of extreme metal formatted into the stylistic approach of European free jazz, brutal harsh noise improv and sound collages is certainly a difficult pill to swallow especially at such an excessive playing time but even though such albums can come off as ridiculously convoluted and excessively avant-garde for its own sake, i have to say that because SUMAC are such seasoned pros they infuse a vast array of musicality woefully missing from many similar styled acts. While definitely not music you want to play at your wedding, SUMAC delivers all the goods and if you’re into the idea of Khanate meets a more extreme version of Maudlin of the Well then this one’s gonna rock your world!

THOU Umbilical

Album · 2024 · Sludge Metal
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siLLy puPPy
The sludge metal scene may have had its origins in 80s California hardcore punk bands and 90s Seattle grunge but no other place has nurtured it into the gloomy ugly beast that it has become like Lousiana, USA. After all if it weren’t for bands like Eyehategod, Crowbar and Acid Bath the genre never would’ve blossomed into the gift that keeps on giving to the modern era. Must be the swamp gas wafting off those Louisiana bayous or something! While the Baton Rouge based THOU wasn’t exactly part of the original cajun country scene, the band sprang to life in 2005 and has been quite productive releasing numerous albums, splits and EPs and garnering a wider audience as time passes as it takes the unadulterated sounds of brutal sludge metal into the 2020s. The band is the perfect example of modern sludge metal with captivating covert art and a rampaging extremism not heard since bands like Iron Monkey, early Mastodon or Neurosis with their other New Orleans sludge bros included in that list as well.

The band has delivered one of its finest albums of its career in 2024 with its sixth full-length studio album UMBILICAL which has been garnering rave reviews as one of the best metal albums to have emerged in recent years and while such claims seem to be a dime a dozen in this diverse day of varying opinions and array of tastes, in the case of THOU’s latest effort all the brouhaha around the band’s newest album is actually well founded. Like many of the band’s albums, UMBILICAL has been released with a variety of album covers, three in this case with completely different cover art for the CD and vinyl and yet another for the digital downloads. Personally i prefer the band’s album covers that depict black and white scenes from war times and other historical despair from antiquity. Preferring to call themselves grunge rather than sludge metal (well Ok whatever!), UMBILICAL does indeed display more aspects of its ancestry than other sludge metal bands with Alice In Chains chugs, good old fashioned Nirvana inspired self-loathing and at times a rather Stone Temple Pilots simplicity.

But let’s get real here, despite nods to the past in the course of ten caustic distortion-drenched tracks, THOU is the epitome of doom metal infused sludge metal delivering all the misanthropic attributes of what makes the genre distinct, unique and reverberating into the extremities of guitar feedback. THOU is also one of the most angry sounding of the sludge metal world by far with Bryan Funck’s raging screamed vocals that give you a sore throat by merely listening. Add to that the exaggerated use of creepy slow tempos out of the Eyehategod playbook with the occasional more energetic outbursts of adrenalized speedy romps. It’s classic 90s sludge metal through and through but done so well that it makes you remember the days when sludge metal was pure and impregnated with that classic 90s annihilation and pure depressive extirpation. In the modern era where most sludge metal has hybridized with prog, post-rock or dark ambient sounds, THOU emphasizes sludge metal’s punk and grunge origins better than most.

Sure experimental metal and avant-garde forays are always nice evolutionary branches to explore as they create completely different mood settings in hitherto unexplored soundscape crafting but there’s something about unadulterated sludge metal that just resonates so wickedly well with the psyche as if it is the absolute panacea of a cathartic release of pent up rage that goes along with living in the modern world where absolutely everything seems dysfunctional and in decline. While many acts such as Cult of Luna, Intronaut and even Neurosis jumped off this bandwagon decades ago, THOU has continued to remain true to its sludge metal origins and in the process has garnered a slow and steady ascent as one of the guardians of the old school of sludge metal majesty. And it’s not hard to hear why on UMBILICAL as the band delivers one amp splitting guitar squeal after another with vocals so insanely intense as to qualify as scary.

Oh how THOU hath delivered a multitude of musical majesties yond resonates liketh a flame beckoning for an airy gust of inspiration the likes of which bloweth aught competition by the wayside. Rejoice in the beckoning quipping of the art of musical resonance yond captivated by the incessant floweth of the exquisite resonating sounds of sludge purity. Heavy denseness suffocating thy senses liketh a blackened tornado of souls in anguish in pure musical form yond hath been unleashed onto the world in the finest of art forms called UMBILICAL so finely constructed yond coequal Shakespeare himself wouldst tremble in awe at the sheer magnitude of the album upon us anon. For alloweth t beest writ yond the reveled anguish unveiling itself through the pyroclastic floweth of torturous textures and melancholic malaise shall reverberate in the most pleasing of ways as THOU hath polished its musical charm liketh the finest of silver in all of the kingdom.

