The Five Best Metal Bands You've Never Heard 5) Völuspá If you don't like Völuspá, you don't like Viking power metal. It's as simple as that. From their auspicious debut EP Dvergatal to the soaring heights of their latest release Tyr's Hand, Snorri Sćmundar and his brave crew never disappoint the diehard fans of their unique brand of epic, rampaging power metal. Not only is the musicianship tighter than the bonds of gleipnir, featuring the swirling keyboards of Heimdallr Björnsson and the thunderous drumming of Skoll Nordal, but the battle hardened lyrics are the best of any band today in the Viking genre. Yes, even better than Loki's Torment or Jörmungandr. I dare you to listen to "Sailing the Drakkar" or their cover of Jethro Tull's "Cold Wind to Valhalla" and not wish you had a sword and shield to bang together in a glorious battle chorus. 4) Gorgathor Journey to the outer limits of sludge doom metal with the true masters of the style, Gorgathor! If your idea of a good time involves three drummers laying down overlapping thunderous beats with double bass pedals, skull rattling bass lines, and waves of nihilistic vocals threatening to make your eardrums implode, Gorgathor is the band for you. Although Crushing Doom Insomnia is the only album Gorgathor released in their illustrious career, it stands as the single most gut pummelling record in the history of metal. Part of the secret of Gorgathor's incomprehensibly brutal tone is the use of the infamous "double drop doom" tuning, pioneered by frontman Skrugg Hateman. The tuning, which goes "D-G-D-G-D-G-D" with each "D" being a whole octave lower than the one preceding it, required Hateman to commission legendary luthier C.C. Bych to build a custom guitar with a neck roughly 25% longer than normal in order to maintain tension on the lower strings. Make sure you've got your subwoofer cranked to the max before giving Crushing Doom Insomnia a spin, and be ready to scrape your pulverized internal organs off the wall when you're done! 3) Johnny Lizzard & the Gizzards Johnny Lizzard has been serving up helpings of southern fried goth rock for the past twenty years, and like Pappy's moonshine, he just gets better with age. Like a stick of dynamite baked into a hushpuppy, Lizzard wraps uptempo twelve-bar blues and boogie music around a solid core of INNER FURY on classics like "Mordant Shotgun Anguish" and "The Ballad of Desdemona & Satanica." The current lineup of the Gizzards, featuring deathgrass mainstays Oblio Deathshead on upright bass and Bessy-Anne Borden on washboard, is perhaps the strongest since their breakthrough album, 1992's inexplicably titled It Don't Mean A Thang If It Ain't Got That Twang. If pomade, motorcycle jackets and dark mascara are your accessories of choice, you owe it to yourself to give Johnny Lizzard & the Gizzards a spin. 2) Stone Prophet Stone Prophet proves what funeral doom metal fans have known all along: "slow" can be a synonym for "brutal." Since the release of their debut album Minions of Set, lead singer Marakabarrha and the rest of Stone Prophet have been experimenting with a progressively slower, more stripped down sound. Don't think for a minute the slower tempos and ambient influences have mellowed the band, though; they remain as harsh and uncompromisingly loud as ever. While the lyrics of Stone Prophet's earlier albums dealt mainly with the Set/Horus mythology, their latest work, Nut Descending, deals largely with the goddess Nut. It features some of Mulhorandi Sabr's most chilling, sombre drumming, often juxtaposed with the strumming of an oud and Marakabarrha's murderous growling vocals. As an added bonus, the CD features a remix of "Book of the Dead" by hard German techno artist TUR-bro. 1) Apothecary Without a doubt, Apothecary is the greatest metal band in the world. If you disagree, Sythious Damned will burst through your wall atop a fire breathing manticore and obliterate your very soul with a furious sweep picked minor arpeggio while Doomthor disintegrates the foundations of your house with his laser sharp hyperblast drumming. From their debut album Glory of the Damned, to their triple-platinum selling Alchemy of Disaster, to their current chart topping Furious Blasphemy Redounding, Apothecary has spanned every conceivable genre and style of metal with ease, from symphonic neo-classical metal to epic power metal, and influenced countless other bands along the way. This, of course, has had some unforeseen consequences, such as their accidental invention of rap metal following the release of their 1990 hit "Fear of a Sorcerous Planet." Still, in the annals of metal there is no band more important, influential, or evil than Apothecary. Quite simply, if you don't have at least one Apothecary album, you should just throw out every heavy metal CD you own.