The first time I caught The Art of Mankind, I genuinely couldn’t tell if I was being attacked or hugged. The riffs hit you like a Helsinki winter — needle-cold, unforgiving — and then the chorus opens up into a melody so warm and so unmistakably Japanese that you start wondering if your face is supposed to be doing whatever it’s currently doing.

That’s the trick of this band. They write melodic death metal that no Scandinavian could write, and no American could fake.

The melody nobody else writes

I’ve been listening to a lot of Japanese metal for a long time. There’s a specific shape to a Japanese melody when it shows up in heavy music — the way it bends in the unexpected places, sits on the half-step you wouldn’t expect, refuses the obvious major-key resolve. Anime composers have been doing it for decades. Japanese hardcore bands have been doing it since the ’90s. The Art of Mankind brought it into melodic death metal, and the first time you hear it, you do a small double-take. Wait, you say. Wait. Did that just happen?

Yeah. It just happened.

Brutal on stage, beaming between songs

The other thing about them — and I really love this — is the gap between the music and the people playing it.

When the band is on, they are on. Blast beats, full vocal carnage, the whole guitar wall. You’d assume the people behind it are equally extreme — black-clad, brooding, the standard look.

Then the song ends and the singer leans into the mic and goes, in essentially a sweet voice, “ありがとうございます” — thank you so much for coming — and the whole room kind of softens. The drummer waves at someone in the second row. The guitarist mentions, casually, that they’re playing again next month and it would be lovely if you came. Then they count off the next song and the world ends again for four minutes.

I don’t know what to do with this band. I just know I want everyone to hear them.

A short history, a long road

Wooming, the guitarist, started the project in 2016. He brought in vocalist sawacy and lead guitarist Kenkawa pretty quickly. By 2017 they had a real lineup with bassist OGA and drummer Oma. Their debut EP AXIS came out at the tail end of 2016 and announced more or less everything they’d be doing for the next decade.

What they did is: ship records. Distant Light. Archetype. Gods of Slaughter (EP). Blood Ocean (single). Chaosbringers. Three full-lengths, two EPs, two singles in nine years — a pace most bands envy and very few actually hit.

The road hasn’t been smooth. Oma left in 2024. sawacy stepped back in 2025 — life got in the way, as it does. Wooming has kept the band moving. If you’re reading this in a future where they’ve already settled into a new lineup, lucky you. If you’re reading this in a future where they’ve called it, I’m sorry, and: go find the records. They will hold up.

For the foreign reader

Their official YouTube channel runs a clean catalogue of full music videos. Start with Vortex — embedded above. If you’re flying to Tokyo for shows, watch their socials and check taomofficial.com; the band books carefully and the rooms they play tend to be small enough that you’ll be in the front row whether you wanted to be or not.

Too brutal, too kind, too specifically Tokyo. Just listen.