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G'day,

Like most people I suspect, when I'm working I love having music on in the background.

One of my go-tos is Tool (and A Perfect Circle) because it offers the perfect mix of "wall of sound", great clear vocals, sharp interesting drumming, and guitar work that slaps and moves around instead of playing the same sound over and over again (also I am not a musician so I have no idea what the proper technical terms are for these things).

I stick YouTube Music on a Tool Mix and it's a pretty bad selection with a heap of stuff I really don't enjoy (I dislike growly or screamy voices, sad muddy instruments, or where the "wall of sound" is basically just feedback that drones on and on, etc).

I've tried going with "prog metal" and "prog rock" and "alt metal" as genres but that seems to cover a LOT of variation. No matter how many thumbs down I give there's always the screamy dudes and high pitched guitar whining popping back up.

Are there any bands that are Tool-like I can seed my selection with? The big focus being if there's vocals you can actually hear and understand them, distinct instruments that are actually playing a tune, and drumming that does something more than just maintain a beat in the background.

Some other bands I enjoy that I feel are similar enough are My Sleeping Karma, Kadavar, Witchcraft, Smote, and Riverside.

The recent post on EU's search index got me thinking: the real reason I (personally) haven't been able to shift to other search engines (like duckduckgo; I currently cannot afford Kagi) is Google has these information cards that "summarize" useful information in an information card. For example, it can give you the recent results of the sports team you searched for. Or it can give you synopsis of a movie and the list of its cast and crew.

However, recently Google has started replacing these information cards with AI-generated content. Not to be against AI summaries, but the whole UX is pretty bad (I can't just click the cast member and go to their information card on Google); and it seems it is only going to get worse.

So my question: Are there any search engines that do this well?

I know duckduckgo has an information card which usually is a summary of the wikipedia page of whatever you searched for. I would use something like letterboxd or goodreads on the first go but I have found (a) the websites to be a bit clunky for a quick search (b) they are not as good for fuzzy search.