In many hard rock and heavy metal songs, the riff is a central element, playing a foundational formal, motivic, gestural, and social role. My presentation examines the role of the riff in the funeral-doom metal genre, arguing that it can also be used as a musical object for contemplation.

Scholars such as Gavin Hurley and Jonathan Piper have explored funeral doom's connections to practices of contemplation found in Orthodox spiritual traditions and philosophers such as Georges Bataille and Eugene Thacker. Silence and paradoxical images or texts often play a role in encouraging contemplation, as they encourage sustained attention to a transcendent or unknowable topic and bypass normal habits of thought.

Riffs in funeral-doom tracks often play an analogous role to a paradoxical image through their extreme slow tempi and through puzzling transformations. For example, Mournful Congregation's "Remembrance of the Transcending Moon" transforms a riff so that harmonic arpeggiation and melodic gesture become unified. Shape of Despair's "Monotony Fields" contains several riffs that are all variants of an unheard source and simultaneously suggest stasis and motion. Skepticism's "The Organium" transforms an organ riff through multiple changes in time-feel and pitch level, creating confusion over whether it has many identities or one.

My presentation draws attention to expanded possibilities of how riffs are constructed and transformed in some metal subgenres and it shows that, while riffs have a strong embodied component, they can also serve to invite the listener to mental reflection.