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Avant-Garde Metal: The Spontaneous and Adventurous Side of Metal

Throw the rulebook out the window - The Beginner’s Guide to Heavy Metal Part 12

Alexander Razin
The Riff
6 min readJan 24, 2025

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The band Sigh. Image Credit: Sigh and Peaceville Records.

The Beginner’s Guide to Heavy Metal featured a broad spectrum of metal, including several traditional and a few extreme metal bands.

To non-metal fans, extreme metal sounds dissonant and like “noise.” However, there is a metal subgenre that is more dissonant and noisy than extreme metal: avant-garde metal (experimental metal). Many bands in this genre take the principles of metal and apply atypical music structures.

Even though the sound is more unpredictable, the genre is accessible. Like glam and classic metal, it can be fun music to listen to.

So, let’s explore avant-garde metal in greater depth. I will discuss the genre, a brief history, notable bands, and my favorites.

What is avant-garde metal?

To understand avant-garde metal, we need to know what avant-garde means.

The word avant-garde is a French term meaning “advance guard” or “vanguard.” Those two words describe people who venture into the unknown.

The avant-garde genre took this approach with music. Composers made songs with musical compositions that…

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Alexander Razin
Alexander Razin

Written by Alexander Razin

Aficionado and connoisseur of obscure and experimental music, movies, and TV. Fictional and nonfictional pieces have their place here, too

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