Instrumental Rock albums are rare treasures, overlooked in favour of the diamond hits and album tracks enciphered with powerful lyrical meanings. With this in mind, we’ve collected 12 of the best rock and metal instrumental albums of all time, in no particular order, uncovering the subterranean levels of the genres, and spotlighting how the tentacles of melody may sprawl, thriving in the total absence of lyrics.
A lot of instrumental rock and metal reaps inspiration from adventurous, progressive, and often futuristic sound palettes, a journey to the precipice of what rock truly is when freed of its given structure of lyrics and anthem choruses.
These ingenious records are absurdity, anti-conventionalism, and anti-commercialism at their finest: the life forces of rock and metal as you’ve never heard them before.
1. Blood Incantation – Timewave Zero (2022)
Blood Incantation’s cosmic strain of death metal gave way to an atypical instrumental album, Timewave Zero, focused on disturbing celestial ambiance and retro-futurism. Described by the band as “a more than 40 minutes long journey through the stargate, into the vast darkness of outer space”, Timewave Zero soaks in the type of atmospheres where “riffs” are elusive, and the stereotypes of music are shattered.
Instead, an ocean of synths set a fluid backdrop for intermittent samples and odd occurrences to haunt the waters, unseen and unsettling to those exploring the album.
2. Ozric Tentacles – The YumYum Tree (2009)
With a name like Ozric Tentacles, you’re destined to be in for an odd spell. This progressive English band’s 2009 release, The YumYum Tree, carves the path where rock music meets electro futurism, hazed over by a time-defying mix of world and classical influences. Each track is masterfully controlled by synthetic chaos, infiltrated by metal riffs and guitar solos that sound like UFOs ascending to interstellar flight.
Ozric Tentacles have always focused on music over meaning, and without any lyricists credited to this album, The YumYum Tree promises 53 minutes of kaleidoscopic instrumentals, pouring each shred of inspiration into summoning a landscape which swarms with strangeness.
3. Frank Zappa – Jazz From Hell (1986)
Frank Zappa’s harmonic genius is what made him a legend in classic and prog rock, so it’s no surprise he scattered some A-star instrumental records through his incredible 120+ album discography.
Jazz From Hell is the last album Frank Zappa released (excluding his posthumous records); a final snapshot of Zappa’s unmatched eccentricity as a songwriter and an original talent.
Zappa’s style trailblazed a sharp standard, refining the jagged edges of rock music with the eccentricities of jazz, pioneering a fusion of anomalous atmospheres since reanimated by other artists of his genre, but hardly ever perfected.
4. Buckethead – The Elephant Man’s Alarm Clock (2006)
If Frank Zappa’s 120+ album discography seemed insane, Buckethead steals the show with nearly 400 studio albums released across various projects since 1992.
While most of this Californian guitar virtuoso’s music is focused on instrumental work, The Elephant Man’s Alarm Clock is one of his darkest releases — as metal as a church on fire.
Igniting its sweeping, bittersweet melodics with the harsh passions of doom, djent, and a circus of other sub-genres, Buckethead’s experimental tones are deep-set with disorientation and are sometimes completely alien to the common spectrum of rock and metal.
5. Explosions In The Sky – The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place (2003)
This post-rock record by Explosions In The Sky takes a refreshing step away from prog and all its chaos. An instrumental four-piece from Texas renowned for their “cathartic mini-symphonies,” Explosions In The Sky’s third studio album paints a dreamscape of sound, manifesting and disintegrating in multitudinous forms of serenity.
The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place reverberates with distortions of hope, capturing an ambient swelling of light and tranquil decay which streams through five 8+minute long tracks.
6. This Will Destroy You – Another Language (2014)
Cinematic post-rock at its finest, This Will Destroy You’s 2014 record, Another Language, is an album of drowned ambiences, driven by bittersweet beats that come clouded in a grainy haze. This immersive instrumental album feels dissociated and enchanted by an unreal perception of music, its overwhelmingly stunning atmospheres flushed with unmatchably raw emotion
Guitarist Chris King revealed the inspiration behind the band’s cinematic sound, recalling; “When the band was formed 11 years ago the ultimate goal was to be involved with scoring film […] Film in general is a huge influence for me both visually and aurally. It is such a powerful and important art medium that will always have holding power […] That’s what I love about film – the capacity to transcend and transform.”
