Dungeon Synth
The 30th of November, 2025
It’s me after all. I have to write about dungeon synth.
Perhaps much has already been said about this, but there is some great magic about seeing music live. The feeling of being in this huge place with so many people with loud, booming music gives some kind of powerful primordial feeling. When the lights dim and the crowd falls quiet, and the screams of a guitar reverberate around the room at an unfathomable volume, it’s as if a magical spell has been cast upon you, as if this is something you’re meant to do. I think it’s easy to grow addicted to this intensity. For many years, I’ve been a lover of metal music for this reason.
But, dear reader, music is more than just this feeling.
It’s easy to get lost in the more “fun” or intense aspects of music and not focus on the more nuanced stuff. Pop hooks and heavy riffing are fun, but I think dungeon synth provides something wholly different in a way that I find infinitely interesting. Of course, the ambient music genre long predates dungeon synth, and it’ll exist long after the final dungeon synth record is published, but something that keeps me holding onto dungeon synth specifically is that it brings structure and focus to the ambient scene. This isn’t to say all dungeon synth records are ambient either; while some records do focus on that, there’s a lot of stuff with strong melody and traditional song structure as well.
Dungeon synth is thematically captivating to me because I’ve always been deeply interested in these gloomy fantasy worlds that dungeon synth records often portray. There is an inherent escapism in dungeon synth which I find to be enriching; like an old RPG game on a PC, it’s doing its best to take you to another time and place. Being a spin-off of black metal, it tends to have iconography and style that I find personally appealing as well, but I think even for someone not particularly fixated on those elements, there’s still a great deal to enjoy about listening to some dark dungeon music.
An interesting factual tidbit I should briefly mention is that dungeon synth actually didn’t get its name until long after those early trail-blazing albums in the 1990s. The name of the genre was actually coined by Dungeon Synth Blog (linked below) in 2011. The irony of praising the genre for its structure and then dropping this fact is not lost on me. The earliest examples are disputed, and dungeon synth came from a few different places at the time. These early records were categorized by their sound and aesthetic many years later in the modern era. Because of this, dungeon synth is a genre that maintains a wide breadth of variety, even in those early records, and of course, in the modern Bandcamp era as well, with our microgenres and things of varying silliness.
“Why should I listen to dungeon synth?”
Dungeon synth is uniquely positioned because it’s very much an outsider art-type music genre, but it’s not really abrasive or unpleasant like so many outsider art-type music genres are. There are many DS records you could put on for your mom, and she’d think they are fine. I think there needs to be a lot more ears on this stuff for this reason; it’s actually super palatable, and I think a great many of you would enjoy it. Maybe its aesthetic fixings make it seem unappealing to a wider range of people? Maybe it’s just nerdy and obscure? Regardless, the actual musical content of many records in this genre is worth a listen.
“So why are you talking about all this anyways?”
Unfortunately, I’ll be recommending you all some music. I’d like to provide a little starter pack for someone who may be interested in getting into dungeon synth here…
That’s it?
Yeah, actually. A lot of articles like this often recommend such a massive range of things that it’s kind of impossible to actually derive anything of value from them. I think recommending one extremely good single record here will do more good in actually getting you into dungeon synth! If you don’t end up liking it, that’s fine! If you do like it, this is a great starting point, and you can find other projects that offer more of the specific stuff you enjoyed! The entire record is only 30 minutes long, so I feel okay recommending it to even someone who’s only casually interested!
The Twelve Castles is a short and sweet record that is filled with magical melodies that transport you to another time and place far away from our own. The record is filled with emotion and nostalgia, even though there’s not a single spoken word in it. This is some seriously beautiful music, and I think even someone who’s not particularly interested in the genre will find a lot of things here that they enjoy.
You may not be able to tell because I’ve only recommended a single record, but I’m actually really into the dungeon synth scene. If you’re really astute, you may note other pages on my website where I’ve talked about it before. Well, this is a website exclusive for sure, but I actually recorded a dungeon synth song of my own in 2013 when the online scene was still quite new, and it still sits unlistened to by anyone other than me on a dusty old cassette tape on my bookshelf. Besides that bit of personal lore, I’d like to also leave a couple of links to online resources for the dungeon synth community that I’ve found to be very useful. Normally, I don’t really link to things in this way, but the dungeon synth community online is unfortunately a bit sparse, so I feel the need to do so here.