What Kind Of Metal You Think Doom Is?

[DSC]

The soundtrack of nu-Doom has pretty much become the go to choice whenever someone mentions metal in most of the Internet spheres. It's influence has far reached beyond even the scope of just the games. Just look at the amount of memes and parodies that came from it, for example. And whenever a game has a metal soundtrack, there comes a swarm immediately saying "this sounds like Doom!", even if it's an entirely different subgenre. Honestly, it has become quite tiresome for me. I heard someone say once that the nu-Doom OST is kind of becoming "white girl metal", and I couldn't agree more. Besides that, (and I don't want to knock on the quality of the soundtrack itself) IMO it is not even the best representation of what the original vision for Doom was, even if the industrial/djent mix has become the point of reference of the series and even metal itself for a large amount of people. To me, Doom is more akin to something like thrash: unrelenting speed and aggression, with an healthy dose of a punkish and anti-establishment attitude. A constant assault of the senses, like being in the middle of a big, furious mosh pit while the music plays at an ear-drum rupturing volume, making a tornado or storm look like a soft breeze, as opposed to the slower more down-tuned tracks of nu-Doom. If I were to choose myself the soundtrack for a new Doom game that's what I would go with (and if I ever become a decent mapper, I might just do that in some of my own maps!).

 

But of course, that's just one interpretation of what Doom could be. That's the amazing thing about extensively moddable games like Doom: they can be whatever the hell you want! For many of the more atmospheric maps this kind of soundtrack wouldn't fit in at all, as an example. In this post in particular I'm not focusing at all about the tone of the entirety of Doom as a whole including every single community map, I'm talking about what the original 1993 Doom wanted to be, and that it's trying to be replicated by the new games. I already made my case on how I see the original Doom, and it left me wondering, what do others think? So, I've decided to make this poll in order to hear what my fellow Doom enjoyers have to say. What kind of metal you see that fits Doom the best?

[Explorer of Time]

Well, the kind of metal that Doom is is quite obviously meteoric iron, what with the series starting on Phobos and Deimos and all that.

 

More seriously, I don't listen to enough metal to know what subgenre the soundtrack is. I usually go for more orchestral music myself.

[WASFDDDDD]

Doom might've been inspired by classic black metal, but due to its whimsical midi soundfont, it honestly comes across as more a mixture of hard rock and ambient metal. (Aside from Facing the Spider, which is about the most chill that thrash metal gets) Some of the undertones kind of remind me of Nine Inch Nails too, but if they were an inspiration at all that's never overtly expressed in any of the tracks

[RataUnderground]

I think its eurodance these days, mostly.

[Gifty]

Doom's original soundtrack is pretty explicitly inspired by 80s crossover thrash/Dio-era Sabbath and other classic metal stuff, there's pretty good historical record of the specific references Bobby Prince was given and what he was going for. I think the more ambient tracks are likely more in dialogue with John Carpenter/spooky 80s horror soundtracks than with more niche metal subgenres which I doubt Bobby (or even the other Id guys) would have been aware of in the early 90s.

 

In terms of what type of metal Doom embodies in some kind of platonic sense, the 90s games are tonally riding this constant interplay between "you are the baddest dude" and "you are powerless", so probably a mix of 80s thrash with some sludgy and industrial overtones to round out the atmospheric palette--which I feel like Mick Gordon's scores actually do a really good job of capturing. When Doom 2016 first came out I felt like the soundtrack evoked every different tone and texture the series had ever touched on over its various incarnations (and even a bit of Quake's sound, too), it was pretty impressive how well he managed to wrangle those things together while still infusing it with his own style.

Edited June 9 by Gifty

[yakfak]

one of the reasons Doom 2016 loses me is that it whittles everything I liked about Doom to one genre

like the breadth of community continuity doom is replaced by elevator pitch Doom, more raw than ever before and uh that's it \o/ the Mick Gordon soundtrack is super powerful but the game's execution doesn't deserve it, like... the genre of Doom 2016 is when a pop star decides they're in their heavy metal phase and their shit replaces rock music in the charts and the rock music never gets back in the charts

Edited June 9 by yakfak

[Lila Feuer]

My own personal bias says industrial metal, the new 3TEETH songs with Mick Gordon would be right at home in Doom.
 

 

Edited June 9 by Lila Feuer

[Naarok0fkor]

Full metal jacket...

[Astar]

I love djent with all my soul. I play a djent myself.

And Mick Gordon's soundtrack was phenomenal.

 

BUT, nowadays the so-called argent metal is already tiring.

 

I generally liked what I heard in the trailer. And since the game will be a prequel, it would be logical to take a guitar with at least one less string, lol.

Besides, without Mick Gordon they simply won’t have the same sound.

Perhaps this is for the better. They need to give way to new young musicians

[Xaser]

"Doom music" to me will always be Jimmy, stewboy, Klem, and company, and their output encompasses way to many genres to try and even list. With apologies to the heaps of skilled community musicians I haven't mentioned; if I tried to list 'em all, I'd be here all day. :P

 

There's such a wide gulf between the new and old games, musically (even without factoring in mods) that I dunno if it makes sense to try and lump them together at all. That said, my answer is still "Other" even if I consider the new games only, 'cause Mick's 2016/Eternal soundtracks sound like nothing else that came before it.

