Sisters of Mercy

Death. Pain. Doomed romance. Existential dread. Goth music has a penchant for prodding at the psyche through some of the heaviest themes imaginable. And yet, things get even heavier once you add a pinch of metal to the mix. Enter gothic metal. It’s a winning combination: goth music’s bleakest and most romantic tendencies merging with blasted guitars, death-style growls and other assorted markers of the metal scene. And the results come up big, having left generations of listeners swooning to the gloomiest of gloom tunes. So, we asked our readers who did it best. Here’s the thing: We had to split hairs this week. While folks showed up in the comments with a flood of votes for arguably more traditionally goth-coded greats like Fields of the Nephilim, Bauhaus and Sisters of Mercy — the latter were voted in by none other than Crowbar’s Kirk Windstein — we tried our best to stick to the decidedly more metallic side of the sound. My Dying Bride A favorite of fallen angels around the world, My Dying Bride have been keeping things exquisitely, achingly gloomy for more than 35 years. Their songbook has involved macabre-metallic anthems, glacial despair, weeping string sections and more, all of this supporting the downtrodden groans, growls and dark-crooned musings of founding vocalist Aaron Stainthorpe — who left the band in 2025. Paradoxically, their songs of darkness have brought music fans into a world of light. Lacuna Coil Even before delivering an album of this name in 2012, the music of Italian mainstays Lacuna Coil was giving listeners a massive shot of dark adrenaline. Crunching metal guitars, synth-phonic flourishes and the towering, dynamic emotivity between clean-unclean vocalists Cristina Scabbia and Andrea Ferro have driven the band’s sound for 10 mesmerizing albums. Throughout, they’ve delivered gothic gravitas, stadium-sized anthems, and a boomingly moody redux of Depeche Mode’s Violator classic “Enjoy the Silence.” HIM Gothic metal to some, Love Metal to others, it’s clear that folks still have a heart-on for Finnish outfit HIM. How did the band manage to pull so many fans right into their arms, you ask? Part of the draw is the inky and super sigh-worthy baritone belting of lead singer Ville Valo, while it can’t be understated that the group s swirl of classic goth and Eighties metal has yielded some of the greatest lovesongs ever. A high profile co-sign from Jackass alum Bam Margera in the early Aughts helped grow their fanbase, too. They’ve inspired devotion in fans around the world, some even branding themselves with the band’s familiar Heartagram logo. Paradise Lost It’s not for nothing that longtime gloomsmiths Paradise Lost named their 1991 sophomore LP Gothic. For that matter, it’s also telling that the act made a record called Icon — twice. After all, Paradise Lost helped set the bar for ebon-crested heaviness as we know it. Formed at the tail end of the Eighties, Paradise Lost initially infused their love of thrash, death metal and U.K. goth into their own uniquely obsidian aesthetic. Across 17 full-lengths, they’ve explored growled-out death marches, funereal woe, storm-clouded synth-pop and more. It’s a rich and diverse catalog, and the fans entered our comments this week to hail the Yorkshire-formed Shadowkings. Type O Negative We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Our readers really have a Type. While crypt-croaking crooner Peter Steele was sometimes called the “Green Man,” for many gothic-metal fans there’s none more black than Type O Negative. Truly, the darkest bits of their catalog unfold as fascinating reflections on death, depression, sex and heartache. Yet they also possessed a bewitching gallows humor to manage the damage. Check how the Drab Four wielded gloominess in menacing, misanthropic fashion on dour and damned heavy pieces like “Everything Dies,” but vamped through campy, Munster-mentioning ghoulishness on “Black No. 1” and combusted through carnal rituals on the lusty “Be My Druidess.” Their darkness reflected all kinds of emotion. Type O have soundtracked goth fans’ lives for decades, and remain a band they love to death.