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If you don’t know this already, I am (and have been for a long time) a huge fan of deathcore. This sometimes sucks because, well, a lot of deathcore sucks, and lots of metalheads do agree on this point (but not all). Here’s a rule I’ve learned, though: no genre of metal is without its great albums, the types of releases that seem to break the bounds of a subgenre without abandoning its tenets, showcasing to all what makes a certain style of metal tick. The ability to speak outside the very clear demarcations between deathcore, for instance, and the rest of metal is no small feat, and invariably not everyone will be down for the journey (though I’ve always been in). In the case of Codex Obscura, a solo deathcore project from North Carolina, this is precisely what is happening. The mastermind behind it all goes by Miira who writes some of the most bombastic, energized, and hyper-heavy deathcore in all the lands. Codex Obscura has a debut full-length on the way later this year, but we’re stoked to unveil a new song “Feral in Abstract” now.

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Straight to the point: Until Death is unabashed, 110% deathcore to the motherfucking maximum. As for “Feral in Abstract” in particular, it’s all breakdowns, beatdowns, and throwdowns as techy guitar riffs explode with Beneath the Massacre-esque intensity on top of programmed drumming which can only be described as “impossible.” The resulting music is extremely pissed off, but doesn’t lose out on any opportunity to become saturated with melody (and even atmosphere) as even some technical death metal bleeds in. “Feral in Abstract” does not bank fully on its adjacency to tech-death, though, owing its true heart and passionate soul to deathcore sui generis. The song bleeds with its own brutality, unabashed and sensationally dramatic in all those special deathcore ways.

Even if deathcore isn’t your thing, the raw talent on display by Codex Obscura should be apparent; even if staccato breakdowns and post-processed insanity don’t float your boat, hopefully a song like “Feral in Abstract” can fill your oceans a bit. If not, just be glad it’s not Suicide Silence or Emmure taking the cake in this game, two bands which get a ton of deathcore credit but as of late have not delivered anything special (at least in my opinion). Until Death, however, is special, and that distinctiveness doesn’t ruin or spoil Codex Obscura in the slightest.

As for my oceans, Codex Obscura boils them. All hail deathcore that doesn’t suck.

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Until Death releases later this year. Stay in tune with Codex Obscura via Bandcamp and Facebook.

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Despite all the black and doom metal I ingest — all those silky atmospherics I soak up so willy-nilly — I still have a serious weak spot: proggy, unrepentant deathcore shit. Basically, the opposite. Maybe I consider it some kind of balance; that, or maybe my taste is metal is just all over the goddamn place and I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. All I do know is that there’s this band Krosis and their upcoming second full-length A Memoir of Free Will is heavy as shit. Borrowing from djent, deathcore, technical death metal, brutal stuff and slam, Krosis have come up with a savage formula that wields significant heft while also being nimble and flexible. The new album isn’t all blasts and breakdowns; the band actually conjures up some dynamics to breathe actual life into what would otherwise be the machinations of intensely furious cyborgs. Here’s the penultimate track “Battles Are Won Within,” the heaviest thing I’ve heard so far in 2020 (and probably will for a while).

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I mean, 30 seconds in and you know what you’re getting here. But that’s not a bad thing outright: Krosis delivers what they promise, and that’s cutting-edge tech-death with oodles of groove and unabashed breakdowns. “Battles Are Won Within” is one of the heavier songs on the album for sure, but still not even the heaviest, which is saying something. The more I listen to it, too, I can sense already that this music is very love/hate, and that’s fine with me — it’s a certain blend of extreme that might work for some but not others. But as antithesis to all the ultra-bleak dark-room music I gouge myself on, shit like this works wonders for my mood sometimes. Just unabashed aggression, filthy slams, and no fucks given.

Krosis, keep on ripping, and I’ll keep on listening.

