In many ways, Electric Wizard are more than a band. Yes, they’re a British doom metal institution—but they’re also a celluloid wormhole, a reading list, an aberration in the fabric of space and time who have fed generations of freaks from a bubbling cauldron of cult cinema, bizarre literature, and subcultural reference points from the interzone. This is all great fun, of course. Should you wish, you could spend months—years, even— tracking down ancient Jess Franco movies, discovering the works of Robert E Howard and H.P Lovecraft, and becoming au fait with crackling old Groundhogs and Amboy Dukes records in pursuit of a greater understanding of the Wizard's catalogue.

For those unaware of the early history, the band were formed in 1993 by vocalist/guitarist Jus Oborn alongside bassist Tim Bagshaw and drummer Mark Greening in Dorset, UK. Oborn had previously played in a death metal band, Lord of Putrefaction, and was a lifelong Black Sabbath and Saint Vitus obsessive with an encyclopedic knowledge of VHS horror and trash culture. Electric Wizard were, from the outset, a product of their peculiar surroundings—of being a band that channelled Oborn's obsessions while being steeped in the ancient occult folklore and anarchic eccentricities of rural British life. While much of the wider doom pantheon has its foundation in gritty urbanism—be it Black Sabbath evoking the greyscale smog of industrial Birmingham, Pentagram and the humid drug blitzed inertia of Virginia, or Saint Vitus and the Los Angeles heat haze—the Wiz’ have always had both feet firmly planted in claggy Dorset mud.

But what about an entry point to the Electric Wizard discography? Fanatics are a notoriously diehard bunch who enjoy getting lost in the (green) mist, but new fans are discovering the band all the time. Of course, everyone has a favorite era. You’ll find no end of online debate about the supposed superiority of the original line up, in particular the aural talisman that is 2000’s Dopethrone. But to obsess over that album alone, superb as it is (and we’ll discuss it further down the page) is to miss the point. Electric Wizard have never been about a single "golden era" or set pantheon of essential releases; such sentimental concerns are anathema to a band who have long existed far removed from the regular constraints of the music industry, and who are, essentially, more a psychic channel than a group. The truth is that every era in the Wizard's nearly three decades of activity has its own pitch black charms.

A self titled 1995 debut LP set their stall in fine fashion, but it was 1997’s Come My Fanatics that really hit home, its turgid doom imbued with sleazy cosmic reach and a blackened punkish energy. And while 2000’s Dopethrone is, by common consensus, the heaviest Wizard record, many find equally satisfying thrills in more majestically hypnotic later material such as 2007’s Witchcult Today, or 2010’s Black Masses. Indeed, hypnosis is arguably the Wizard watchword: to fully understand this band, you need to step somewhat outside the world of heavy metal and into a broader church of eclectic heaviness. They’re as indebted to noisy space rock like Hawkwind and Amon Duul II or brash rock 'n' roll like Amboy Jukes, early Alice Cooper, and Groundhogs as they are to Celtic Frost and Saint Vitus. T

heir discography is large, but not forebodingly so; it can be divided along myriad lay lines, and I set out a few personal entrance points below. Don’t know where to start? Don’t worry, we got you….

So: you want to get into angry and direct Electric Wizard?

Let’s face it, Electric Wizard aren’t exactly the first band that springs to mind when it comes to speed—or brevity. 10-minute songs are the norm, and riffs often unfurl at the speed of a bulldozer pushing against a towering wall of grey silt. That said, the more savage and immediate moments in the Wizard catalogue are amongst their greatest. 2000’s Dopethrone, in particular, is imbued with a righteous fury that see’s Oborn spitting out his tales of primordial destruction with a punkish glee. "Barbarian," for example, is based on a tale gleaned from Robert E Howard’s Conan books, and is a particularly intense workout, with layers of blackened sludge and submerged cymbal crashes courtesy of Mark Greening (one of the most chaotic and idiosyncratic drummers in metal history). "Vinum Sabbathi" says it all in three minutes, while "Funeralopolis" is the last word in scuzzy doom aggression.