The Best Doom Metal Albums of the 2010s

Neurot Recordings put out four songs and sixty-two minutes of them, engineered by Billy Barnett with Brad Boatright mastering. Mike Scheidt has fronted the Eugene trio since 1996, and this is where his writing finally caught up with his volume. Marrow runs past eighteen minutes before it earns one clean vocal line, and when that arrives the riff underneath stops fighting it.

Billy Anderson recorded and mixed it at Type Foundry in Portland, and the difference from the debut is that you can finally hear everything Pallbearer are doing. Profound Lore issued it in August 2014. Worlds Apart opens on a lead figure that sounds like grief given a melody, then hands Brett Campbell a chorus he sings rather than intones.

One song, eighty-three minutes, no guitarist anywhere — Dylan Desmond plays a six-string bass and Jesse Shreibman plays drums and Hammond organ. Billy Anderson produced this one too. Mirror Reaper folds in unused vocal takes by cofounder Adrian Guerra, who died in 2016, and the passage where his voice surfaces is the hinge the whole piece turns on.

Relapse put this out in 2013 and it became the Richmond band's first Billboard entry, at number 24 on the Heatseekers chart. Dorthia Cottrell sings through the fuzz rather than over it, which is the whole trick. Boleskine closes the record at just over thirty minutes and holds its nerve through long stretches where almost nothing happens.

Dave Otero produced, mixed and mastered the whole thing at Flatline Audio, which is why a doom record from 2016 has the clarity of a Maiden album. 20 Buck Spin released it that October. Hunted takes thirteen and a half minutes to finish the record, and the harmonised leads running through it are straight NWOBHM slowed to a funeral tempo.

Two electric violins are the point here — Sarah Pendleton and Kim Pack matter as much as Rebecca Vernon's guitar, and Magnus Andersson mixed and mastered it at Endarker Studios in Sweden. The Usher opens the record with fourteen minutes of violin sawing against a downtuned riff, detuned just enough to be unpleasant on purpose. Profound Lore, 2013.

Stickman in Europe, Armageddon in the States, June 2017 — and the Massachusetts band brought guests into the studio, with Mike Risberg and Michael Samos adding guitar, keys and pedal steel. Sanctuary opens on a riff that keeps mutating instead of repeating. Border case: doom's chords played at heavy-psych speed, closer to prog than to Sabbath by the end.

Gilead Media put out seventy-four minutes of it in March 2014, recorded and mixed by James Whitten. Baton Rouge's finest are a sludge band who write like a folk band, which is why the short acoustic interludes sit beside the crawl without sounding like a break. Feral Faun rides one progression for nine minutes and the vocal never lets up once.

Cambridge, England is where this came from, originally issued in 2011. Spotify carries two listings — one dated 2011 and one dated 2012 for the reissue — and the 2011 edition is the one linked, bonus track Down to the Fire included. I'll Cut You Down buries the vocal under tape hiss on purpose, and the guitars sound like a Hammer horror soundtrack played too loud.

Their own drummer, Esben Willems, recorded, mixed and mastered it, which explains a record that sounds like one enormous amplifier in an empty room. RidingEasy released it in April 2015. Vænir closes the album on a riff slow enough that you can count the individual pick strokes, and Spotify keeps the ligature in the title rather than spelling it out.

Formed in Lyndhurst, New Jersey in 1992, Evoken had been doing this for twenty years before Profound Lore released this one in July 2012. Atra Mors opens the album with a death-growl set against a keyboard line high enough to belong to a different record, and that contrast is the band's whole method. Funeral doom at its least apologetic.

William Hope Hodgson's shipwreck novel supplies the plot, and the German band — funeral doom since 2004 — spend an hour and six minutes on it. The Weedmen alternates clean, almost post-rock guitar with a growl pitched somewhere below the hull, and never rushes the switch. Spotify's listing adds a bonus track, The Light in the Weed (Mary Madison), at the end.

Napalm Records, 2014, with Chris Fielding on bass having joined the year before. Jon Davis tunes down far enough that the riffs stop being chords and start being weather. Foehammer is the one to test a speaker with: two notes, repeated, for long enough that the repetition becomes the melody. Border case: caveman sludge more than traditional doom.