Last Book Before Doomsday

A few years ago I compiled and revised various German reviews and analyses, gradually turning them into a book on Funeral Doom – one I kept refining over time. After Åbstand #2 failed to see the light of day, I revisited the topic with more intensity, rewriting much and incorporating more theoretical foundation into Funeral Doom, as well as introducing more Funeral Doom into various theories. The response from publishers I contacted was uniformly positive, though always accompanied by a big BUT. Despite the varying degrees of editorial work that were deemed necessary, one point remained constant and clear: In the German-speaking market, such a work wouldn’t find a viable audience, because Funeral Doom is a niche, my language is a barrier, and the theoretical material I draw from sociology, psychology, philosophy, and physics is overwhelming. Who would want to, should, or could buy and read it? This statement can be the compression:

A great work, but not commercially viable for our publishing house.

– Yeah, thank you, thought so …

But what should I do with this body of work?
My English is decent, but honestly, I don’t think I could translate the entire book, not in one go, not with all those theories. So I’m choosing an alternative route… I’ll try to translate excerpts from Last Book Before Doomsday and use them as articles and reviews. Here’s the start with the overdue narration of the History of Funeral Doom from my subjective perspective and knowledge.

A Brief History of Funeral Doom

So, what you get here, is an concise history, focusing on works deemed essential within Funeral Doom. The attempt to write a map of the genre is based on success and recognition within the Funeral Doom scene, addressing works that had an impact beyond the genre’s boundaries. This approach cannot claim completeness, but instead offers an insight into key works. Just as with other lists, it should be noted that such an enumeration may seem incomplete at certain points or may even appear filled with the wrong releases. In a genre like Funeral Doom, which remains largely uncanonized, subjective decisions are inevitable.
A cartographic consideration of Funeral Doom requires not only a chronology of works but also a reflection on the aesthetic and philosophical dimensions of the genre. Through the lens of Lyotard, Adorno, Deleuze, and Derrida, the history of Funeral Doom reveals tensions and potential, from the aesthetics of slowness to the deconstruction of musical conventions.

