Iceburn constituted one of the most adventurous projects of 1990s rock music. Their music, emerging from the "skate-metal" genre, was a form of progressive rock that fused jazz, metal, and hardcore.

Iceburn was formed in Salt Lake City (Utah) by guitarist Gentry Densley and vocalist Jeremy Chatelain. Their first album, Firon (Victory, 1992), presents a bold crossover of heavy metal, hardcore, funk-metal, and progressive rock. Their style is therefore original and eclectic if a little too unstable. The seven-minute Burn II sounds like a cross between Black Sabbath and Slint. Fall dives into noisy chaos reminiscent of Fugazi but then settles for an atmospheric melody a` la Pearl Jam. The eight-minute instrumental Winter alone surveys a vast stylistic terrain, from Voivod to Living Colour via Metallica. The ten-minute Guts, after quoting a Stooges riff, weaves a tapestry of melodic and sycopatic riffs that becomes a constantly changing accompaniment for the singer's psychodrama. The eight-minute instrumental Poem Of Fire is perhaps the first towering statements by the band certainly more cohesive than most of the rest, an artful blend of prog-rock fantasias, noise-rock cacophony and jazzy jamming. The metal vortex of Burn I is emblematic of their skills at fusing melody and dissonance. The seven-minute Drop, instead, erects metal walls around emocore wailing with a break of swinging jazz for distorted guitars. The intermezzos are no less varied: the acoustic instrumental Soulstice bridges baroque music and Stairway to Heaven. Not everything works, but everything is ambitious.

The subsequent and monumental Hephaestus (Revelation, 1993) perfects the formula through twenty-eight cerebral fragments. It guides the labyrinthine jams of Caravan and Whirlpool with guitar finesse verging on the avant-garde. The rhythm section of Cache Tolman (bass) and Joseph Smith (drums) generously contributes jazz-inspired ideas. Densley�s mumbled vocals practically neuter the �hard� potential of I and Wall. Appearances of conventional riffs hold only in Only and especially Swatter, worthy of the best grunge. Many of the tracks are simple launching points, often based on brilliant insights (the psychedelic solo of Deconstruction, the fluid jazz-rock of Swatted). Rarely has a heavy metal album attempted to be so cultured and refined.

Jeremy Chatelain quit and went on to be the singer of the band Handsome on Handsome (1997), featuring ex-Helmet guitarist Peter Mengede and ex-Quicksand guitarist Tom Capone. Relocating to New York, he also formed Jets to Brazil with Blake Schwarzenbach, former singer of Jawbreaker, that released Orange Rhyming Dictionary (1998), Four Cornered Night (2000) and Perfecting Loneliness (2002).

Gentry Densley assembled a new band with second guitarist James Holder, tenor saxophonist Greg Nielsen and the same rhythm section of Cache Tolman on bass and Joseph Smith for Poetry Of Fire (Revelation, 1995). The album further refined Gentry Densley's hyper-fusion of free jazz, classical music, progressive-rock, atonal avantgarde, heavy-metal and Indian ragas. A sort of summary for beginners is provided by the instrumental Poetry Of Fire (16 minutes): fibrillating psychedelic drones, martial tempos, dark hard-rock riffs, dub-like beats, free-jazz horn improvisation, Frank Zappa-ian cartoonish fanfares and King Crimson-ian convoluted counterpoint are blended in a smooth and free-flowing continuum. The whole sounds like a jazzier version of Djam Karet or a deconstructed Colosseum suite. Stones (14 minutes) is a subtler exercise in restrained interplay, reminiscent of Cream and Blue Cheer. The undercurrents of Blues (nine minutes) further unravel the sound, placing a rambling guitar against a decomposing rhythm and a nocturnal sax. Discolor (14 minutes) is also bluesy, but the saxophone takes the lead, and its delirious acrobatics humble the guitar.

