Fear, Emptiness, Decibel: Our Favorite Magazine Presents “The Top 100 Doom Metal Albums of All Time”

For all the lists MetalSucks does—personally, I prefer “The 101 Rules of Nu-Metal,”#77 most of all—I don’t think you guys have ever cranked out a community-sourced doom list. YOB, Electric Wizard and Pallbearer have gotten props recently, and we’re right there with you—all three are repped in our Top 100 Doom Metal Albums of All Time special issue.

This is the time of year when we kill ourselves banging out an extra issue with 100 percent new and exclusive content, and we couldn’t be happier to finally unveil this malformed monstrosity. In case you’re hung up on what exactly we’re talking about when we say “doom metal,” let’s refer to the immortal words of Sergeant D, from his 2011 thought-piece “Which Is Better: ‘GRINDCORE’ or ‘DOOM’????”

“IMO, doom is metal that is like half hippie, half emo. The hippie part is that their songs are really long and slow like the Doobie Brothers or Grateful Dead (probably because when you smoke a lot of weed you lose track of time and space out, so you think that playing the same riff for 10 minutes is a good idea). The emo part is how their lyrics are always about being sad, suiciding yourself and other stuff that overweight teenage girls with low self-esteem and My Chemical Romance tattoos are into.”

That about sums it up! Hence, we studied six decades of proto-doom, funeral doom, gothic doom, stoner doom, melodic doom and whatever else the hippies and emos came up with to generate this list. The results: 100 unassailable exemplars of the genre, supplemented with brand new interview content, Top 5 lists from a smorgasbord of doom’s living legends, and a brand new Decibel Hall of Fame on Cathedral’s originally misunderstood sophomore classic The Ethereal Mirror. That’s a lot of doom! (Gloom sold separately.)

Our annual special issues are not included with subscriptions—sorry, kids—but can be obtained cheaper than the newsstand cost of a regular issue right here. So, go indulge in the sadness. Like the great Phil Connors once told us, “It’s cold out there… it’s cold out there every day.”