[kalensar]

Doom 1= Thrash,  A lot of Megadeth influence is what I hear,

 

Doom 2=  leaned more toward Heavy Metal imo

 

Doom 4= MickMetal complete with nuggets , a slight dabble of sriracha and a ball pit.

[june gloom]

Mick's score is definitely industrial/djent, not even a question.

 

Bobby's tracks are a little more all over the place -- obviously there's the straight lifting from popular metal bands (and "Running From Evil," while not to my knowledge directly ripping off Megadeth, absolutely sounds like a lost Megadeth song, complete with solo) but I hear more traditional rock and roll, blues (very explicitly cited for "Dave D. Taylor Blues,") and a touch of early doom (heh) metal in some of the other ambient tracks.

 

I feel like comparing the two scores really shows where metal music is at today versus thirty, forty years ago. Metal in the early 90s was still very much in the same family as more traditional rock and roll. These days it's unrecognizable -- I try listening to newer stuff and it's all the same djent stuff, which is yet another example of why I don't listen to metal much anymore. This isn't to say djent is bad, but it's oversaturated because djent, apparently, is what sells.

[DankMetal]

Grindcore

[Gifty]

24 minutes ago, june gloom said:

I feel like comparing the two scores really shows where metal music is at today versus thirty, forty years ago. Metal in the early 90s was still very much in the same family as more traditional rock and roll. These days it's unrecognizable -- I try listening to newer stuff and it's all the same djent stuff, which is yet another example of why I don't listen to metal much anymore. This isn't to say djent is bad, but it's oversaturated because djent, apparently, is what sells.

 

As an aside that's not really on-topic, I had a similar arc of really falling off the metal train for a decade-plus, but in recent years I feel like there's been sort of a back-to-basics revival that's gotten me back into metal again. If you're also someone who's more into metal as a fundamental subset of rock-derived music and not so much as an exercise in technically-obsessed production fetishism I'd recommend a lot of stuff like High on Fire, Castle Rat, Nox Novacula, Windhand etc. (I'm not picking these names with any particular pattern except that they're newer and consistently not djent!)

Edited June 10 by Gifty

[Vaeros]

Thrash or Groove metal and Grunge.

[june gloom]

1 minute ago, Gifty said:

 

As an aside that's not really on-topic, I had a similar arc of really falling off the metal train for a decade-plus, but in recent years I feel like there's been sort of a back-to-basics revival that's gotten me back into metal again. If you're also someone who's more into metal as a fundamental subset of rock-derived music and not so much as an exercise in technically-obsessed production fetishism I'd recommend a lot of stuff like High on Fire, Castle Rat, Nox Novacula, Windhand etc. (I'm not picking these names with any particular pattern except that they're newer and consistently not djent!)

 

High on Fire is great, yes. But honestly? I haven't been big into metal for almost two decades now and every time I poke my head back in I'm reminded of why I left. In the mid-to-late 00s after being extremely disillusioned with the metal scene and especially angry at the direction Opeth (my favorite band at the time) was taking, I realized I needed to explore other stuff, so I switched to post-hardcore (and post-metal, which is basically just "what if Explosions in the Sky was heavy?") and got really into it, after a couple years I went back to some of the bands I grew up on and I thought to myself, am I just older, or has this always been a load of juvenile bullshit, creatively stagnant and forever trapped in the six months after Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory came out, doomed to an eternity of repeating the same old shit in the name of being tr00 metal (in reaction to the perceived takeover of numetal, which was seen as a threat and dilution of metal as a genre) and making money hand over fist playing down-tuned chuggery for a bunch of emotionally stunted geeks with wallet chains? It didn't take me long to realize that the answer was both.

 

(To be clear, I love Linkin Park, and a wide swathe of the metal scene twenty years ago was so angry at the rise of numetal and new fans joining the scene through "the wrong bands" that the old heads went in a deeply reactionary direction, both creatively and politically.)

 

And don't get me wrong, I do still enjoy metal as a genre, but it's just not what I listen to anymore. I'm still listening to post-hardcore stuff (Sparta, Beloved, Secret & Whisper, among others, plus newer stuff like My Dead Girlfriend and Body Thief) but I also listen to a lot of vaporwave, future funk, jazz (usually older stuff but I appreciate doomjazz greatly) and whatever genre Ulver is in a given year.

[Snaxalotl]

5 minutes ago, june gloom said:

 

High on Fire is great, yes. But honestly? I haven't been big into metal for almost two decades now and every time I poke my head back in I'm reminded of why I left. In the mid-to-late 00s after being extremely disillusioned with the metal scene and especially angry at the direction Opeth (my favorite band at the time) was taking, I realized I needed to explore other stuff, so I switched to post-hardcore (and post-metal, which is basically just "what if Explosions in the Sky was heavy?") and got really into it, after a couple years I went back to some of the bands I grew up on and I thought to myself, am I just older, or has this always been a load of juvenile bullshit, creatively stagnant and forever trapped in the six months after Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory came out, doomed to an eternity of repeating the same old shit in the name of being tr00 metal (in reaction to the perceived takeover of numetal, which was seen as a threat and dilution of metal as a genre) and making money hand over fist playing down-tuned chuggery for a bunch of emotionally stunted geeks with wallet chains? It didn't take me long to realize that the answer was both.

