DOOM

Doom metal is a subgenre of heavy metal, which origins can be mainly searched in bands like Black Sabbath, Pentagram and Saint Vitus.

Black Sabbath was in fact a British heavy metal band, formed in Birmingham in 1968. They were among the first heavy metal groups in history and contributed significantly to the development of the genre and indeed also contributed significantly to the birth of doom metal and stoner rock.

The music of Black Sabbath had from the beginning heavy and dark sounds, with references to the devil and the occult. In the song Black Sabbath Tony Iommi uses the "Devil's Triad" (a riff based on three tones, G - Db - D), a musical interval strongly dissonant and disorienting that in the Middle Ages was called "diabolus in music".

In 1971 Black Sabbath released a very successful third album, Master of Reality, the band's darkest and most introspective album. Together with previous albums Black Sabbath and Paranoid, it's considered fundamental for the birth of doom metal and sludge metal.

Take a listen to: Black Sabbath, Hand of Doom, Iron Man, Into the Void.

Pentagram also are iconic within the world's heavy metal scene because they are precursors, of a leaden, dark and slowed down style that would later give rise to doom metal.The history of the band is rather troubled and made up of valuable releases, but also by numerous dissolution and line-up changes that will see the historic singer Bobby Liebling as the only permanent member.

Take a look to this documentary about the last reunion of the band and about the lifestyle of Liebling:

Saint Vitus are among the best known names in the doom scene and among the prosecutors, in the eighties, of the stylistic development started by Black Sabbath in the previous decade. They resumed the slow and lysergic pace, here taken to the extreme, mixing sounds and rereads according to the attitude of the then emerging heavy metal movement.

They were mostly acclaimed between 1987 and 1990 thanks to the singer Scott "Wino" Weinrich, one of the icons of the scene and already frontman of the group The Obsessed and previously of Warhorse.

Listen to their most famous album: Born too late [1987].