And the New Elder is surprisingly good. I love doom metal, but I really don't like a lot of doom metal bands. Did not really care for previous Elder, but this one hangs pretty well. Definitely more prog than doom for me, but still enjoyable.
It’s my favourite genre of music but….yeah. Especially in the last decade or so it has become mainstream and a lot of it is shit. Plenty of diamonds in the rough though.
Anyway, given that the genre has pretty limited tonal range (windhand, whom I love, has made a living rewriting the same song for 4 albums), and a very low bar to entry seeing as even I can write a decent riff, it’s not surprising that the scene feels a bit saturated.
You can see this in the rising number of psych and other genres in doom charts (the website) and the proliferation of new bands
For me, the problems with doom lie in over reliance on predictable slowed-down blues rock phrasing and the singing and vocals is often… a no for me. Operatic satanism is not where I’m at in life.
Otherwise it’s a pretty fertile and accepting a scene.