Meditavolutions (Revelation, 1996), credited to Iceburn Collective, (Gentry Densley on guitar and sitar, Greg Nielsen on tenor sax, James Holder on guitar, Doug Wright on bass, Randy Herbert on percussion, Daniel Day on drums), is the band's second masterpiece, an album in which their sources and their original ideas are blended into a personal style of terrific power, supreme geometries are warped by devastating emotions and life springs from amorphous magma.
The icy and terrible ouverture, Trills And Cones, pays the band's debt to King Crimson, both the original romantic bards and the latter, brainy avant/improv unit. After a blast of white noise (Revolution II), their heavy-metal roots come out in the operatic hymn Vision (the only track with vocals).
The album's centerpiece is the 22-minute suite Sphinx. From the very first notes, when an Hendrix-ian guitar with a middle-eastern accent engages the horns in a dissonant fanfare, it is not clear who are the protagonists. The instruments take turns in uttering dischordant phrases. Sudden bursts of collective noise are quickly sedated by long phases of directionless drifting. The playing is more about dissecting the parts than about creating a whole.
Objects is even less organic. Lacking any trace of jazz, one can't even call it "free jazz". It is "free music" that takes very little for granted.
But jazz does permeate the 14-minute jam History, a better structured jelly that revolves around the saxophone's skeletal solos and is mainly a showcase for each musician's technical prowess.
After another blast of white noise (Revolution III), the album is closed by an atonal reprise of Trills And Cones.
The playing is as self-indulgent as progressive-rock can be, but the overall effect is certainly powerful and fierceful.

Their avant-rock style got another injection of jazz from the three lengthy group improvisations of Polar Bear Suite (Revelation, 1997). The band (completely redesigned, except for Densley, Wright and Day) was now a small orchestra, and the relationship to rock and roll remains vague at best. Solarity, a 20-minute jam, displays a band that has left behind the brooding, pensive Meditavolutions. Seven minutes into the track, the musicians charge with unusual fervor, and four minutes later the instruments lock in superb counterpoint. These are musicians who are not only interested in displaying their own style, but also in taking issue with the style of the others.
On the other hand, the 23-minute monolith of Polarity ranks as one of their most abstract performances, and Aurora Boreality presents itself as a subliminal sequence of sounds rather than an organized unit. They are probably the most accomplished pieces on the album. Polarity's eloquence is unmatched in Iceburn's career, and Aurora Boreality coins a new form of atonal composition, one that has many facets and virtually no ending.

Two electric guitars, two stand-up basses and drums recorded the seven pieces that make up Power Of The Lion (Iceburn, 1998). Those pieces are intended not as finished goods but as components to be superimposed at will, according to a principle derived from Quantum Mechanics.

Speed of Light/ Voice of Thunder (1999) was credited to the Iceburn Double Trio (two drummers, two guitarists and two saxophonists). Iceburn seemed to disband after Land of Wind and Ghosts (2000).

The mini-album Land of Wind and Ghosts (The Mountain Collective for Independent Artists, 2002) was recorded live by a line-up of two guitars, saxophone and percussion.

Gentry Densley of Iceburn and Greg Anderson of Sunn O))) formed Ascend and released Ample Fire Within (Southern Lord, 2008), that sounds like an experiment in orchestral drones, adding instruments such as trombone, piano, the human voice and additional guitars to shape monolithic trips such as Ample Fire Within, VOG and Dark Matter. They later released The Feather Tipped the Serpent's Scale (2012) and The Thundering Heard (2018).

Densley went on to form Eagle Twin that debuted with The Unkindness of Crows (Southern Lord, 2009), a return to the heavy progressive sound of Iceburn, although some songs betray the influence of Sunn's and Earth's school of doom.

Jeremy Chatelain formed Cub Country that released High Uinta High (2002), Stay Poor Stay Happy (2004), Stretch That Skull Cover and Smile (2009), Repeat Until Death (2014).

Iceburn returned with Asclepius (2021).