This page gathers the bands of post metal, also written post-metal, together with a handful of avant-garde metal outfits that bend the genre from the other side. Expect long songs, slow builds and a very loose idea of what a chorus is.

The short version

Post-metal is rooted in heavy metal but looks past its rules. It takes the weight and darkness of extreme metal and pours it into long, loosely structured pieces that grow through crescendos and repeated themes rather than verses and choruses. Guitars soaked in effects and drums carry the music; the vocals, usually screamed or growled, often work as one more layer of texture, and many bands in the style are wordless. The genre took shape in the 1990s in the United States and England. Neurosis, from Oakland, California, is the name almost everyone starts with, and Isis, from Boston, turned the sound into a template for the next decade. Cult of Luna in Sweden, Amenra in Belgium and Year of No Light in France carried it into Europe.

The “experimental” half of this page covers bands that the usual reference works file under avant-garde metal: Sigh from Tokyo, Kayo Dot from Boston and the Norwegian duo Solefald. They do not share the post-metal blueprint, but they share its habit of treating metal as a starting point rather than a set of rules.

From hardcore basements to slow-motion epics

The groundwork was laid in the 1980s and early 1990s, mostly in American underground rock. The Melvins, especially their 1991 album “Bullhead”, Swans, Justin Broadrick’s work in Napalm Death and Godflesh, and noise-minded hardcore bands are usually named as the ancestors. Two 1992 records are the ones most often cited as the first true post-metal albums: Godflesh’s “Pure” and Neurosis’s “Souls at Zero”. Neurosis had formed in Oakland in 1985 as a hardcore band, and over a few records it slowed down, stretched out and grew heavier. Guitarist and singer Steve Von Till later explained the shift as something that came out of playing loud, hypnotic music on stage.

The record that fixed the style in place was Neurosis’s “Through Silver in Blood”, released by Relapse in April 1996. Terrorizer later credited it with more or less inventing the genre, and Fact named it the best post-metal album ever made. Neurosis also gave the movement an infrastructure: the band’s own label, Neurot Recordings, later released records by younger groups, among them Amenra’s “Mass V”.

The second wave was led by Isis, formed in Boston in the autumn of 1997 by Aaron Turner, Jeff Caxide, Chris Mereschuk and Aaron Harris. Turner had already founded the Hydra Head label in 1993. The band’s 2002 album “Oceanic”, released by Ipecac, brought in a gentler, post-rock side and female guest vocals from Maria Christopher of the band 27. Pitchfork’s Chris Ott scored it 9.1 out of 10, Terrorizer named it album of the year, and Rock-A-Rolla’s Vuk Vulcic called it the standard every later post-metal album would be judged by. Its shadow is long: Cult of Luna, formed in Umeå in 1998 out of the hardcore band Eclipse, cite it as an influence on their 2004 album “Salvation”.

Not everyone likes the label. Metal Hammer’s Tom O’Boyle has called the term nebulous, and Fact’s Robin Jahdi pointed out that Neurosis and Isis do not actually sound much alike. Writing in Slate in 2009, Simon Reynolds argued that the bond between these bands and metal is more about attitude than sound: a shared taste for darkness and drama. That is a fair description of the whole page.

The experimental edge

The three avant-garde metal bands here come from very different places. Sigh was formed in Tokyo in 1989 by bassist, singer and keyboard player Mirai Kawashima, who still leads it; its debut album “Scorn Defeat” came out in 1993 on a Norwegian label, and “Imaginary Sonicscape” followed on Century Media in 2001. Kayo Dot was started in Boston in 2002 by Toby Driver after the end of his previous band, Maudlin of the Well, and its debut “Choirs of the Eye” appeared in late 2003 on Tzadik, John Zorn’s avant-garde label. Solefald, formed in Norway in August 1995, is the duo of Cornelius Jakhelln and Lars Are “Lazare” Nedland, whose albums run from “The Linear Scaffold” in 1997 to the two-part “Icelandic Odyssey” of 2005 and 2006.

Year of No Light, from Bordeaux, shows how fluid the boundaries are. The band formed in 2001 as a sludge and post-metal group with a singer; in 2008 it dropped the vocalist and became a wordless sextet, adding black metal, doom, drone and dark ambient colours on “Ausserwelt” and “Tocsin”.

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The bands in this guide

Eight bands, from the Oakland pioneers to the Belgian, Swedish, French, Japanese and Norwegian bands who took the idea somewhere else. Each card opens the band’s page and its album guides.

Elsewhere on Prog Atlas

Two bands that live under other scenes on this site belong in the same conversation. The Ocean, founded in Berlin in 2001 by guitarist Robin Staps, lists post-metal first among its styles; it sits in my Modern Progressive Rock section because of how far its records reach into progressive metal. Tool is the other one: its music was already being described as post-metal as early as 1993, before the term had settled on anyone else.

If you came here from Neurosis or Cult of Luna and want to cross over into prog proper, I put together a list of prog albums for Neurosis listeners and another one built around Cult of Luna.

Where to start

I would start at the root with “Souls at Zero” (1992), one of the two records most often named as the first post-metal album, and then move to “Through Silver in Blood” (1996), which Rolling Stone’s Steve Smith called the band’s “transformative masterpiece” and which AllMusic’s Eduardo Rivadavia gave a perfect score. Next comes “Oceanic” (2002) by Isis, the album that much of the later scene measured itself against. For the Swedish branch, “Salvation” (2004) is the Cult of Luna record the band itself links to “Oceanic”. To hear the wordless side, try “Ausserwelt” (2010), the first Year of No Light album after the band dropped its singer. And for a bridge into progressive metal, “Pelagial” (2013) by The Ocean came on CD with a second, fully wordless disc next to the version with vocals, so you can hear the same music both ways.

Related scenes

The heavier, more technical side of the same story lives in Tech & Extreme Prog Metal, while Progressive Metal covers the melodic, song-based tradition. The quiet half of post-metal’s family tree is in Post-Rock & Math Rock, and the avant-garde streak continues in RIO & Avant-Prog.

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