A Chronicle

The rough overview of important albums begins with Winter’s Into Darkness from 1990. The album, closely tied to the post-punk/post-hardcore-influenced crust scene (which at the time wasn’t yet labeled as such), is denser, heavier, and darker than anything else that could be mentioned. Into Darkness stands as a precursor or pioneering work of Funeral Doom. Following in this lineage of pioneers are the later central band Thergothon with the demo Fhtagn nagh Yog-Sothoth (1991), as well as diSEMBOWELMENT with the EP Dusk (1992) and the album Transcendence Into The Peripheral (1993), or Funeral with the demo Tristesse from the same year.
1994 and 1995 saw the release of the works that are now considered the “Holy Trinity” of Funeral Doom: Thergothon’s Stream from the Heavens, Skepticism’s Stormcrowfleet, and Esoteric’s Epistemological Despondency. The latter album from the inside view of one of the most important and popular albums of the genre remains a story yet to be fully told. Nevertheless, anyone who is not primarily interested in the genre itself but only in the universally recognized metal classics should already be well-served by Thergothon and Skepticism. Around this core, one can always add a few personal favorites. Not rarely, Funeral’s Tragedies is mentioned alongside the triptych. Oneiricon – The White Hypnotic by Ras Algethi also came out in 1995, though it stands as an example of the early Funeral Doom releases that are largely forgotten today, representing Italian Funeral Doom, which, as a cultural and heterotopic event, receives little attention.
After the foundation laid by Thergothon, Skepticism, Esoteric, and Winter, there was a period of little notable output. Releases like Tears laid in Earth by The 3rd and the Mortal are considered classics, but only partially had their foot in the Funeral Doom genre.
The genre never followed a linear development, but rather followed a rhizomatic model (cf. Deleuze & Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia), where influences from Gothic Doom, Ambient, and Depressive Black Metal interwove and reinvented the genre without denying its core aesthetics. It branches out, forms connections, and breaks through established hierarchies. Precursor works like Into Darkness or Tristesse are not the beginning of a straight-line development, but rather are nodes in a network that extends to later classics like Bell Witch’s Mirror Reaper or Ahab’s The Call of the Wretched Sea.
The awareness of the music as an independent genre was shaped by three releases around the turn of the millennium: Worship’s Last Tape Before Doomsday, Nortt’s Døden, and Shape of Despair’s Shades of…. Especially Shape of Despair marked the transition into broader recognition with Shades of…. The band established the dualism between male growling and female clean vocals within the Funeral Doom genre. The Finnish band was also the one most closely resembling a traditional metal band within the three. Through their development of the ‘Beauty and the Beast’ vocal dualism, Shape of Despair demonstrated that Funeral Doom had enough commercial potential to influence more than just a few generic Skepticism imitators.
These three demos, Shades of… is traced back to the 1998 demo Alone in the Mist by the Shape of Despair predecessor Raven, were re-released multiple times in the following years and are today considered genre classics. Not only did they continue the creative openness that Funeral Doom was born with, but they also shaped musical and thematic orientation poles within the genre. An erotically charged longing for death and suicidal black metal coldness with Nortt – Depression under angry raw and freezing cold minimalism with Worship – and the skilful, hardly kitschy balancing act between Funeral Doom and Gothic Metal with Shape of Despair.
Between 2005 and 2006, the genre reached its peak. Works like Evoken’s Antithesis of Light, Ahab’s The Call of the Wretched Sea, or Mournful Congregation’s The Monad of Creation cemented Funeral Doom as one of the most extreme and impressive forms of metal. During these years, a globally networked scene also emerged. As Kahn-Harris writes, a global phenomenon that established itself as a musical and cultural spectrum within metal, radically deviating from mainstream trends. (cf. Kahn-Harris: Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge, pp. 1–9). The Benelux countries, Scandinavia, Russia, and North America proved particularly formative during this phase.
As early as the 2000s, when Shape of Despair enjoyed fan and critical success with their Gothic Metal-adjacent Angels of Distress, Evoken made a name for themselves with their epic monument Quietus, or Pantheist presented their sacral sublime O Solitude at the Doom Shall Rise festival, Funeral Doom was beginning to surface in the market. In the Benelux countries, a distinct Death and Funeral Doom scene was established around bands like the the agonizing Ataraxie/Funeralium, the ambient minimalist project Until Death Overtakes Me, and the sublime Pantheist. In North America, Evoken’s success made waves, giving space to both the voluminous-sounding monster Loss and the minimalist niche phenomenon Catacombs. Similarly, in Scandinavia and Central Europe, small and medium labels saw commercial potential or creative quality in the genre.
Whether it was commercialization or creativity depends on which product was the focus. Companies like Firebox Records, Marche Funebre Records, Aesthetic Death, Weird Truth, and Solitude Productions were increasingly seen as quality guarantors of the genre.
Especially in the East, the genre took root with the Russian label Solitude Productions and a whole host of bands. In 2005 and 2006, it seemed as if the genre was sliding from one spectacular release to the next. A listing of canonical works from this phase can only be exemplary rather than exhaustive: Evoken’s Antithesis of Light, Longing for Dawn’s contemplative ambient hybrid One Lonely Path, Loss debuted with Life Without Hope… Death Without Reason, atmospheric in its closeness to Depressive Black Metal, Mournful Congregation celebrated radical minimalism on The Monad of Creation to the limits of tonal emptiness, Tyranny released the monolithic Cthulhu-themed Tides of Awakening, Ataraxie showed with Slow Transcending Agony the potential of growing from the psychotic suicidal aspects of Bethlehem, My Shameful executed a cold Post-Industrial hybrid on The Return to Nothing. And so it continued with names of today’s canonical albums: Ahab The Call of the Wretched Sea, Wormphlegm Tomb of the Ancient King, Doom:VS Aeternum Vale, Asunder Works Will Come Undone, Catacombs In the Depths of R’lyeh, Until Death Overtakes Me Symphony III – Monolith, Ea: Ea Taesse…
By the end of 2006, such a mass of albums, now considered classics, had been released that the demand for the genre was saturated. Funeral Doom never played in the front ranks of the metal scene. However, the fan base broadened, specials were written, and columns were temporarily installed. Some of the albums became cult objects, and names like Ahab and Evoken established themselves. But after 2006, Funeral Doom lost broader attention. The scene remained active but produced few new classics. An exception is Bell Witch’s Mirror Reaper (2017), which once again brought the genre into focus. The commercial significance of the genre has since declined, but Funeral Doom remains an aesthetic space for reflecting on modern subjectivity.

