‘Mammoth’s Tundra’, the current single from Sun Below, first began life in 2023, before going through “significant changes” to wind up being the massive behemoth that kicks off the band’s 2025. The opening riff shares a slow, classic doom sound, instantly advertising the band’s heavy feel. After several bars, maybe at the point you’d expect a vocal to appear or the riff to do something dramatically different, Sun Below merely choose to heavy everything, whilst simultaneously slowing down to a sludgy crawl. The appearance of a vocal lends something Melvins-esque, before the doomy vibes slide into a slightly more melodic blues-doom sound, by which time, you’re either completely behind the band, or not. Working a Sabbath-on-steroids groove, the combo of drums and guitar latch onto an even deeper brand of doom, before the sludge comes back for a second assault.
Tag Archives: doom metal
Check out ‘Sentinel Hill’, the new video by In Dakhma
When a band is pitched as “death metal”, there are certain tropes that the listener will expect. There are the pnrumatic drums – an integral part of the death metal sound, from the genre’s formative years, due to the brutal assault of bands like Suffocation – and the guttural vocals, often associated with the genre’s bigger names like Death and Entombed. You’d probably also expect to hear speed driven, huge sounding bass grinds, often providing a pivotal aspect to the aural assault.
Croatian band In Dakhma’s debut album ‘He Who Sows The Ground’ features all of that…and more. Check out ‘Sacrum’ and you’ll find a classic death metal sound delivered with a genuine enthusiasm; listen to ‘In Dogma’ and you’ll discover a hardcore infused bass part colliding with thrash riffs that are direct descendants from Sepultura’s massively influential ‘Arise’. Elsewhere, ‘Lies Beyond The Golden Ruins’ colours the band’s riffs with a hard nod towards groove metal, and the epic closer ‘Tower of Silence’ introduces sludgy riffs to bring something even heavier to the fore.
VOLT RITUAL – Swamp Lake City EP
From the moment their self-titled release arrived on Bandcamp in 2022, Polish doom/stoner/space rock band Volt Ritual proved to be an act headed for greatness. Whether channelling Black Sabbath on that debut, or putting elements of Hawkwind and Neu! through a much heavier filter on their ‘Return To Jupiter’ follow up, the musicians never sounded anything less than a hundred percent committed to delivering the riffs.
NEGATIVE THIRTEEN – Recover What You Can
On their full length release ‘Mourning Asteri’ from 2022, Negative Thirteen tapped into a brilliantly heavy sound. The bulk of the material fused classic doom metal riffs with a sludgy aesthetic which resulted in a well orchestrated, uncompromising record. Unlike some doom-sludge acts, though, the album flaunted a brilliant production job which placed as much interest on the bass as the sledgehammer guitar parts. It could be argued that the material often valued massive riffs over any kind of immediacy, but there was no doubt that this band meant business.
Their 2025 follow up, ‘Recover What You Can’ is often just as heavy, but with a couple of tracks favouring an epic length allowing the doomy band more room for manouevre, it sometimes feels as if Negative Thirteen haven’t so much “branched out”, but descended even more deeply into their own world of sludge derived sounds.
CURSE THE SON – Delirium
Sixteen years into their career, Curse The Son have unleashed a devastating work in ‘Delirium’. By taking many cues from classic stoner and doom bands and then adding their own brand of extra sludge, this fifth album from the New Haven heavyweights certainly doesn’t sell itself short in terms of riffs. The record’s general heaviness will be enough to win over a huge section of the metal community, but some already intense workouts take on new levels of darkness when the arrangements are peppered with some very bleak lyrical concerns.