I love working with instrumental metal, typically prog or "djenty" stuff, in the background. Sometimes a bit of post-rock.
I was surprised how many of us there are. A lot of "professionals" I know listen to metal. Engineers, developers, IT folks. It will randomly come up and everyone will say something along the lines of "Oh, really, you too?"
Been listening to a lot of Their Dogs Were Astronauts recently. In the interest of sharing my personal favorites bands to work to, because I found a number of them from random mentions in forums:
- Their Dogs Were Astronauts -mostly instrumental.
- Wide Eyes - mostly instrumental.
- Caligula's Horse - instrumental only tracks available.
- Polyphia - mostly instrumental.
- Protest The Hero - instrumental only tracks available.
- TesseracT - instrumental only tracks available.
- Apocalyptica - started covering Metallica as cello quartet instrumentals, now has a drummer and a number of original songs, often with guest vocalists.
- Collapse Under The Empire - post rock, mostly instrumental.
- Parhelia - post rock, mostly instrumental.
- Opeth - occasional instrumental tracks, started as death metal, evolved into more prog metal. Huge fan of most of their work in general.
Edit: I'm stuck at work with my PC being worked on so here are some more random artists whose music I appreciate:
- Anup Sastry - very djenty, mostly instrumental, some guest vocals occasionally.
- Scoredatura - djenty, mostly instrumental.
- Rishloo - psychedelic prog rock? not instrumental.
- HAKEN - instrumental only tracks available.
- Brass Against - brass and other classical instruments. They cover Rage Against The Machine as well as other random songs and make occasional mashups of them. Not instrumental.
- Pomegranate Tiger - prog metal.
- Modern Day Babylon - djenty, instrumental.