Interlude, the lost Supergroup: Wijlen Wij

Wijlen Wij (We the Deceased) was, at the time of its founding in 2002, a small Funeral Doom supergroup. Kostas Panagiotou from Pantheïst, Stijn van Cauter from Until Death Overtakes Me, Lawrence van Haecke from Solicide, and Kris Villez from In Somnis. However, when the band’s debut was released, the genre had already passed its commercial peak. Van Cauter left after the self-titled debut of Wijlen Wij, and in 2014, due to ongoing issues maintaining the lineup of the internationally scattered group, the remaining members disbanded Wijlen Wij. In its early years, Wijlen Wij was intended to serve as a dirty, depressive counterpart to the primary bands of its musicians. The ideal of manifesting an intensely dark and hopeless sound persisted for years. Larger band projects, life events, international moves, and professional commitments took their toll, primarily in the form of time. Thus, it took five years from the band’s founding to the release of their debut under Aesthetic Death, with two of those years marked by sporadic recording sessions in Van Cauter’s home studio. It was, along with Black Metal and Dark Ambient (with Mental Funeral by Wreck of the Hesperus), the third Funeral Doom project to be released by Aesthetic Death after Esoteric and Wreck of the Hesperus.
Wijlen Wij came out at a time when the label did not yet enjoy the reputation it has today. While companies like Firebox were considered the Funeral Doom company, alongside emerging ones like Solitude Productions, Aesthetic Death enriched its catalog in a form of negative dialectic with Wijlen Wij, adding an anti-consumerist/anti-conformist layer, and for the first time releasing a work that positioned itself as a critical response to metal rather than fitting within the commercial framework of the scene. Negative dialectic here can be understood as thinking that does not resolve contradictions in things but keeps them within thought. (cf. Adorno: Negative Dialectics, pp. 140ff.). The dualism of turning towards the given economic and cultural patterns of the majority while simultaneously breaking those patterns. To this day, the album has not enjoyed a success story: There are 1,000 copies of Wijlen Wij, no re-release, no underground hype, and no overpriced collector’s purchases.
Pantheïst and Until Death Overtakes Me had firmly established themselves at the center of attention with a joint tour that featured Skepticism as the headliner – at the time the biggest name in Funeral Doom – at the beginning of the 2000s. Both bands released successful albums in 2003 that set new standards within the genre and opened deeper dimensions of possibility. Pantheïst’s debut O Solitude offered a sacral elevation of the Funeral Doom direction popularized by Skepticism, and Until Death Overtakes Me’s Prelude to Monolith, released through Firebox, anticipated the ambient Funeral Doom aspects of later bands, as a self-sufficient one-man album. Drone and ambient elements defined the musical aspect, while the reduction to a single person working from a home studio and self-released works defined the cultural aspect. This path of dialectics of change was consistently pursued by Pantheïst, especially through their enduring unpredictability and creative openness in their musical development.
As a small genre, Funeral Doom did not form its own regional scene. Festivals could hardly be held with only Funeral Doom bands, and labels could not limit themselves to just that area. The close interconnections and collaborations, on the one hand, encouraged fans to remain open to adjacent ideas, and on the other hand, allowed followers of adjacent styles to engage with the genre. Pantheïst was the first Funeral Doom band to perform at the traditionally oriented Doom Shall Rise festival in 2004, where they impressed a large portion of the dedicated Doom Metal fans with their sacral Funeral Doom. At times, Until Death Overtakes Me and Pantheïst became major names in Funeral Doom.
However, the band and album, with their somewhat cumbersome approach in relation to Doom:VS, Evoken, or Shape of Despair, did not manage to stand out as originally expected. After groups like Mournful Congregation, Tyranny, Evoken, Ahab, and Shape of Despair had made Funeral Doom a rolling avalanche by the mid-2000s and the genre had solidified, developed different playing styles, and the melodic and dynamic groups garnered significant attention, Wijlen Wij’s Wijlen Wij in 2007 already felt outdated. The band was certainly a supergroup, and had they debuted three or four years earlier, who knows – but in 2007, this supergroup was no longer so super. The status of the four musicians was by no means diminished, but Wijlen Wij had been overtaken, even surpassed. Funeral Doom had moved beyond its niche and had become at least known to many metal fans. The associative connections to Gothic Metal, through Funeral and Shape of Despair, helped make the genre commercially viable. The creative opening towards the extravagant elegy, to a hint of romance, to the sacred and to ambient, initiated by Until Death Overtakes Me and Pantheïst, had borne fruit, and others were now reaping those benefits. The ideas had been picked up, developed independently, and perfected by others, which is why Stijn van Cauter and Kostas Panagiotou, despite their potential to become stars of the genre, never became more than well-known names who still faded behind the bigger representatives of Funeral Doom.
