Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1994

DSBM

Emerged 1994 Origin Sweden / France Subgenres — Vocals Growled or shrieked
Heaviness
8
Speed
6
Melody
5

Growled or shrieked. Unintelligible without a lyric sheet. The thing most newcomers bounce off.

In short

Depressive suicidal black metal: slower tempos, wailing guitars and desperate vocals. The subject matter is heavy, and the genre is debated inside the scene itself.

How it sounds

  • Slower tempos with repetitive riffs in mournful minor keys.
  • Lo-fi production with distant, desperate vocals.
  • Long, monotonous structures built on repetition.

Hear what that means

  • Inert rather than cold

    Silencer - Death - Pierce Me

    Slow, thin and claustrophobic. Where the second wave sounds like a forest, this sounds like a bedroom, and the vocal is far more exposed than black metal's.

    Open on YouTube
  • The voice as the subject

    Shining - V: Halmstad

    Shrieked, sobbed and spoken by turns, mixed forward rather than buried. Black metal treats the voice as a texture; this treats it as the record's content.

    Open on YouTube
  • Hollow by construction

    Xasthur - Telepathic with the Deceased

    No audible bass, a thin machine-like drum sound, and long unresolved intervals. The absence of power is the effect being aimed at.

    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
60-140 bpm
Song length
5-10 min
Tuning
Standard or lower, deliberately badly intonated in places, with the guitars thin and the reverb long. Nothing here is tuned or recorded to sound competent.
Production
Raw to the point of hostility, frequently recorded alone at home. The lo-fi is not the second wave's mythic distance but a much more claustrophobic one — this sounds like a bedroom, not a forest.
Written about
Depression, Suicide, Isolation, Self-harm

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Slow, repetitive tremolo or simple arpeggios, often with a deliberately unresolved interval held for a long time. Where black metal is cold, this is inert.
  • Drums Frequently a cheap machine or a very simple human pattern, mixed thin. The absence of power is part of the effect.
  • Bass Usually absent or inaudible, which contributes to the genre's characteristic hollowness.
  • Vocals Shrieked, sobbed, wailed or spoken, and much more exposed in the mix than black metal's — the voice is the record's subject rather than one of its textures.

What it isn't

That the subject matter is a pose. Some of it certainly is, and the genre has an uncomfortable history of records whose authors were not posing at all. This encyclopedia describes it because it is a real and influential branch, and the honest note to attach is that it is the one genre here where the recommended approach is caution about what you are listening to and why.

Told apart from

  • Second wave The second wave is hostile and outward-facing. This uses the same tools for collapse rather than for attack, and it is far slower and sparser.
  • Atmospheric black metal Atmospheric black metal is about landscape and scale. This is about one person, and the intimacy is what makes it uncomfortable.
  • Funeral doom Both are extremely slow and about despair. Funeral doom is ritual and vast; this is personal and small.
  • Blackgaze / post-black Blackgaze takes similar emotional material toward beauty and release. DSBM refuses both.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

This branch, which appeared in Sweden and France in the mid-1990s, treats depression and despair as its central subject. Its aesthetics are debated critically within the scene itself, precisely because some bands have been accused of romanticising suffering rather than describing it. Musically, it significantly influenced blackgaze and the atmospheric wing.

Descended from

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.