Southern Lord is an American independent label founded by the guitarist Greg Anderson, a Seattle native active in the Los Angeles scene, which began issuing records in 1998. Its first releases documented two doom bands that had already split, Thorr’s Hammer and Burning Witch, and Anderson himself called it a vanity label at first. The name and logo play on the Southern Comfort brand, with lord as a nod to the devil.
The label became the principal home of drone metal. It issued the albums of Sunn O))), the group Anderson formed with Stephen O’Malley as a tribute to Earth’s early work, including Black One in 2005 and Monoliths & Dimensions in 2009, and it released Earth’s own later records such as Hex, with its cleaner, slower guitar tones. Over time the roster widened to ambient, post-metal, jazz fusion and fast hardcore and crust punk, yet the label remains best known for slow, amplified drone.