7. Guthrie Govan – Erotic Cakes (2006)
Instrumental albums leave a rare space for the oddities of music to mutate and flourish like plantlife devouring an abandoned town.
Guthrie Govan’s 2006 record, Erotic Cakes, is a prime example of the wonders which come when a multi-instrumental guitarist commands the lyrical space, devoid of words but soaked in melody.
This genre-skimming instrumental album balances predominantly between prog rock and technical metal, entangling both jazz extensions and hi-speed shredding, ridiculousness and a golden level of skill.
8. Hypothermia – Skogens Hjärta (2015)
Skogens Hjärta is the only instrumental album by Swedish DSBM (depressive-suicidal black metal) band, Hypothermia, and captures a bleak feeling lyrics could never convey.
Founded in rhythm guitars, loose arpeggios, and a traditional 3-piece rock band set up, Hypothermia uniquely declines to venture into prog to fill the void without lyrics – they craft music in tune with the chasm, giving the wordless sensation of inner emptiness centre-stage.
Like a depressive jam fed by cleansing light, Skogens Hjärta ventures through thick atmospheres, conjuring an expanse of chords which ring out like peaceful death knells, and waltz the listener to introspection.
9. Polyphia – New Levels New Devils (2018)
Polyphia laces an alternate shade of futurism through their sound. Their 2018 release, New Levels New Devils, layers electric rock melodics over trap beats, leeching power from synths, cinematics, and a vibrant clash of tones.
As the band said to Metal Insider: “With the new record, we just wanted to make something that went hard as f***. “S*** that goes hard” was quite literally the mantra from the beginning. So it just makes sense to draw inspiration from things that actually go hard as f***.”
And trust us, it does.
10. Liquid Tension Experiment – Liquid Tension Experiment (1998)
Releasing only 3 albums between 1999 and 2021, Liquid Tension Experiment’s music is like a rare, cryptzoologic sighting that gets talked about for decades to come. Their debut album, the self-titled Liquid Tension Experiment, sees the retrofuturist sound of ‘90s video games crushed by the elemental force of ‘90s heavy metal.
Fluid with grooves and steamrolled with a crystalline sense of musical anarchy, this record is an adventure through technicolor hallucinations of sound, tied together by experimental guitarwork resonant with the rock greats.
11. Animals as Leaders – The Joy of Motion (2014)
The Joy of Motion is a clustered minefield of eccentric metal, ribbed with djent-style rhythmic textures, bluesy jazz, and power-hungry prog rock.
Animals as Leaders cobweb an offbeat array of influences in their patchwork sound, spiralling around a focal point of inspiration and instinct.
As Animals’ guitarist Tosin Abasi said to Loudwire in 2014, “I think our intuition is basically what guides us to decide what we decide is good music. Right? I guess why we write technical music is because we have been listening to progressing and technical music for so long that it becomes what we naturally create ourselves. So, we aren’t being super cerebral in trying to make the song overly complex or anything like that but we have consumed a steady diet of complex music to the point where it is kind of like our bread and butter.”
12. Earth – The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull (2008)
Earth’s fifth full-length release, The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull, sees progressive blues rock tinged with Wild Western undertones. While harbouring the eerie feeling of a long-lost Breaking Bad soundtrack, this slow-paced, drone-based album packs its sonic wilderness with gripping anticipation of the warmth emerging from its horizon.
Earth started off as a drone/doom metal band, conjuring sinking, Black Sabbath-like atmospheres from distortions and claustrophobic low frequencies. But their 2008 release inverts the band’s acclaimed sound; grounding itself in unique, melodic reimaginations of drone/doom under the calm, sun-washed influence of country rock.
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