Funeral doom
Growled or shrieked. Unintelligible without a lyric sheet. The thing most newcomers bounce off.
In short
The slowest metal in existence: under 40 bpm, organ, guttural vocals and fifteen-minute songs. Music for a single chord.
How it sounds
- Tempos under 50 bpm, often under 40 — the slowest metal there is.
- Chords held for tens of seconds, with organ or keyboards underneath.
- Sparse guttural vocals, ten- to twenty-minute pieces, minimal structures.
Hear what that means
- A chord, and its decay from 18:54
Thergothon - Stream from the Heavens
The riff has stopped being a sequence and become an event. Listen to how the chord dies in the room - the overtones beating against each other are the music.
Open on YouTube at 18:54 - Keyboards holding the gaps
Organ pads sustaining harmony while the guitars are silent between chords. Without them the record would be mostly space.
Open on YouTube - Patience as technique from 43:40
Mournful Congregation - The Book of Kings
Half an hour in one piece. The hardest thing here is the counting and the willingness to wait.
Open on YouTube at 43:40
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Every second here is the uploader's own, read from the recording's tracklist.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 25-50 bpm
- Song length
- 10-25 min
- Tuning
- A or lower, on strings so slack the pitch is barely defined. Tuning is chosen for how long a note will sustain rather than for what it plays.
- Production
- Enormous reverb, everything left to decay, and no compression to speak of. The recording is mostly the sound of a room after a chord has been struck.
- Written about
- Death, Grief without consolation, Ritual, Deep time
What each part is doing
- Guitar A chord struck and then left. At this tempo the riff has stopped being a sequence and become an event, and the decay is as much of the music as the attack.
- Keyboards Sustained organ or choir pads under everything, holding harmony while the guitars are silent between chords. Without them the record would be mostly gaps.
- Drums Individual hits minutes apart, played hard and left to ring. The hardest thing here is the counting and the patience.
- Vocals A very low growl, delivered slowly and mixed deep in the reverb, closer to liturgy than to metal singing.
What it isn't
That nothing is happening. What is happening is the decay: at this tempo the interest is in how a chord dies in a room, how the overtones beat against each other as it fades, and where the next event lands relative to your expectation of it. It requires a kind of listening most rock does not ask for, which is why the genre is small and why the people who like it are unusually devoted to it.
Told apart from
- Doom metal Doom is slow. This is a different order of slow — chord changes thirty seconds apart, and songs longer than most bands' albums.
- Death-doom Death-doom keeps melody, dynamics and a recognisable song. Funeral doom removes all three deliberately.
- Drone metal Drone metal abandons the chord change entirely, leaving sustain alone. Funeral doom still moves, barely.
- Atmospheric black metal Both use slowness to create scale. Atmospheric black metal does it with tremolo at speed; this does it by removing almost everything.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
Thergothon, a band of Finnish teenagers, recorded a demo in 1991 so slow it sounded like a playback error. Skepticism added the church organ and Evoken carried the formula to America. The genre has a few hundred bands and demands a patience not everyone has.
Descended from
Siblings on this branch