NEUROSIS Times Of Grace

Album · 1999 · Atmospheric Sludge Metal
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SilentScream213
This is going to come off as harsh and opinionated, but the fact of the matter is, bagpipes are one of the ugliest instruments out there. They are piercing and shrill, they have almost no vibrato resulting in a stagnant, unrelenting cry, and they’re prone to staggering off key in between notes. It’s very difficult to properly fit them into a song, and are usually only used in contemporary music as a quick way to make something sound “Scottish” or folky.

I think it’s only fitting, then, that Neurosis of all bands would be the ones to utilize this instrument to its full potential. Neurosis are no strangers to making ugly music, as it’s pretty much their MO. Still, I was blown away by the utilization of bagpipes in “The Last You’ll Know.” The instrument provides the lead melody in what could only be called the apex of the song, or album even. The bagpipes play shrill, sustained notes over doomy guitar, and with pristine efficiency, convey this sombre, painful emotion that evokes a person at their limit, threatening to break. The ugly, static, unrelenting, barely-staying-on-note shrieks of the bagpipes are absolutely perfect for evoking this. It works wonders with the sludgy yet fragile atmosphere the band builds here, it doesn’t sound gimmicky or Scottish, it just perfectly encapsulates a harrowing yet still passionate cry of human emotion. It is, quite plainly, one of the greatest moments in music I have heard.

…What about the rest of the album? Right… it’s good. Not all that memorable. The majority of this album is Neurosis plodding along with chords that don’t evoke much and adding some effects and atmospherics that only provide surface level complexity to the album. Most of it is not very successful in building any mood outside of the generic trademark Sludge “miserable.” There are a few moments such as above where the band really captures something special, but most of them are hidden between long stretches of nothing.

Oh yeah, and then there’s the album Grace. Most should know the lore; Grace is a Dark Ambient album made by Neurosis side project Tribes of Neurot as a companion album meant to be listened to simultaneously with this album. On its own, well, it’s just a pretty minimalistic Dark Ambient album with samples, droning, and Noise. Doesn’t make for great individual listening.

But, how do they stack up as a duo? Grace adds some pleasant layering, density, and connectivity to the album. It truly makes it feel like one continuous experience, and it does feel like it’s how the album was meant to be listened to. And good god, remember that aforementioned moment with the bagpipe leads on “The Last You’ll Know”? Ambient pads backing that moment in perfect harmony just elevate it into an even more unbearably bittersweet moment of pure miserable catharsis. Unbelievable…

But does it do enough to elevate the whole album to its commonly held masterpiece status? To me, no. It definitely improves the album, but using numeric terms, probably by about a quarter star, 10 percent, etc. Grace is too minimalistic and lacks any standout moments of its own to do much more than just slightly improve the album. Given the choice, I would always listen to them as a set, it's definitely the superior experience, but it’s not as “transcendental” as some would have you believe. Mostly just a small bonus. I applaud the creativity, but at the same time, could have just released it as one album…

Either way, I’m not rating the duo here, because that’s not what this is. And after having listened to the two together, it does highlight a bit the “empty” parts of this album, where there’s really not much going on. Without a denser, more evocative atmosphere, the weak riffs and simple rhythm section isn’t doing enough to really carry this.

And so, I’ll stand by what I said before. It’s an album with some incredible moments, but they do get a bit lost in a fire of “just good” Atmosludge. Not the magnum opus of the genre it is often hailed as.

SLOTH Cattlepress / Sloth

Split · 1997 · Sludge Metal
Cover art Buy this album from MMA partners
UMUR
Press and US, Ohio based sludge/hardcore act Sloth. The split was independently released in 1997.

Cattle Press opens the split with the 9:25 minutes long instrumental and experimental noise/sludge metal track "So That Threads Remain of What Will Be First Movement:Deeper Than the Sea of Ruin". It sounds like an unfinished demo and it´s not a particularly interesting track. Sloth follow with three tracks. The Sloth tracks also features what sounds like a demo quality sound production, and they are extremely raw and heavy. It´s repetitive, experimental, and chaotic sounding. The last track "A Serenade" is basically an a cappella cover of a Danzig song. So upon conclusion this is an odd and not particularly good quality release and a 2 - 2.5 star (45%) rating is fair.