Depends on the genre of metal imo, both grindcore and hardcore have been getting a ton of great and varied releases over the last 5 years.

[LadyMistDragon]

1 hour ago, Snaxalotl said:

Depends on the genre of metal imo, both grindcore and hardcore have been getting a ton of great and varied releases over the last 5 years.

I think that's kind of a given though, although I probably lean more towards the doom metal side of things, I find extreme metal in general to be more stagnant. Hardcore is obviously more punk, but arguably falls into the creatively stagnant category if we're talking the bands everyone's heard of.

[Grazza]

Molybdenum

[Dreemurr Deceevurr]

A mixture of thrash, grunge, trad metal and hard rock for the classic games with some occasional ambient. The djent/industrial sound is definitely strong with the id-thesda era stuff but I feel like the harder variants of drum and bass and brostep could work with it (Killer Instinct 2013 drew quite a bit from those sounds and you can't tell me BFG Division isn't just a riddim track with an 8-string and Axe-FX instead of a fucked up bassline filtered through a million VSTs).

 

Of course sometimes when I play doom I just listen to whatever especially with gameplay wads or wads that don't replace the vanilla soundtrack. WADPAK + 90s production library music is a surprisingly potent combo

Edited June 10 by Dreemurr Deceevurr

[Astar]

9 minutes ago, Dreemurr Deceevurr said:

and you can't tell me BFG Division isn't just a riddim track with an 8-string and Axe-FX instead of a fucked up bassline filtered through a million VSTs).

I would discuss this topic with you, but you know what... I probably agree with you on this :D

[fruity lerlups]

32 minutes ago, Dreemurr Deceevurr said:

you can't tell me BFG Division isn't just a riddim track with an 8-string and Axe-FX instead of a fucked up bassline filtered through a million VSTs).

it even sidechains everything on the snare lol, imo i despise that track but whaever people foinnd it fun

[Astar]

51 minutes ago, fruity lerlups said:

it even sidechains everything on the snare lol, imo i despise that track but whaever people foinnd it fun

You don't like Daddy Mick's BFG Division track? ;_;

[GreenAnime]

wasn't there a thing called "Argent Metal"

[Sonikkumania]

Doom E1 - Heavy Metal.

E2 - Doom or Stoner Metal.

E3 - Thrash Metal.

 

Doom 2 - 90's Metal.

[Snaxalotl]

2 hours ago, LadyMistDragon said:

I think that's kind of a given though, although I probably lean more towards the doom metal side of things, I find extreme metal in general to be more stagnant. Hardcore is obviously more punk, but arguably falls into the creatively stagnant category if we're talking the bands everyone's heard of.

If we are going over the most mainstream bands possible then sure, but as a big fan of hardcore I've had no issues finding diversity and variety (Especially over the last few years, its really taking off).  As for Extreme metal I think Full of Hell does has a fuckton of variety, especially on their latest album Coagulated Bliss. Also God Shell is pretty underground but doesn't sound like anything else I've heard before.
 

[OpenRift]

I've kind of divided it into different genres based on each title.

 

Doom 1 - Thrash, traditional heavy metal, NWOBHM

Sample Tracks:

• The Mob Rules by Black Sabbath
• Any song from Bonded by Blood by Exodus
• Seek and Destroy by Virtue

 

Doom II - Grunge

Sample Tracks:

• Literally anything from Alice in Chains' first two albums

 

Doom 64 - Doom/stoner metal

Sample Tracks:

• Demons Gate by Candlemass
• Paranoid (Black Sabbath cover) by Type O Negative
• Dying World by Pentagram

 

Doom 3/Doom 2016 - Oldschool Death and black metal

Sample Tracks:

• Necromancy by Bathory
• Pull the Plug by Death

Doom Eternal - Dio*

Sample Tracks:

• Holy Diver by Dio

 

*If they somehow in an alternative universe had the rights to use Dio's music (either his work in Black Sabbath or his solo career) in Eternal that would've made the musical experience like 10x better than the underdeveloped djent that we ended up with. Dio may be my favorite artist probably ever, but Eternal is far from my favorite Doom game. It just so happens that the sound of Dio's work fits well with Eternal's aesthetic.

[fruity lerlups]

50 minutes ago, Astar said:

You don't like Daddy Mick's BFG Division track? ;_;

i wish the soundtrack was more like Rust Dust and Guts or Transistor Fist, that was the kinda stuff i liked from Mick Gordon, dissonant, grinding, adrenaline horror.

[OniriA]

A little zinc with a bit of copper and iron.

[Budoka]

The soundtracks are one thing, but I feel like that's only the surface level approach tackling the question posed by the thread title. In spirit, however? Either power metal or death metal, depending on whether you focus more on the narrative experience or the aesthetic. Unless we're talking stuff like Sunder, which is black metal to the bone.