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A Memoir of Free Will releases February 7th via Unique Leader Records. The band is on tour; dates below:

2/6 Chapel Hill NC @ Local 506*
2/7 Winston Salem NC @ Breaktime
2/8 Asheville NC @ The Odditorium
2/9 Columbus GA @ The Plughouse
2/11 Lafayette IN @ The Spot Tavern
2/12 Pittsburgh PA @ Black Forge Coffee
2/13 Montclair NJ @ Meatlocker
2/14 Philadelphia PA @ Century
2/15 Virginia Beach @ West Beach Tavern
support by A Wake in Providence and God of Nothing
* No God of Nothing

A message from vocalist Mac Smith about the new single:

“Battles Are Won Within” is our modernized tribute to pioneers of 1990s death metal and innovators of the slam subgenre, including bands such as Suffocation, Internal Bleeding, and Devourment. We wanted to write an extremely heavy jam that is musically abnormal for us while still maintaining our stylization as a group, and we feel that this track turned out to be exactly that. We wanted this song to be as intense as possible and to overwhelm the listener with different dynamics of heaviness, as well as to try out our hand at complimenting classic styles of brutal death metal with a modern twist. Aggression, groove, riffs, slams, punishing vocals, you name it: this track has it all. As a death metal enthusiast, this one comes from a special place in my heart, and I hope everyone enjoys this track as much as I do! SLAM!

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If you’re here, I’m sorry. We’re talking about — and listening to — deathcore in this article. Most deathcore, especially today, is annoyingly bad copypasta from a handful of easily confusable yet nonetheless separate bands. But no subgenre of metal is terrible through-and-through; in fact, you could make the case that the worse the subgenre overall, or the less that you actually enjoy it, the better its gems will be, at least in comparative terms. Now, these three albums below will not suddenly transform you into a deathcore fan, so don’t worry. They might, however, showcase the complexity and artistry which was (and still is) happening behind the headlines, so to speak. While other bands were simply trying to get blitzed and write the heaviest breakdowns possible, with no regard for anything else really, these three saw the breakdown as a means to an end, not the end goal itself.

In the inaugural edition of this column, I explained deathcore as a vehicle for the breakdown, and the breakdown as something inherently physical and addictive. The same goes for these three albums here, and like the others I’ve featured in this series, they bridge somewhat to the less-derided technical death metal realm. This means that, sort-of counterintuitively, these deathcore albums are less about breakdowns than others in the subgenre. In my mind though, this only increases the impact, viability, and core essence of the breakdown itself: using it to make a powerful artistic statement, not just as an easy way to sell more trendy merch and get people to beat the shit out of each other in the pit wearing said merch. And while there is such thing as “marketable but still good” deathcore, like Rings of Saturn’s Lugal Ki En, those albums tend to still miss the point of being actually different rather than just offering differing variations on a genre-provided framework.

Anyway, enough mentalizing about deathcore. It’s a silly subgenre anyway, and honestly, I spend only a small fraction of my time with it anymore despite it being (alongside metalcore) my inroad to the metal world. Let’s just get heavy with these three wonderful albums and say “fuck it” while smashing our heads into whatever’s directly in front of us.

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Circle of Contempt — Artifacts in Motion
November 23rd, 2009

You might have heard of the term Sumeriancore: basically, the label Sumerian Records released a ton of high-quality deathcore and early djent between their founding in 2006 and, say, the early 2010s when those subgenres really started to get super-stale. And while you could easily make the argument that deathcore and djent have always been stale, some early Sumerian releases will forever be the counterargument that the heyday was something worth being a part of. Born of Osiris’ debut EP from 2007 is one of those albums (which I covered in the prior installment of this column), and Circle of Contempt’s Artifacts in Motion is another. As this Finnish band’s debut full-length, it showcased considerable mechanical and artistic talent alongside helping define that ever-popularizing Sumeriancore mold… down the road, now, Artifacts in Motion might be downright the best (and best preserved) microcosm of the label’s entire repertoire from a decade ago.

Sumerian releases a ton of hilariously abysmal rubbish now, and that’s fine, because albums like Artifacts in Motion retain their modernity and style despite not arriving long after the very first iPhone. One important distinction this album made — and thereby proving a point for the whole subgenre — is that deathcore breakdowns don’t need to be so obvious all the damn time. Circle of Contempt used the breakdown as more of a songwriting tool rather than diversion or embellishment, neutering the mindlessly heavy impact of breakdowns but, importantly, making them far more interesting, angular, and unpredictable. Circle of Contempt would go on to release another album with Sumerian in 2012 called Entwine the Threads, but I vastly prefer this earlier look into grittier and less melody-conscious deathcore that ended up becoming much harder to find once the new decade pressed on.

