Doom metal
Sung. Melodic singing throughout.
In short
The branch most faithful to Black Sabbath: slow tempos, thick riffs and crushing atmosphere. The weight comes from space, not speed.
How it sounds
- Tempos between 60 and 100 bpm, with sustained chords and plenty of space.
- Thick guitar tone, usually down-tuned, with analogue fuzz.
- Oppressive atmosphere and themes of fate, the occult or depression.
Hear what that means
- Where the tuning came from
Black Sabbath - Master of Reality
Tony Iommi lost the tips of two fingers in a factory press and tuned down three semitones so the strings would pull less. Every down-tuned guitar in this encyclopedia descends from an industrial accident, and this is the record where you first hear it.
Open on YouTube - The drag
The drums are fractionally behind the beat and stay there. It is not sloppiness - hold a stopwatch to it and the lag is consistent - and it is what makes doom feel heavy at a tempo a ballad could match.
Open on YouTube - The voice doom never gave up
Candlemass - Epicus Doomicus Metallicus
A full, high, operatic clean vocal over the heaviest thing on the record. Every other extreme genre in this tree eventually abandoned singing; doom decided the weight came from the guitars and left the melody alone.
Open on YouTube
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Each opens at the start of the recording.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 50-110 bpm
- Song length
- 6-12 min
- Tuning
- C or D standard on heavy strings. Doom turns the amp up rather than the gain, so the distortion is the speaker breaking up rather than a pedal.
- Production
- Analogue and roomy, the guitar left fuzzy rather than tightened up. Closer to a 1971 hard rock record than to anything else filed under metal.
- Written about
- Despair, Drugs, The occult, Ruin and aftermath
What each part is doing
- Guitar One riff, repeated, at a tempo slow enough that you hear each note decay. Bends and vibrato do the work that a faster genre would give to another note.
- Bass Loud, and frequently the thing actually carrying the song while the guitar is left ringing out.
- Drums Playing fractionally behind the beat on purpose, with crashes left to ring rather than choked. The drag is the feel.
- Vocals Sung, usually clean and often high. Doom is the extreme genre that never gave up melody, which is why it is the easiest of them to start with.
What it isn't
That slow means easy, or that doom is simply metal with the tempo down. Slow is the hard setting: at 60 bpm there is nowhere for a weak riff to hide, no speed to carry a passage, and four seconds of silence between chords that the band has to make feel intentional rather than empty. Doom is also the oldest branch here rather than a later softening of metal — Black Sabbath in 1970 is already doom, and everything faster came afterwards.
Told apart from
- Stoner rock Stoner rock is doom that grooves — the same tuning and the same fuzz, but the riffs swing and the mood is warm rather than bleak.
- Sludge metal Sludge is doom with hardcore's anger and hardcore's vocals. If it is screamed, it has left doom.
- Funeral doom Funeral doom halves this tempo again, until the riff stops being a riff and becomes a chord change every thirty seconds.
- Gothic metal Gothic metal grew straight out of doom and kept the tempo, then added keyboards, a second sung voice and romance. Doom stays a guitar band with a grievance.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
Doom is the branch that never left Black Sabbath: the same tempos, the same tritone, the same atmosphere. Pentagram and Saint Vitus kept the sound alive through the 1980s while everyone else sped up. Candlemass gave it its epic form, and sludge, drone, funeral and stoner doom split off from there.
Descended from
Branches into
On the timeline
Siblings on this branch