When I think of the heaviest songs ones that come to mind are the likes of Enclosure in Flame by Neurosis, MCCCXLIX the Rising End by Kodiak or Whorecrown by Marduk.

Half of you are now thinking, "yeah, those songs are fuckin heavy" and the other half are thinking, "they're not heavy, X is heavy!" Well, I want to hear the heaviest songs you know know of: give 'em to me, I can bear the weight!

Hangman of Prague by Marduk often gets me off guard in terms of pure evil, non-stop sonic assault. I think it's the best and most rabid song they ever done, just crank up the volume!

Another song with a different, yet unbearably oppressive aura is VVitchdance by Katharsis. 11 minutes of that crazy dissonance are tough!

Also another evergreen that just beats me down is the Necrolust by Mayhem, in particular the intro. Those gallops hit like an hammer

ADMIRABLY HEAVY!!! VVytchdance is a new one to me, I like how the atmosphere and intensity build over the course of the song.

Here's another heavy-as-fuck tune but in an unusual way.

Heavy is a weird concept. Everyone thinks differently about what is heavy and what is not. Well, to me these are some things that come to mind:

Agreed. To me there are different kinds of heavy. There's the intensity of black/death/grind/etc. and then, on the other hand, there's the heaviness of massive doom riffs while on the third hand something like a Townes Van Zandt song can be crushing in it's emotional weight. It's a funny one.

Gnaw Their Tongues has a strange heaviness- it's oppressive like a gas filling the room slowly choking you.

Heavy is one of those words that can mean almost anything. I see heavy as a characteristic only found in slower music whereas faster music would be labeled as extreme or intense as you put it. Of course this is just my opinion. So unless there is some sort of consensus, people are going to think of different things whenever someone describes something as "heavy."

I guess there're broader and more narrow definitions. Even when there is a consensus on the meaning of a word it will never be absolute since everyone has come to understand the meaning of that word in different ways so the meaning is coloured by their experience. A part of my interest in this topic is to get a read on what "heavy" means to other people.

So what songs do you consider the heaviest you've heard?

A thick, bassy and doomy sound seems heaviest to me. Particularly drone/doom such as Black Boned Angel - Verdun, which has some operatic vocals and sounds of war layered onto it as well (if it counts as a 'song').

Coffins - The Other Side of Blasphemy and Moss - Sub Templum are the other two albums that I usually cite.

Those are fuppin' heavy alright. The Madness, Agony and Doom of the Men Who Seek to Know the Unknowable has to be one of the greatest song titles ever conceived.

Moss I know, Black Boned Angel and Coffins are new to me. BBA especially are cool, thank you!

There was another ridiculously heavy band from NZ that I'm trying to remember in that slow crushing doom style. I think it was two girls and a guy and I think that they're split up but I'm not certain.

I have that Moss album and I enjoy parts of it but as a whole I find it hard going. With many of the riffs being made up of evenly spaced chords to me it gets boring after a while. I find it much heavier and more engaging when some of the chords are left to hang while others change more quickly.

No offense, but this doesn't sound heavy at all to me.

It's quirky, but I can't hear at all what would make anyone say this is "heavy as fuck".

This is one of the only times in recent memory I can remember anyone saying something was super heavy that I actually didn't find to be even a little bit heavy.

Not that non-metal music can't be heavy, but this isn't heavy and it's also not metal.

I'm just curious, but what about this do you find heavy?

It's in the bleakness of the scenes he portrays as well as in the intense discordant repetitiveness of the music. I can see how it might not seem heavy to some but that's how I experience it.

I wasn't really listening to the lyrics so maybe if I did that would help, but the music itself isn't heavy to me. Matter of perspective I guess.

While I am a sucker for black metal, I really think doom metal songs often capture a real "heavy" feeling ... but then again I agree with you guys, it's quite hard to define

First song that came to mind is "House on the Borderland" by Electric Wizard ... those guitars... damn...



or this one:

Wizard have some heavy-ass tunes. What was the second one?

I prolly shoulda posted the songs I mentioned in the OP but I didn't. Oh well.

Here's one by the band Kodiak:


Dunt get much heavier.

I feel like heavy is a very subjective term, but in general its going to favor very downtuned guitars and more often than not slower rhythm sections, so alot of funeral doom probably falls into the heavy section. I much prefer death metal though so to throw something into the ring for that respective genre, anything off of the album "Chapters of Repugnance" by Defeated Sanity fits well because the guitar tone is monsterous and they still include some slower slam sections to really get the inner caveman going.

I'll throw in "Castigation and Betrayal" by Anaal Nathrakh. You get roughly 40 seconds of breathing room, then it's like a nuclear bomb exploding in your ears.

Hmm, the most crushing fit I can think of for the two girls and a guy/split up description is sludge band Over-Population.

For dronier stuff, Septithe were also two girls and a guy, but they existed very briefly. Brenda of Septithe is in the longer-running drone/droom band Somme who are still somewhat active. They've always had 2-3 female members but never been less than a 4-piece and hardly released anything (there's a low quality rehearsal demo CD from before Brenda joined which I need to dig out sometime to add them to the Archives).

Sylvie of 2-piece Divide and Dissolve also has some NZ heritage.

Triptykon - The Prolonging

The "heaviness" starts at around 1:26: