Post-metal
In a way similar to the predecessor genres post-rock and post-hardcore, post-metal offsets the darkness and intensity of extreme metal with an emphasis on atmosphere, emotion, and even "revelation", developing an expansive but introspective sound variously imbued with elements of ambient, noise, psychedelic, progressive, and classical music, and often shoegaze and art rock.
The widespread acclaim of Deafheaven, who succeeded Alcest in combining black metal and shoegaze (a fusion nicknamed blackgaze), made this global post-metal underground more visible.
The groundwork for post-metal was laid in the 1980s and early 1990s by various artists (mostly in the US) combining heavy metal and punk rock sounds with an "avant-garde sensibility", such as the Melvins (particularly on 1991's Bullhead),[3] The Flying Luttenbachers, Justin Broadrick of Napalm Death and Godflesh,[2] Swans, Gore, Last Exit, Glenn Branca, Rollins Band, and Fugazi.
[3] Furthermore, Fact writer Robin Jahdi highlights the late 1990s US noisecore of bands such as Botch, Kiss It Goodbye, the Dillinger Escape Plan and Coalesce, who merged brutal metallic hardcore with jazz into fast-and-complex compositions, as a fundamental influence on post-metal.
[4] Writing for Bandcamp Daily, Jon Wiederhorn also noted the significance of Botch and Cave In,[3] while Converge have been connected to post-metal through their longer songs since the closing track of their seminal 2001 album Jane Doe.
In particular, their 2002 album Oceanic – which showcased "buzzing washes of multilayered sound that ebbed and flowed in intensity", combining the "barbed guitars" and "shouted vocals" of post-hardcore with "meandering, psychedelic progressions"[3] – has become regarded as a classic of the genre.
[3] Wolves in the Throne Room, who became a significant act for American black metal by the release of their 2007 album Two Hunters, were also inspired by Neurosis in combining "ambience and violence" to craft deeply melancholic music.
[3] While all aforementioned post-metal pioneers are either from the US (Neurosis, Isis, Pelican, Agalloch, and Wolves in the Throne Room) or the UK (Broadrick's Godflesh and Jesu), the genre soon spread internationally.
It has also inspired a new wave of bands such as: Ghost Bath from North Dakota, who use undistorted guitar melodies to develop unsettling atmospheres; Austria's Harakiri for the Sky, whose despairing sound melds black metal and post-hardcore;[3] and the recent work of Oathbreaker, who are rooted in the Belgian dark hardcore scene of Amenra.
[3] The New York Times associated the term with a "wave of bands using metal as a jumping-off point for a range of experimental styles, dabbling in free jazz, minimalist post-rock, noise and even modern classical music.
[3] Writing for Slate in 2009, Simon Reynolds reflected: Post-rock doesn't have the same temporal aspect that post-disco or post-punk have; it's not about the ripples set in motion by a galvanizing "event."
For similar reasons, the term post-metal seems increasingly useful to describe the vast and variegated swath of genres (the thousand flavors of doom/black/death/grind/drone/sludge/etc., ad infinitum) that emerged from the early '90s onward.
Sometimes beat-free and ambient, increasingly the work of home-studio loners rather than performing bands, post-metal of the kind released by US labels like Hydra Head often seems to have barely any connection to metal as understood by, say, VH1 Classic doc-makers.
The continuity is less sonic but attitudinal: the penchant for morbidity and darkness taken to a sometimes hokey degree; the somber clothing and the long hair; the harrowed, indecipherably growled vocals; the bombastically verbose lyrics/song titles/band names.
