OMM's Inferno
15 Songs | 9 Circles | One Journey
Dante's descent into Hell reimagined as a progressive metal concept work.
When I was in school, I read Dante's Inferno. That was one tough book for me to get through! I don't recall much about it now, so sometime around the late 2000s, I decided to tackle it again.
Heck, I had recently defeated The Canterbury Tales (unabridged), so I figured I could surely reread Inferno! I found an old copy and went back in.
Let me say, some of Dante's descriptions were like watching paint dry. There are pages and pages describing people, places, punishments, architecture, history and things that, at times, felt like they were never going to end.
I think that was one of the punishments that was UNLISTED!
But I FINALLY got through it. And when I finished, I had one thought:
This would make a killer metal concept opera.
The idea stayed with me.
After completing A Story of Woe / Poe, I decided it was time to tackle The Divine Comedy. But I didn't want to simply turn Dante's work into a musical retelling.
I wanted to take the characters, imagery and underlying journey from the original work and look at them from a 2026 perspective. What would these ideas look like now? What would these punishments mean to us? What would we recognize in Dante's journey that perhaps wasn't as obvious when the work was written?
And somewhere in that process, OMM's Inferno was born.
Who Was Dante?
Dante Alighieri was a Florentine poet, philosopher and political thinker who lived from roughly 1265 to 1321. His Commedia, later known as The Divine Comedy, became one of the great works of world literature.
The poem is divided into three parts — Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso — and follows Dante on an imagined journey from Hell, through Purgatory, and ultimately toward Paradise.
Inferno is the first part of that journey, with the Roman poet Virgil serving as Dante's guide through the nine circles of Hell.
But the poem wasn't written in some peaceful literary bubble. Dante lived in a world of intense religious, philosophical and political conflict.
He became involved in Florentine politics and aligned himself with the White Guelphs, only to be forced into exile when the Black Guelphs, backed by Papal forces, took control of Florence in 1301.
Dante never returned to his city. Much of the Commedia was written during that exile, and the work carries with it the concerns of the medieval world — politics, morality, religion, philosophy, justice, sin and the human condition.
Nearly seven hundred years later, I'm looking at that same journey from a completely different world.
Dante had his Florence. We have ours.
The people, places and circumstances have changed, but some of the questions haven't.
That's what interested me.
Fifteen songs. Nine circles. One journey.
Not a replacement for Dante. Not an attempt to rewrite the original. Just another way to walk through Hell.