There are at least four artists with the name Premature Burial.

1. An American death metal band (active from 2003 to present)
2. An American industrial/ambient/experimental/soundtrack project (active 1999 to 2003)
3. A free improvisation/free jazz trio
4. A Spanish heavy/speed/doom metal band solely formed by JM Dopico from legendary acts such as Machetazo, Dishammer and Bodybag.

1. Premature Burial is a Brutal death metal band from USA. They formed in late 2003 with Corey, Joe, and Brandon, who then recorded a demo with Jesse Smith (Zao) titled "Monuments of War". They then started playing shows around their area with this material.

During the years the group went through some line up changes. They did another CD, recorded by Doug White (Everytime I Die, Psyopus), and hit the road playing with Misery Index, Origin, Through The Eyes of The Dead and Decapitated.

They are currently recording new material and are booking a new tour in the summer months.

2. Premature burial, as an idea, evolved from Joshua Heinrich's forays into experimental electronic music in college and studies of musique concrete and musique electronique. Initially emerging from the track "exctinction", an experimental dark soundscape composed and recorded in 1999 for a live group performance piece at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the on-again-off-again project eventually took on a new duality that blended processed orchestral instrumentation and sampling techniques with more tongue-in-cheek song-oriented material. The result was premature burial's debut album, flowers for the dead, with the band's somewhat dark name actually being an inside joke referring to the number of times the project was abandoned, reworked, and restarted.

With premature burial's second album, however, the project took on a life of its own along with a more serious and cohesive concept-driven style and instrumental sound that combined ambient, classical, industrial, rock, and world music elements. Centered around ideas including spirituality, searching for identity, historical events, and persecution, ritual became premature burial's most popular album and produced the cult hit "sacrifice", which has since appeared in film.

In 2002, flowers for the dead and ritual were reissued with additional artwork and bonus tracks (including material from Heinrich's score to the 2001 horror film The Strange). The reissues were followed by premature burial's third album, ruins, a second epic concept album that this time concentrated on violence and war, following civilization from the deaths of past cultures to the extinction of mankind in a bleak nuclear winter. While the melodic/orchestral elements of ritual were still firmly in place, ruins delved further into industrial/noise territory, portraying the album's later thematic content with relentless distorted percussion and bleak processed ambient noise as the world fell into disarray and violence.

In 2003, work began on a fourth premature burial album, titled nightfall, that was a concept album dealing with politics, the media, and false illusions of control and power. Recording sessions were soon abandoned, however, due to feelings that the material wasn't pushing the project forward musically, and premature burial was officially put to rest.

In October 2011, Autumnal Release released remastered versions of all 3 premature burial albums, including a 10th anniversary edition of ritual with bonus tracks that included an unreleased 2002 compilation track plus two of the previously unreleased songs intended for nightfall.

3. The unit takes it's name from an Edgar Allen Poe story in which the narrator suffers from episodes of catalepsy and fears being buried alive. The reader is taken through various stages of paranoia, forced to imagine being trapped inside a coffin, paralyzed and unable to communicate their mortal predicament to the world of the living.
Comprised of Peter Evans, Matt Nelson and Dan Peck, all three members use varying degrees of amplification; Evans presses up against a close mic at times while Nelson and Peck have a full array of effects pedals at their disposal. Combining a vast dynamic spectrum and versatility of form, the resulting pieces range from the sound of softly scurrying rats to pitch-shifted loon-calls from Hell. The recording session took place in a church, the acoustics of which enhance the illusion of the sounds having multiple/unclear origins and supply an added dimension of unease to the standstill moments.
The church in which this album was recorded is in Wilkes-Barre, PA, a depressed Rust Belt town that in recent years has seen spikes in gang crime and unemployment. A broader definition of the word "haunted" could be applied to cities like these across the country, "ghost towns" where the progression of time and socio-economic development has seemed to creep backwards. The real darkness of Wilkes-Barre's past still resonates within it's interior spaces, and subtly exerts itself on this recording.

4. Premature Burial (A Coruña, Galicia, Spain) was formed in 2018 by JM Dopico, releasing their first allbum, Antihuman, in May 2019.
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