Wreck of the Hesperus

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Wreck of the Hesperus
From left: Andy Cunningham, Ray Keenaghan, Count Rodge
Origin	Dublin, Ireland
Years active	2004 – present
Genres	Funeral doom
Labels	Self-produced, Aesthetic Death
Members	Andy Cunningham Count Rodge Ray Keenaghan
Website(s)	Official site

This article is about the band. For the poem by Henry Longfellow, see The Wreck of the Hesperus.

Wreck of the Hesperus are a doom metal band from Ireland, based in Dublin. The band first played together in January 2004 and they recorded their first demo, a four-track effort entitled Terminal Dirge in June 2004. The follow up Eulogy for the Sewer Dwellers was released in 2005.

The band's style of music is a particularly slow and heavy form of funeral doom, with guttural vocals and stoner doom influenced guitar riffs. Unusually for doom metal, the band's music frequently highlights Ray Keenaghan's drumming skills, with tracks such as Prolix featuring close to 4 minutes of drumming accompanied by nothing other than Christian choral samples.

The band's live performances feature as little interaction with the crowd as possible, with feedback filling the spaces between songs and giving the audience no chance to applaud. This bears some resemblance to the live shows of Sunn O))). The bass player dons a hooded top and keeps his back to the crowd at all times.

The band have reportedly finished work on their new album The Sunken Threshold and it is to be released in late Summer 2006. It will be 45 minutes long and feature 3 songs. The band's website also reports that split albums with Irish doom metal bands Mourning Beloveth and DeNovissimus are in the pipeline, with the former to be expected in 2007.

Despite the fact the band shares its name with a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, they claim to have taken their moniker from an Irish expression meaning an unpleasant state (such as a hangover) and deny deriving any inspiration from the poem. However, the album Eulogy for the Sewer Dwellers is littered with references to events in the poem.