10 Heavy Metal Bands Genuinely Progressing The Genre

With long black robes and ornate golden art-deco masks, you’d expect a band with an image like New York’s Imperial Triumphant to play the sort of impenetrable blackened Metal that bands of a colder disposition have been peddling since the mid-90s.

Spend ten minutes in the company of any of their albums though, and you’ll find a musical rabbit hole as dense and labyrinthine as the city they call home.

Billing themselves as a band embodying ‘the chaos, the menagerie, the perils and the majesty of The Greatest City on Earth’, Imperial Triumphant’s jazz influenced take on Heavy Metal sounds like it could come off the rails at any moment, then coalesces into perfect unity, before sprawling into pandaemonium once again.

Replete with time changes, freeform solos and even the the occasional saxophone thrown in for good measure, this truly is a fitting tribute to the glitz, glamour and cruel indifference of New York City.