Due to the significant impedance mismatch between water and air, two types of pipeline silencers designed for the same target frequency with different filling materials often have significantly different thickness. This increases the difficulty in designing silencers for multiple pipelines with different filling materials in narrow spaces. The paper reports a metamaterial design paradigm based on a Helmholtz cavity for low-frequency sound absorption for both air pipelines and water-filled pipelines. An asymmetric absorption metamaterial with coupled Helmholtz resonators is proposed to reduce the impact of low-frequency noise in air pipelines. By coupling the absorption mode and reflection mode, the asymmetric absorption metamaterial with a thickness of 71 mm achieves 95.6% absorption at 403 Hz. The tunable absorbing performance in broadband is confirmed by a finite element simulation. Additionally, a composite metamaterial constructed with HRs associated with a rubber layer is proposed for low-frequency broadband sound absorption in water-filled pipelines. An average absorptance of above 0.8 is achieved over the range of 380–508 Hz by coupling four basic composite metamaterial units with a thickness of 31.5 mm. The proposed design paradigm can reduce the complexity of designing multiple pipelines silencers with different filling materials because the muffler should have similar thickness in the same paradigm.