warbiscuit

It's interesting because I can't think of a single death metal or black metal band that wouldn't be considered extreme, but the label doom seems to cover such a diverse range of styles from sludge, funeral doom, drone, death-doom etc. which I'd call extreme to stoner rock and traditional doom which are closer to hard rock and not that extreme. A lot of the academic writing on extreme metal completely ignores doom or only gives it a passing mention, and I wonder if that's because it is so diverse and harder to make generalisations about than other forms of extreme metal.

I'm interested to see whether people class doom metal as extreme metal. I feel like with death or black metal it seems pretty obvious they belong under the extreme metal umbrella, but with doom there seems to be a wider variance. A band like Primitive Man are about as extreme as you can get, but then there's stuff like The Obsessed which gets labelled doom but is really just 70s-style hard rock, and not particularly extreme. What do people think? I just started a PhD researching extreme metal subgenres, and this stuff is fascinating to me.