Here's a link on Archive.org to listen.

Back in the day I used to like music -especially metal- with long-sustained chords/tones somewhat more than would be considered normal. I even had a Tumblr blog just for it. I still listen to this sort of music, but much less. Recently I revisited Earth 2, one of the staple albums of the slow, droning doom metal 'Drone Doom' genre, for the first time in maybe 2 years.

I've been trying to get back into listening to music more actively recently. I got stuck in a music-enjoyment-rut for many years as life took over and while I have much bigger priorities than improving my last.fm stats these days, I felt sad that I could no longer appreciate a lot of formative music coming back to it in 2026. But Earth 2 is pretty good, and here's what I wrote excitedly an hour or so after relistening.

Earth 2 Special Low Frequency Version album cover

Why I think Earth 2 is very good

Many bands have tried at drone metal, myself included, and most of the albums are quite bad. Even when they're good on their own merits.

I think this is partly because drone doom is often somewhat a meme genre occupied by people strongly typecasting themselves before they've even started writing their first songs; I also think the bar for "very good" is higher for edgeland/edgelord music than what my electronics-loving friend calls "Real Instrument Music".

The deficit in what came after Earth 2 is in how thin so much of it actually sounds. Even really good albums like Fulci's Dead Lights Red Sky have relatively minimal layering, and usually just multitrack the main riff. By contrast the riff in Seven Angels is more like decorative icing on a cake slab of heavy, multitexture drones.

By the time you reach the latter half of Teeth Of Lions Rule The Divine, the drone running through the whole album is so flush with little details you don't even necessarily notice the amount of variation going on. Folks fond of droney sounds, myself included, tend to talk up minimalism, repetition etc. in a fetishistic sense that implies that things staying the same each time is good; in reality the very best drone is maximal, and in terms of this little niche of metal, The Most Maximalist Minimalism is probably Earth 2's earned title.

A given sequence or portion of a recording repeating in a fashion doesn't mean it is truly the same every single time. The finer the differences the more similar they'll seem, but mastery lies in making something that seems cyclical, repetitive, inward-winding but which has within whatever structure of repetition is chosen many small noticeable variations. Ideally you don't even notice them, and instead just don't get bored feeling like you're hearing a copy-paste job.

Rather than sticking to one or two overdriven guitars and a couple of overdubs, there are multiple tracks of overdriven guitars sustaining chords, then overdriven guitars covering the core riffs, multiple tracks purely for amp feedback, some clean guitars, a drumkit and lots of intermittent noise and low squealing phrases repeated & layered under all of that. It's so detailed and I loved hearing it again with fresh ears and not feeling let down as I was expecting to be.

Some of these intermittent noises that tend to happen at boundaries between one kind of looping chord progression and another are, combined with sparse cymbal crashes and drums, and combined with the enormousness of the sound, almost (to me) reminiscent of war horns & war drums, or of watching some grand natural disaster like watching the gradual collapse of Mt. St. Helens on film (I know this's cliched imagery, sorry).

Earth 2 starts with what is pretty much a thrash metal riff slowed down, then by the 2nd track the riffs become more blocky and chords-based, and then the 3rd track is one constant drone. I think the gradual removal of those more traditional riffs across the album are what lets the last 30m of beautifully textured droning in Like Gold And Faceted glimmer so grand.