I’ll start with the bass player. I went to a DOOM gig once, stood front-row, and the bassist — Abe — played with such absurd violence and grace that I genuinely could not sleep that night. I was lying in bed at 2am replaying lines in my head. The next day I went to another one of their shows. That’s the kind of band this is. They do not let you go.

DOOM started in Tokyo in 1985, which means by now they’ve been at this for forty years. That alone is unusual for a Japanese metal band, especially one this committed to not being normal. Founder Takashi “Taka” Fujita — the singer-guitarist — has steered the project through every era of heavy music since the original lineup with Koh “Pirarucu” Morota on fretless bass and Joe Hirokawa on drums. They put out their debut LP No More Pain in 1987 and it sounded, at the time, like nothing else.

Still does, honestly.

Thrash, but only for about half a song

Here’s the thing about DOOM: they are technically a thrash band. They formed in the era of thrash, they have the speed, they have the riffs, they have the fury. If a Western rock journalist scanned their press kit they’d type “Japanese thrash metal” and call it a day.

That’s wrong. That has always been wrong. DOOM is what happens when a band takes thrash as a starting point and then refuses to stay there. There’s hardcore in their bloodstream. There’s progressive rock in their structures — sudden time changes, instrumental sections that go somewhere weird and don’t come back the way you’d expect. There’s blues in the bends. There’s jazz in the bass — which, again, you will hear and you will lose sleep over. And there’s straight industrial noise sitting on top of all of it like a kid who wandered into someone else’s recording session and refused to leave.

This is a band that, in 1988, flew to New York and played CBGB. The same CBGB. They held their own. Most Japanese metal bands from that era never even tried to leave the country.

The long pause that wasn’t really an end

DOOM went on hiatus in August 2000. For most bands that’s the end of the story. But in 2015 they returned with a full reunion show at Club Citta in Kawasaki. They’ve been kicking around since, with a pandemic-era pause in between.

That’s the thing about a band like DOOM. They don’t really end. They go quiet for a while and then reappear, the way certain underground records do — out of print for years, then suddenly back in your hands and you wonder how you ever lived without them.

If you’ve never heard No More Pain, that’s where you start. If you’ve heard it, listen again. Time has been very kind.