Drone metal
Instrumental. Usually no vocals at all.
In short
Sustained notes at extreme volume, with almost no rhythm. You listen with your body more than your ears.
How it sounds
- Chords or notes sustained for minutes at a time, with no perceptible rhythm.
- Extreme concert volume, with the emphasis on low frequencies felt physically.
- Controlled feedback and texture in place of melody or structure.
Hear what that means
- A chord, and an hour from 57:30
Struck and sustained, with the amplifier's feedback doing everything that happens next. The playing is minimal and the listening is not.
Open on YouTube at 57:30 - The amplifier as the instrument from 2:17
The band is named after an amplifier brand. What is being recorded is what happens between a wall of speakers and a room at extreme volume.
Open on YouTube at 2:17 - Where drone acquires an orchestra from 17:35
Sunn O))) - Monoliths & Dimensions
Brass, strings and a choir arranged over the same sustained guitar. Proof the genre had somewhere to go.
Open on YouTube at 17:35
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
- 10-40 bpm
- Song length
- 15-60 min
- Tuning
- A or lower on very heavy strings, or nothing recognisable as a tuning at all — several of these records are a chord sustained past the point where pitch stops being the subject.
- Production
- Enormously loud and enormously long, recorded to capture amplifier behaviour rather than performance. The record is a document of what a wall of speakers does over an hour.
- Written about
- None, usually, Ritual, Physical sensation rather than emotion
What each part is doing
- Guitar One chord, struck and sustained, with the amplifier's feedback and natural distortion doing everything that happens next. The playing is minimal and the listening is not.
- Amplifier The actual instrument. Sunn O))) are named after an amplifier brand, and the records are about what happens between a speaker and a room at extreme volume.
- Bass Doubling the guitar an octave down so the fundamental is below what most systems reproduce — you feel it rather than hear it.
- Vocals Usually absent. Where present, chanted, whispered or processed beyond recognition, and treated as one more sustained texture.
What it isn't
That there is nothing to listen to. The content is timbral: overtones beating against each other, the room's resonances being excited and decaying, and the physical effect of frequencies below hearing. It asks for a kind of attention rock does not normally require, and at low volume on small speakers it genuinely does not work — this is one of very few genres where the playback conditions are part of the composition.
Told apart from
- Funeral doom Funeral doom still moves — chord changes minutes apart. Drone metal frequently does not change at all.
- Stoner doom Stoner doom repeats a riff. Drone removes the riff and keeps only the tone.
- Doom metal Doom is a song genre with slow songs in it. Drone is not a song genre, and expecting one is the usual reason people bounce off it.
- Post-metal / atmospheric sludge Both use long forms and volume. Post-metal builds and releases; drone refuses to do either.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
Dylan Carlson, working as Earth, applied La Monte Young's minimalist ideas to distorted guitar in 1993. Sunn O))) turned the concept into performance: robes, fog, walls of amplifiers, shows in which no recognisable note is played. It is the closest point between metal and contemporary sound art.
Descended from
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Beatdown / metallic hardcore 4.6 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.