At a time when heavy metal was moving forward faster than ever thanks to the advent and growing popularity of thrash metal, Chicago's Trouble embodied a nostalgic throwback to the genre's old-school '70s values -- and specifically a preference for the deliberate, slow-creeping style of the genre's founding fathers, Black Sabbath, which, in the able hands of Trouble and California's similarly backward-gazing Saint Vitus, came to be known as doom metal. Emerging in the early '80s, the group's first two studio LPs, Psalm 9 (1984) and The Skull (1985), are considered seminal in the genre. Lineup changes and shifting musical landscapes went a long way in lessening the band's output over the years, but they endured well into the next century, issuing their eighth studio album, The Distortion Field, in 2013. While the group never achieved any notable amount of commercial success, their preservation efforts nevertheless rescued metal's original blueprint from disuse and carved it in granite for subsequent exploration by each new generation of doom bands that followed.