Wijlen Wij thus stands not only as a document of the Funeral Doom underground but also as a testament to missed opportunities and lost directions due to the passage of time. Where Funeral Doom might have developed had Wijlen Wij debuted earlier and perhaps bigger is still a question to be guessed at today. Romantically, one could read Wijlen Wij as evidence of a nonconformist, perhaps even non-cultural capitalist approach, if one is willing to go so far and attribute to the musicians a conscious and deliberate separation from the then-ongoing success of Funeral Doom. Van Cauter’s later attempts to make his music freely available online would support this idea. The choice of the then-still-small and relatively unknown label, despite Esoteric and Fleurty, is also telling. However, this is not certain. What is clear, however, is that particularly after the release of Prelude to Monolith, Van Cauter temporarily showed no interest in collaborating with larger labels and sought to maintain control over his creative output. This, however, is a point that can be attributed to all involved, even though they followed very different paths over the years. Thus, Panagiotou initiated his own label, Melancholic Realm Productions, in 2019.
Thus, Wijlen Wij chose a path beyond quick success in favor of preserving their own artistic ideal. A kind of ‘escapism’ in which the musicians consciously distanced themselves from the standardization of the economic mass product and the incorporation by then-popular genre labels, choosing instead to appear as authentic art, untouched by the cultural industry. Perhaps, then, the band resisted the temptation to submit to the market with a more commercially appealing album and bigger labels, as it could have. Postmodernism, according to Lyotard, allows for this economy of small narratives. (cf. Lyotard: The Postmodern Condition, pp. 26–30). Acting against market logic, which leads back to the introduction, prosumerism, and Kahn-Harris’s logic of extreme metal. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the decision to release with a small label and deliberately stay out of commercial success could be interpreted as a flight line – an attempt to escape capitalism, which even permeates music production and consumption. (cf. Deleuze and Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, pp. 305–307). This is what the logic of DIY and Independent embodies as a whole.
Musically, the album stands on its own. An album that at times leans towards neoclassicism, at other times towards black metal, and at times towards drone, carving a path that is still scarcely represented in Funeral Doom today. A dirty mirror to Asunder’s Works Will Come Undone or a distant precursor to the young subgenre Apocalyptic Funeral Doom by artists like Fordomth, Mesmur, or Omination. This sub-subgenre, which operates with black metal cross-references, dynamics, and occasional operatic contrast vocals, is, however, more dynamic and much clearer in the mix than Wijlen Wij. Rough signposts and forerunners are found between Bridges and L’Anathème. Yet the band dares to remain unique and true to itself, somewhere between anachronistic and timeless in this uniqueness, with qualities as well as noticeable rough edges of the anti-consumerist album.
Wijlen Wij could today be added to the canon of the genre alongside albums like Tides of Awakening, Last Tape Before Doomsday, and The Monad of Creation, and with its bridge to black metal, which bands like Nortt and Funeral Mourning primarily claim for themselves, it would have added a nuance to the genre. But the peak of the genre’s success was passed in 2007, and the brief gold rush was over. Wijlen Wij was swallowed by history – an antithesis to the melodic and more accessible albums, as well as a critical reaction against those artists who collaborated with the then-more famous genre labels.
This also reflects Lyotard’s skepticism toward normative categories. (cf. Lyotard: The Postmodern Knowledge, p. 23). As a result, both the band and the album confirmed genre conventions by presenting an album within the stylistic means of Funeral Doom by known musicians, but on the other hand, positioned itself deliberately outside the commercial success with its radical release, peppered with cross influences. Wijlen Wij thus represents the crisis that Lyotard describes as a transitional state, in which no clear teleological narrative prevails. (cf. Lyotard: The Postmodern Knowledge, p. 24).