CATTLE PRESS Hordes To Abolish The Divine

Album · 2000 · Sludge Metal
Cover art Buy this album from MMA partners
UMUR
"Hordes To Abolish The Divine" is the debut full-length studio album by US, New York based sludge/hardcore act Cattle Press. The album was released through Hydra Head Records in February 2000. "Hordes To Abolish The Divine" turned out to be Cattle Press sole studio album in their original run as they disbanded in 2001 without releasing anything further. Before releasing "Hordes To Abolish The Divine" they released a demo, an EP, and a couple of splits with Sloth and Agoraphobic Nooebleed.

Cattle Press started out playing an ultra heavy and filthy sludge/hardcore style but they´ve cut quite a few of the sludge metal elements from their sound on this album. It´s still crushingly heavy and aggressive hardcore with sludge metal leanings, but this is more post-hardcore than sludge. "Hordes To Abolish The Divine" is quite the interesting and also pretty experimental hardcore release and I´m sometimes reminded of the caustic aggression and heaviness of Breach. A newer band like Code Orange have probably listened to this album as inspiration.

Featuring 13 tracks and a total playing time of 52:53 one could have feared that the album was too long for its own good as this type of music is often not varied enough for such long album lengths, but nothing could be further from the truth, as "Hordes To Abolish The Divine" is a nicely varied release. The vocals range from aggressive raw hardcore shouting to deeper almost death metal growling vocals, and the band change pace often, and all tracks feature intriguing and in some cases even unique songwriting ideas (the use of samples work very well too), making this an entertaining and interesting listen all the way through the playing time. And I haven´t even mentioned the suffocating, grim, and claustrophobic atmosphere Cattle Press create...it´s the sound of the apocalypse (or maybe the soundtrack to a post-nuclear war world).

The album features a heavy, brutal, and raw sounding production, which is the perfect sound for the material featured on the album. So Cattle Press have taken quite a few development steps since their minor release days, and "Hordes To Abolish The Divine" is a high quality release from them. A 3.5 - 4 star (75%) rating is deserved.

sludge metal movie reviews

ISIS Clearing The Eye

Movie · 2006 · Atmospheric Sludge Metal
Cover art Buy this album from MMA partners
Triceratopsoil
Probably only really for fans of ISIS (I mean, who else would buy a concert DVD than a fan of the band in question?), but an absolutely great experience. Witness an incredible band at their peak. The main feature here is the full 70 minute performance from Sydney Australia in 2005. Great cinematic camera work, a relaxing and overall fantastic performance of some of the best songs ISIS ever wrote. Top notch. No complaints here, though I'm a giant fanboy so take my opinion with a grain of salt or 10.

Most of the other live videos are curios, though they are quite good - not the same professional sound and video quality as the Australia concert.

I made my mom buy me this for Christmas a few years ago, ahaha

MASTODON The Workhorse Chronicles: The Early Years 2000-2005

Movie · 2006 · Sludge Metal
Cover art Buy this album from MMA partners
Kingcrimsonprog
The Workhorse Chronicles is a must have for any fan of the band. Period. The DVD contains a huge documentary, their first four music videos and live performances of just about every song the band had written up until the touring for Leviathan. The documentary is incredibly informative, with details on how the band formed, inter band relationships, the witting process, touring, their personal lives and what inspires them. Footage from their old bands, their earliest shows and backstage is mixed with candid interviews to let you in on just about every aspect of the band you could think of.

The dvd displays just what a down to earth collection of musicians Mastodon are, never acting like rock stars and always feeling honored to be where they are. While the dvd is completely serious and professional, fans of the band will already know what a humorous bunch of guys they are and will revel in the joking, sarcasm, unusual dreams and even an interview conducted in the shower.

Then you get the live performances taken from several sources, One concert while the band was still a Five Piece playing material off of the then upcomming LifesBlood EP which is recorded by the audience so isn’t of high audio/visual quality. Another Concert is from The Leviathan Tour is a sold out club, with higher Audio/visual quality and a career spanning track listing. Then there are several professionally recorded one off performances for television with superb sound and looks, With songs like ‘Workhorse,’ and ‘Mother Puncher,’ played to the highest standard with crystal clear audio. Finally the music videos which are welcome. Overall this dvd is a must have; with a superb documentary, four videos and an astonishing 29 live songs.

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