page_title: Post-metal
section_title: Emergence in the 1990s
hierarchical_section_title: Post-metal / History / Emergence in the 1990s
caption_attribution_description: The band Neurosis playing at Neumo's in Seattle, Washington.
context_page_description: Post-metal is a style of music that is rooted in heavy metal but explores approaches beyond the genre's conventions. It emerged in the 1990s through the work of bands such as Neurosis and Godflesh who transformed metal texture through experimental composition. Associated with and inspired by post-rock and post-hardcore, the genre employs the darkness and intensity of extreme metal but emphasizes atmosphere, emotion, and even "revelation", drawing on a wide range of sources including ambient, noise, psychedelic, progressive, and classical music to develop an expansive but introspective sound. Post-metal songs are typically long, with loose and layered structures that discard the verse–chorus form in favor of crescendos and repeating themes. The sound centres on guitars and drums; any vocals are usually screamed or growled and resemble an additional instrument.
  Post-metal is closely related to avant-garde metal and has also been associated with sludge metal, drone metal, progressive metal, and industrial metal. Alternative names that have been used to describe the genre include art metal and metalgaze, highlighting its connection to art music and shoegazing, respectively.
context_section_description: The term post-rock was coined in 1994 and soon used to describe a diverse group of bands that shared "a penchant for drifting melodies and the desire to expand beyond established rock boundaries". As this movement swelled, bands from post-hardcore and experimental backgrounds began to incorporate its tendencies of "ambience, offbeat experimentation, downcast melodies and psychedelia" into metal. The two genres further converged through the influence of post-rock bands such as Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Lift to Experience who shared metal's emphasis on loudness.
  Neurosis' third album Souls at Zero and Godflesh's sophomore album Pure, both released in 1992, are often retrospectively considered the first post-metal records. Godflesh had already pioneered "sluggish and tortured" industrial metal of their 1989 debut Streetcleaner, but Pure showcased "more expansive structures and long stretches of billowing noise", inspiring a number of subsequent bands to combine metal with "layered washes of sound". Neurosis on the other hand were a hardcore band who embraced doom metal, post-punk and industrial influences, experimenting with texture and dynamics. They have since become "worshipped for their pioneering post-metal efforts and unwavering dedication to expanding their artistic boundaries." In 2010, guitarist Steve Von Till stated:
  We always knew there was something deep to Neurosis's music, but ... I think Souls at Zero was when the music became something else. It was taking that material out on the road and losing ourself in the trance states induced by playing hypnotic, super-heavy loud music that we really figured out how to surrender to it. Then we said, OK – this is going to take us to where we wanna go: somewhere deeper, somewhere more emotional, somewhere elemental.
  The band's 1996 fifth album Through Silver in Blood was credited by Terrorizer with "effectively invent[ing] the post-metal genre" and named the best post-metal album of all time by Fact. The fluctuating 12-minute song "Purify" has been described as the album's "signature track". Neurosis' work has also contributed the development of doom metal, sludge metal, and drone metal, and these genres have been associated with post-metal since. Similarly, drone metal pioneers Earth have been significant to post-metal ever since their 1991 debut release Extra-Capsular Extraction.
  Furthermore, Fact writer Robin Jahdi highlights the late 1990s noisecore of bands such as Botch, Kiss It Goodbye, the Dillinger Escape Plan and Coalesce, who merged brutal metallic hardcore with jazz into fast-and-complex compositions, as a fundamental influence on post-metal. Writing for Bandcamp Daily, Jon Wiederhorn also noted the significance of Botch and Cave In, while Converge have been connected to post-metal through their longer songs since the closing track of their seminal 2001 album Jane Doe. According to Jahdi, the genre emerged as "those young intellectuals decided to slow it down" and labels such as Relapse Records and Hydra Head Records began releasing "slower, more bass-heavy and abstract" music more akin to post-rock.
caption: Neurosis have been credited with inventing the genre through their experimental, spiritually intense work.
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