Drone Metal

Drone metal sits at 30 to 60 BPM or abandons measurable tempo altogether. Guitars play sustained tones, single notes, or extremely slow chord changes rather than riffs; distortion is total and the low end is mixed to be felt physically more than heard. Drums, when present, often hit one beat per measure or simply punctuate. Vocals are rare and, when they appear, take the form of throat singing, whispers, or distant cleans. A typical piece runs 15 to 25 minutes and depends on playback at high volume — much of the music's content exists in subsonic frequencies that smaller speakers can't reproduce.

The Olympia, Washington duo Earth, led by Dylan Carlson, established the template on Earth 2 (1993): three pieces totaling 73 minutes of slow, distorted guitar over near-static drums. Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley formed Sunn O))) in Seattle in 1998 explicitly as a homage to Earth, then extended the sound through collaborations with Norwegian black metal vocalist Attila Csihar, harpist Mami Sasaki, and various drone-adjacent figures. The genre's institutional home became the Southern Lord label (founded by Anderson in 1998), which also released Khanate, Boris, and other adjacent acts.

Volume matters more here than in any other metal subgenre — what reads as boring at conversational levels becomes physically immersive at high volume. Listen for the upper-harmonic content drifting above the bass tone; it often contains microtonal beating between strings that creates the sense of motion. The structural events are tiny: a new note enters every several minutes, a vocal phrase emerges, a cymbal swell builds. Sunn O))) shows often pump the venue with fog so the audience experiences the sound visually as well.

Sunn O)))'s Black One (2005) at significant volume in a dark room — give it the full 30 minutes without distraction. For more textured composition, follow with Monoliths & Dimensions (2009), which adds horns, choir, and Csihar's vocals.

Sunn O))) perform in hooded robes obscuring their faces, treating the stage presentation as a fixed visual language. The band's name is taken from the Sunn amplifier brand logo, and early gigs reportedly used so much amplification that members wore earplugs designed for industrial workers.