After the Peak

The attention span of those guided by the press of the scene remained focused on the established names in the market after 2006. New performers had a harder time attracting the interest of the industry and the scene. One of the projects that managed to shine brightly was the American Bell Witch, which, closely tied to the modern sludge container term, made a lasting impact with their 2017 album Mirror Reaper, in honor of their late former drummer Adrian Guerra. Otherwise, the density of works coming from new bands that were more or less considered classics thinned out after 2006. A notable exception in this period was the Finnish band Colosseum, whose third album was posthumously praised, especially Chapter 3 from 2011, which rose to become one of the last classics of Funeral Doom.
A brief hype emerged after the successes of Ahab and Mirror Reaper, but it was short-lived. This revival mostly made previously known releases more interesting.
In the age of the culture-industrial virtual minority mainstream (Mainstream der Minderheiten), (cf. Holert and Terkessidis (Eds.): Mainstream der Minderheiten: Pop in der Kontrollgesellschaft), in which all art becomes a product with commodity value and even the most absurd product finds some target group, the label Funeral Doom, as the atmospheric extreme of metal, retains a lasting market value. Accordingly, Funeral Doom, particularly from the years 2005 and 2006, became a super keyword that was able to subsume slow and depressive metal, far beyond its original form. From Gothic Doom to sluggish sludge, post-metal, atmospheric doom, depressive black metal, and more. Alongside the established classics, the collective negotiation of the style’s concept and the fragmented musical boundary-setting, the term provides an associative space that companies, projects, fans, and journalists alike explore in search of the next, the current cult object.

In the Network of Relations

Looking to the present, the term Funeral Doom remains a nebulous field, and the genre concept often blurs on the metal market into its own ambiguity, becoming an economic buzzword for mere tempo reduction. The inherent creative openness from the beginning and the brief periods of success created the possibility, in the perception of the masses, to shed the idea that Funeral Doom is merely an engagement with the darker sides of modern subjectivity, rather than just simple meaning-making, and to position itself as a consistent form of liberation from the cultural corset of metal.
Lyotard describes the sublime as an aesthetic experience that confronts the subject with the unimaginable – with emptiness, darkness, and death. (cf. Lyotard: The Inhuman: Reflections on Time). Funeral Doom, with its emphasis on extreme slowness, atmospheric density, and its aesthetic of death, can thus be seen as a manifestation of the sublime. The small, but not isolated, modern subject remains embedded in a network of relations. While listeners and artists dive into the introspective depths of the music, they are simultaneously embedded in a global community connected by the shared experience of musical darkness. In line with Lyotard, Funeral Doom confronts the subject with the sublime – emptiness, darkness, and finitude.
In Derridean terms, Funeral Doom not only questions musical but also existential boundaries, (cf. Derrida: The Truth in Painting), while Adorno points to the uncompromising portrayal of the abyss of existence. (cf. Adorno: Negative Dialectics).
Nevertheless, genre performers in both the present and the future are often caught between maintaining the popularity they’ve gained in overblown subgenre comebacks that usually turn former revolutionary genre ideas into palatable, melodic, and catchy versions for a wider audience, or repeating familiar patterns that risk becoming the exaggerated cliché of themselves. The discrepancy between Funeral Doom as the reflection of a self caught in a structure of relations on one hand, and as especially slow and heavy kind of metal on the other, cannot be finally resolved. These two sides of the genre condition and nourish one another.
Following Adorno’s concept of negative dialectics, Funeral Doom, therefore, offers the aesthetic refusal that allows the darkness, the unbearable, and the meaninglessness of modern existence to be made audible. Here, there is rarely comfort or explanation; instead, the burden of existence is presented in its inevitability (cf. Heidegger: Being and Time, p. 187). Funeral Doom thus remains, despite all its ambivalence, a form of musical critique of a world that seeks simple answers where there are none.

What Remains

What remains to be written about is a deeper look at the present state of the genre, scene and market. F.ex. at how the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the COVID-pandemic and the shipping and customs dispute have changed market conditions. For example, the label Meuse Music was able to take over the legacy of Russia’s Solitude Productions… but more on the market in this age of crises and risks another time.

So, to be continued…