favourite unknown artist?

@BumpingFuglies@lemmy.zip

Captain Squeegee. A rare combination of ska and psychedelic rock. Their album To the Bardos! is particularly great, and ranks among my top 5 albums of all time.

The Brotherhood of Dae Han. Southern rock with a hint of ~~black metal~~ metalcore.

Black Bonzo. A modern-ish prog band that sounds straight from the 70s.

Bubblemath. Progressive jazz fusion. Their first album was light on the jazz and pretty low-budget, but their second album, Edit Peptide, is the best in the subgenre, IMO.

Lotus Child. Indie alterna-rock. They only had one album, but it’s creative and interesting.

@DampSquid@feddit.uk

Yay! Black Bonzo! Lady of the Light is a great album.

Edit: oh that’s right, the album is self-titled

@whointhewhatnow@sh.itjust.works

Bubblemath is amazing. Will check out your other recs almost wholly for their inclusion.

@cwagner@lemmy.cwagner.me

The Brotherhood of Dae Han. Southern rock with a hint of black metal.

Which songs have hints of black metal? What I listened to sounded a lot more like metalcore.

@BumpingFuglies@lemmy.zip

Maybe I used the wrong descriptor. I’m not into screaming, so I tend to group all screaming/growling metal into the “black metal” label. 🤷‍♀️

@cwagner@lemmy.cwagner.me

Hah, yeah, of the harsher metal genres, Black Metal is probably the one with the least screaming ;)

@BumpingFuglies@lemmy.zip

Thanks for the correction! I’ve fixed the post. 😁

@TooMuchDog@lemmy.ml

Technically they’re just over the 5000 monthly listeners limit (6955), but Xanthochroid is still relatively unknown and my favorite band of all time, so I can’t not share them.

∟⊔⊤∦∣≶

Tyrant of Death coming in at just over 4000 listeners!

https://open.spotify.com/artist/0v9Vjvjg6Swl0ZzJFEersr

He’s excellent. If you like industrial metal or the Doom soundtrack you’ll probably like ToD. There’s no vocals, so I imagine this will appeal to DnB and EDM fans as well.

I recommend Generation Bliss (link for bandcamp because it’s not on Spotify… wtf bro this your best album!)

https://tyrantofdeath1.bandcamp.com/album/generation-bliss

I must have listened to this 50 times

∟⊔⊤∦∣≶

ohhhh shit… I started playing it and I’m getting chills at 20 seconds in. It’s so good. I’ve never heard anything like it.

@cwagner@lemmy.cwagner.me

ToD is nice, I have 3 albums :D

∟⊔⊤∦∣≶

Nice!! I have almost all of them but I keep going back to the classics.

ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠

I have no idea how to judge the number of listeners, but Norwegian artist Making Marks (formerly mylittlepony) is great.

And Nineteen Forty-Five literally has no bad tracks on either of their published LPs.

@Newwit@lemmy.blahaj.zone

People tend to use monthly listeners on Spotify for this. It’s not a perfect metric as other platforms isn’t included, but it does the job

@googlesnarfen@lemmy.world

Pil & Bue - Norwegian 2-man band, emotive, melodic rock https://open.spotify.com/track/0kVNwwh6CGOoraQY7OBNEY?si=upyFAkKIR4WMqlKCwvQj_Q

Cybernetic Witch Cult - Doom metal with prog and stoner elements. https://open.spotify.com/track/7CYECvyqaE0Q2LqP9klpPq?si=ftVDlzEUSFS-ExUpVxGIrA

horseshoe theory - retrowave/synthwave/chillwave https://open.spotify.com/track/6ac1uMRP1AJxhfyTZLd6s1?si=8rNAQuJTR8Gv2n7-d-gvfA

Brkdncr

Joshua Rotten. A few singles, an EP, decent music that simply went nowhere and he hasn’t made anything in years.

AstralWeekends

Lori Denae - 16 monthly listeners. Kinda Wanna is a great song.

Maida Rose - 1,192 monthly listeners. Harmony of Heartache is great too!

ayaya

Argyle Park and their official unoffical sequel AP2. Around 2.5k combined. My favorite song is “A New Wound” which is actually incorrectly listed as “A New World” but it is so unpopular that will probably never be fixed.

Alto

Two Bad Bricks

Found them through their singer’s YT channel. They describe themselves as acoustic stoner rock, which I feel is a good description. Lots of influence from Queens of the Stone Age.

@cwagner@lemmy.cwagner.me

Remember Twilight

With 230 monthly listeners, a lot more “unknown” than the others here :D A band since the late 90s, they call their music kammermusik-core (chambermusic core) and it combines several chamber music instruments with “spoken singing” and metal. The lyrics are German and usually about philosophical topics. Never successful, but they enjoy the project and treat it as a hobby. Originally met them as support for Haggard in 2004 (far more successful, good friends with the band, sometimes some member overlap) and they became one of my favorite bands ever since. Conveniently, the singer sometimes visits the city I live in for his day job, which is when we meet up (as a small band most of their touring is in their region, which is the opposite end of Germany, so I’m not seeing them live that often).

Not my favorites, but 2 bands I still love and listen to often, even smaller:

All:My:Faults

65 monthly listeners, a German industrial/electro/metal/rock project with mostly English lyrics. Defunct since ~2008

Jessica’s Crime

52 monthly listeners, an American indie rock (with some post-rock, post-punk and industrial influences) duo from 1995, another hobby project that’s active on and off, though the last anyone heard from the founder was in 2019 on Facebook, 6 years since the last album :/