Drone is a minimalist form of music where sustained sounds are emphasized. Drones have been part of traditional music for a long time, with instruments like the tanpura, didgeridoo, or Highland bagpipes producing sustained tones to accompany the other instruments. The modern genre, however, has its origins in the minimalist music scene of the late 1950s and 1960s. As minimalist musicians attempted to reduce music to its bare essentials composers like La Monte Young, with his Theatre of Eternal Music, traded rhythm for long, slow-moving pieces where the listener's focus is instead directed to slight variations in tone or dynamics. Chord changes are infrequent if they happen at all.

Drone music's influences can be seen in the art rock of the Velvet Underground, founding member John Cale having been a member of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Several of their songs, such as "Venus in Furs" and "Heroin", feature Cale’s sustained electric viola, adding a screeching harsh drone to underline the tracks. Lou Reed, another member of the Velvet Underground, would later contribute to drone with his controversial album Metal Machine Music which was critically panned at the time of its release but has gone on to be hugely influential within experimental music. Krautrock bands such as Can, Tangerine Dream, and Faust also incorporated drone into their work, most notably in Faust’s collaboration with Theatre of Eternal Music member Tony Conrad, Outside the Dream Syndicate and Tangerine Dream’s Zeit.

The Velvet Underground were enormously influential on indie rock, and echoes of their drones can be heard in the feedback-drenched sound of The Jesus and Mary Chain and in the wall of sound style of shoegaze bands such as My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, and Ride. Post-rock bands Godspeed You! Black Emperor and This Will Destroy You also prominently feature drones in their work. Artists like Stars of the Lid and Gas blend drone with modern classical and techno respectively, pushing the genre forward.

Finally, we have drone metal, which takes the drone of La Monte Young and fuses it with the glacial doom metal of bands like Melvins. Pioneered by Earth in the early 1990s through releases such as their confusingly named debut Earth 2 [sidenote: Earth collaborated with Kurt Cobain in 1990 on the track “Divine and Bright”] and in parallel by the Japanese band Boris,, and carried on by Burning Witch and, perhaps most famously, Sunn O))). Other artists, such as Neptunian Maximalism, Nadja, and Locrian are some personal favourites.

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