Roots of Converge

High on Fire is an American heavy metal band from Oakland, California, that was formed in 1998. Matt Pike, the band's frontman and founder, also played guitar for Sleep. High on Fire won the 2019 Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance with their song "Electric Messiah". The band has released nine studio albums, with their newest, Cometh the Storm, released in 2024.

Piebald is an American rock band. Piebald started as a hardcore punk band in Andover, Massachusetts, out of the same scene that produced Converge and Cave In. Originally a key Massachusetts post-hardcore band often seen touring with fellow DIY hardcore bands such as Jesuit, Reversal of Man, and Harvest during the mid to late 1990s, they later moved to the Boston suburb of Somerville and became a staple of the Greater Boston indie rock scene.

Equal Vision Records is an independent record label based in Albany, New York. It was founded in the early 1990s by Ray Cappo, the singer for the punk bands Youth of Today, Shelter, and Better Than a Thousand.

Dopethrone is the third studio album by English band Electric Wizard, released on 25 September 2000 by Rise Above Records. Following the release and tour of their previous studio album Come My Fanatics... (1997), the group was asked by Rise Above owner Lee Dorrian to create a follow-up. Vocalist and guitarist Jus Oborn has stated that drug issues and other personal problems led to the production of Dopethrone being a "difficult process". The group entered Chuckalumba Studios in May 2000 with only three tracks written: "Dopethrone", "Funeralopolis", and "We Hate You". The album was recorded in three days. Oborn, who wrote all of the album's lyrics, spoke of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard as influences in his own writing while the group disagreed during the mixing sessions about how the overall record should sound. The music on the album has been described as both doom metal and stoner rock, with influences of British groups like Black Sabbath and Motörhead.