Sludge metal
Growled or shrieked. Unintelligible without a lyric sheet. The thing most newcomers bounce off.
In short
Doom plus filthy hardcore: feedback, screamed vocals and a guitar tone like Louisiana mud.
How it sounds
- Thick fuzzed guitar with feedback left running between riffs.
- Alternation between very slow tempos and hardcore outbursts.
- Screamed or howled vocals with lyrics about addiction, poverty and rage.
Hear what that means
- Slack strings
Eyehategod - Take as Needed for Pain
Tuned so low the strings buzz against the frets, with feedback left between riffs rather than edited out. The record is mixed to be physically uncomfortable.
Open on YouTube - Doom's tempo, hardcore's throat from 2:44
The clearest test between doom and sludge in one vocal: doom sings, cleanly and often high, and this screams.
Open on YouTube at 2:44 - The hinge between two genres
Noise rock's dissonance played at doom's tempo, on the record that most directly connects the two. Both Sonic Youth's world and Eyehategod's run through this band.
Open on YouTube
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 1 of 3 is cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 50-90 bpm
- Song length
- 5-9 min
- Tuning
- C, B or lower, on heavy strings kept slack — the strings are loose enough to buzz against the frets, and that buzz is part of the sound.
- Production
- Filthy and mid-heavy, recorded to sound corroded. Feedback is left between sections rather than edited out, and the whole record is mixed to feel physically uncomfortable.
- Written about
- Addiction, The American South, Self-destruction, Contempt
What each part is doing
- Guitar Doom's tempo with hardcore's attack: a riff dragged out past where it is comfortable, played with a lot of pick noise, and allowed to feed back into the next one.
- Bass Distorted to the same degree as the guitar and mixed level with it, which is what makes the low end feel like a single mass rather than two instruments.
- Drums Slow, heavy and slightly behind, with the cymbals bashed rather than played. The looseness is deliberate and much harder to fake than precision.
- Vocals Screamed rather than growled or sung — a high, throat-shredding scream that is the clearest inheritance from hardcore and the clearest break from doom.
What it isn't
That it is simply slow hardcore. The tempo is the least of it: sludge's identity is textural — slack strings buzzing, feedback held between riffs, everything recorded to sound degraded — and its subject matter is specific and regional. New Orleans in the early 1990s produced most of the founding records, and the addiction and heat and rot in them are not a pose adopted for effect.
Told apart from
- Doom metal Doom sings, cleanly and often high. Sludge screams. That single difference is the most reliable test there is between the two.
- Noise rock Sludge is noise rock's dissonance and hardcore's rage played at doom's tempo. The Melvins are the hinge between them.
- Post-metal / atmospheric sludge Post-metal takes sludge's riffs and puts post-rock's architecture around them — long builds, quiet passages, and a crescendo. Sludge has no interest in release.
- Stoner doom Stoner doom is the warm, groove-led answer to the same tuning and tempo. Same weight, opposite mood.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
In New Orleans at the end of the 1980s, Eyehategod combined Black Sabbath with hardcore and a production that sounds like a damp room. Melvins, up in Washington, had independently reached something similar and directly influenced Nirvana. The genre stays tightly bound to a specific place and its social conditions.
Descended from
Branches into
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Death-doom 2.0 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
- Beatdown / metallic hardcore 2.4 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.