10 Bands That Broke Up Way Too Soon

Some bands define a subgenre, then rule that scene for decades. Others pioneer a style of music, then break up before the scene catches on.

These highly influential bands didn’t all receive their moment in the sun, but their work has proven to be unforgettable. Do you agree that these bands broke up way too soon?

Kyuss was like a vivarium for talented motherfuckers. In just four years, the desert rock stoners released four underground classic albums, including the chronically awesome Blues for the Red Sun. Truly one of the greatest guitar tones ever caught on tape, by the way. Without the dissolution of Kyuss in 1995 we’d never have gotten Queens of the Stone Age, but the California band broke up right before the stoner metal revival of the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Imagine getting to see Kyuss tour with Electric Wizard during their Dopethrone era. 

Siege’s influence on the hardcore, grindcore and powerviolence scenes is gigantic to say the least. Not until the initial wave of metalcore was Massachusetts such a primordial ooze for aggressive brilliance. The Kevin Mahoney era of Siege only lasted from 1981-1985… there were some small reunions with different singers (including Seth Putnam) but nothing too notable. Forty years after Drop Dead was released, it remains an undisputed underground classic. It feels like this band could’ve made so much great music if they’d survived past the mid-80s. 

Few bands that formed in the 2010s have a cult following like Glass Cloud. Masters of catchy, djenty metalcore, Glass Cloud were about 10 years ahead of their time with their sole full-length, The Royal Thousand. No doubt they’d be on top of the melodic metalcore world if they’d stayed together, rubbing elbows with Spiritbox and Bad Omens. Come home, boys.

You can’t really complain about the dissolution of Hellhammer in 1984, because we got Celtic Frost and Triptykon out of it. You can hear why Hellhammer wasn’t widely liked in their day — too punky and raw for heavy metal fans and too heavy metal for punk and hardcore fans. Hellhammer’s proto-black metal has stood the test of time, though. How about a 40th anniversary gig for Apocalyptic Raids?

How do you pioneer deathcore then fuck off forever? The members of Deadwater Drowning, which existed from 2002-2004, ended up joining bands like The Acacia Strain and The Red Chord, but Deadwater Drowning’s one EP proved just as influential in the New England scene. You can only imagine this band’s shine if they’d recorded more than five songs. 

This has to be the peak of death-doom, right? The atmosphere of diSEMBOWELMENT’s Transcendence Into the Peripheral simply supersedes Katatonia’s Brave Murder Day and even Paradise Lost’s Lost Paradise. You just won’t find an early death-doom album that’s more perfectly in-the-pocket. How this short-lived ’90s band came from Australia is an absolute mystery. 

Was Beecher’s style too fluid to define a scene? England’s answer to New England’s metalcore scene, Beecher brought a sense of post-hardcore to mathcore and metalcore that didn’t properly flourish until years after they released 2003’s Breaking the Fourth Wall. The mathy band was seemingly one step away from Protest the Hero’s Fortress or Every Time I Die’s New Junk Aesthetic, but went in a more Dillinger direction with 2005’s This Elegy, His Autopsy. Come 2006, they were dunzo. 

A pioneer in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, A II Z only release one album… and it’s a live album. That’s right, they made a live album before hitting the fucking studio. Makes absolutely no sense, but The Witch of Berkeley is pretty awesome anyway. It’s got enough Motörhead attitude and classic rock grooves to keep the heavy metal fan satiated, and some truly epic bass work from Cam Campbell. They broke up in 1982, long before computer keyboards revealed how annoying their band name is to type!

Arch Enemy is great and all, but Carnage is just so filthy and gross. Formed by Michael Amott and Johan Liiva, Carnage sounds way more like Dismember than Arch Enemy, but with that perfect Swedish Boss pedal tone. Carnage made one killer full-length, Dark Recollections, which basically came out right when the band broke up in the early ‘90s. It’d be epic to hear this album live, but don’t count on it.

This Finnish export was the only band crazy enough to make funeral doom that sounds like The Doors. Stream From the Heavens is one of the most inexplicable metal albums ever, and so unpredictable for a funeral doom record. The mix between gargling gutturals, clean chants, ‘60s keyboards, sloth-peddled riffs and cosmic background noise is just so weird. This band only existed from 1990-1993, but they’d likely be as big as Skepticism if they’d stuck around.