Explore World Metal
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Piles of Festering Decomposition (2020)
Featured Black Metal Album
Give Me Back My World (2025)
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Featured Grindcore Album
The Anthropocene Extinction (2015)
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Browse World Metal Bands
11 bands found
Austin, Texas three-piece American Sharks blast through a high-octane hybrid of punk, stoner metal, and pop hooks that sounds like Weezer collided with a monster truck. Since their 2013 self-titled debut, frontman Roky Moon has led the band through relentless touring alongside heavyweights like GWAR, Clutch, and Red Fang. Their riff-driven approach strips away pretense in favor of pure, sweat-drenched rock and roll energy.
Bongzilla is a stoner, sludge, and doom metal band from Madison, Wisconsin, formed in 1995, whose catalog is among the most explicitly cannabis-themed in American heavy metal. The band released a string of albums on Relapse Records—including Stash (1999), Apogee (2001), Gateway (2002), and Amerijuanican (2005)—before entering a hiatus from 2009 to 2015. After reforming and returning to the touring circuit, they released their sixth studio album Dab City via Heavy Psych Sounds in June 2023, cementing their status as seminal figures in the American sludge underground.
Both emerging from Richmond, Virginia's extraordinarily fertile doom scene, Cough and Windhand joined forces for the 2013 split LP Reflection of the Negative, a 37-minute immersive descent through suffocating sludge and narcotic stoner doom that earned an effusive Pitchfork review and positioned Richmond as a center of American heavy music. Separately, Cough — formed in 2005 — trafficked in harrowing, noise-infused doom, while Windhand — formed in 2008 — developed a more melodic, hypnotic strain of the genre, their collaboration distilling both bands' strengths into a landmark document of 21st-century doom.
Los Angeles' Deathchant take a DIY punk approach to heavy psych and stoner metal, channeling '70s hard rock twin-guitar harmonies in the vein of Wishbone Ash and Thin Lizzy through a rawer, hardcore-influenced lens. Signed to Riding Easy Records, their third album 'Thrones' showcases fluid tandem guitar acrobatics married to an unpolished, punk-rock urgency.
Dopethrone are a Montreal sludge metal band whose sound is filthy, slow-burning, and deliberately abrasive. Formed in 2008, the group developed a DIY identity rooted in stoner doom, sludge, and a grimy sense of humor, with albums such as Demonsmoke, Dark Foil, III, Hochelaga, Transcanadian Anger, and Broke Sabbath building a devoted following among listeners who like their heavy music raw rather than polished. Dopethrone fit metal scope directly through down-tuned riffs, crawling tempos, blown-out bass, harsh vocals, and the oppressive atmosphere of doom and sludge. Their songs often feel less like compositions arranged for radio than like fumes rising from a basement amplifier, but the band has a strong instinct for groove under the grime. The Montreal setting, especially the Hochelaga reference point, gives the music a local character: dirty, stubborn, and proudly outside clean mainstream rock manners. Dopethrone's appeal lies in commitment. They do not chase elegance or technical display. They make heavy music that sounds sticky, hostile, and physical, turning repetition and distortion into a kind of low-end punishment.
Dusted Angel formed in Santa Cruz in 2008, though several of its members had musical roots together that stretched further back into the local heavy and punk scenes. The band brought together Clifford Dinsmore on vocals, Eric Fieber and Scott Stevens on guitars, Elliot Young on bass, and later Steve Ilse on drums, creating a sound that moved away from speed and into thick, riff-centered weight. Their music draws from doom, stoner metal, and heavy rock, with long grooves, Sabbathian pacing, and a rhythmic patience that gives the riffs room to breathe. Earth Sick Mind introduced the group's low-slung attack, combining gravelly vocals, heavy blues movement, and a sense of Californian underground rock grit. The later Side of the Dirt continued that direction with a seasoned feel, emphasizing chemistry over flash. Dusted Angel's music works because it sounds like players making the kind of heavy rock they would want to hear themselves: loud, warm, unpretentious, and rooted in the slow physical pleasure of a massive riff.
Floor formed in Miami, Florida in 1992 and developed a distinctive two-guitar, no-bass sludge and stoner metal approach built around severely down-tuned strings and extremely loose low-end techniques — including what critics described as a "bomb note" — that gave their sound unusual sonic weight. The band released a self-titled album and the EP Madonna before disbanding in 2004, with guitarist Steve Brooks going on to co-found Torche. A reunion beginning in 2010 and a fuller reformation in 2013 produced Dove and Oblation (2014), restoring Floor's influence on the Miami doom and sludge scene and introducing the band to a new generation of listeners.
Gnome formed in Antwerp in 2016 and turned a compact trio setup into one of the most distinctive stoner-rock identities in Europe. The band's music is riff-heavy, playful, and deceptively tight, combining fuzzed-out guitar, punchy bass, agile drumming, and vocals that often lean into absurd fantasy imagery. Father of Time introduced their instrumental and heavy-psych leanings, while King pushed them toward a broader audience with songs that paired massive grooves with odd humor and memorable videos. Tracks such as "Wenceslas," "Ambrosius," and "Kraken Wanker" show the band's balance of heaviness and mischief: the riffs are serious, but the presentation keeps a surreal grin on its face. Vestiges of Verumex Visidrome expanded the mythology and sharpened the songwriting, with Gnome sounding more confident in their blend of stoner metal, progressive movement, and strange narrative energy. Their appeal lies in contrast. The music can be crushing and precise, but it never feels self-serious; Gnome make heavy rock that is technically strong, rhythmically satisfying, and joyfully weird.
Rabies Caste were an Israeli sludge and noise rock band from Tel Aviv, active from 1995 to 2003, operating at the intersection of slow, abrasive sludge metal and confrontational noise rock. Formed from the remnants of the bands To Kill Mother and Cradlenoise, the trio released albums including Let the Soul Out and Cut the Vein and For the Vomiting Tractor Drivers, earning underground recognition for their unrelenting heaviness and willingness to push sonic extremity beyond genre comfort zones.
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World Metal Index is an index of World heavy metal bands — death metal, black metal, thrash metal, doom metal, metalcore, hardcore punk, and all heavy music. Browse bands by genre, find metal concerts near you, and discover the World metal scene.