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Sepratist — Closure
February 7th, 2014

Blackened deathcore is a real rarity, mostly because the two genres are opposite in about every way possible. Sepratist apply dissonance and atmosphere to achieve a significant blackening of the deathcore that backbones the project; doing so without being “deathcore with blast beats” or “black metal with breakdowns” was the hard part, and Closure is a success in that regard. Another distinction, too, is that Sepratist is the brainchild of one person, Australia-based Sam Dishington (who worked with several guests on Closure but wrote the album himself). It’s an interesting singular view of what deathcore could still achieve following its late-2000s/early-2010s heyday: while purists on both sides may see Closure‘s blackening as a farce or gimmick, the album does blend the outright aggression of most deathcore albums and melancholic effervescence that characterizes black metal into something distinctly heavy and bleak.

The punchy nocturne of Closure is what really sells this release. One running trend with non-sucking deathcore, at least in my opinion, is the reintegration of the breakdown as a complexity-building tool versus cheap-thrill exploit, as I described above for Circle of Contempt. This doesn’t mean that Closure doesn’t have its simple and stupefying moments of brutality, of course, but it does mean that when they happen, they actually matter, especially in the blackened void created by all the saturated atmospherics that Dishington worked into the story. Songs like the nine-minute “Carrier” run the gamut between thickly layered, blasting ascents that build suspense and the chonking breakdowns that blow said suspense to fucking smithereens. I love the drama of this album, its unrelenting and sinister onslaught, something which feels like a work of true pain and intrigue instead of the giddy and pointless open-string pounding usually associated with deathcore.

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Phasma — Phasma
June 20, 2018

Phasma’s Phasma feels like a phasma — a cyborgian and pissed-off one. Whereas non-sucking deathcore usually eschews any ultra-mechanical and robotic feels, some deathcore bands just go all for it… usually resulting in an even greater failure. Not this band, though, whose self-titled album from last year stands as a reminder that deathcore just can’t be killed. Yes, there’s saxophone in this deathcore, but not nearly enough to distract anyone from how resolutely fucking planetary Phasma‘s sheer weight is. Embroidered with plenty of tech-death-derived technicality, but honoring the primacy of the breakdown, the album wastes no time quick-shifting between sinister chugs, groovy leads, and a wide variety of tempos. It feels decidedly modern without feeling automated in any way, an interesting achievement in this human age of, well, the automation of as many things as possible, music included.

The only thing, in my mind, not going for Phasma is its brief runtime and resulting fever-dream aftertaste: this album is more a selection of separate tracks than one tied-together narrative, not a dealbreaker but worth mentioning in any case. This would present a serious issue for black metal, for instance, but not deathcore whose defining element is one of fragmentation anyhow. This fragmentation on Phasma does actually benefit it, though, in the face of much longer-form deathcore: it comes, it slays, and it leaves. Let’s call it a short story, then, instead of an unfinished novel. For some (and this is something I totally get), you can only have “so much” of this kind of metal before your mind turns to spaghetti. Phasma turns my mind to spaghetti every time, especially the fifth track “Heathen’s Hammer,” and I love spaghetti despite getting (temporarily) tired of it after just one meal.

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I fucking love Beneath the Massacre. Two reasons: 1) they are mind-blowingly technical without succumbing to purposeless noodling, 2) they get about as close to deathcore as a death metal can get without actually being deathcore. Today, both the band and Century Media announced Fearmonger, to be released February 28th next year, coming in as the band’s fourth full-length starting way back with 2007’s Mechanics of Dysfunction. The new album follows 2012’s Incongruous (embedded below for your listening pleasure), witnessing an impressive dormancy in-between where fans like me prayed and prayed we’d get another album before the end of the decade (or close enough to it).

Doubtlessly, Fearmonger will be ludicrously heavy. Let’s hope it’s ludicrously good, too.

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Deathcore is indeed rife with repetitive tropes and a ton of stylistic pretense (all genres suffer these ailments, but this one especially). We should probably blame the breakdown: in the first Deathcore That Doesn’t Suck article, I wrote that “…deathcore serves a unique albeit overly specific purpose: it takes one element of metal (essentially, the breakdown) and makes it the central element.” Centralizing something as rigidly bound as a breakdown is, really, a recipe for uninteresting and soundalike music, though some deathcore bands manage to destroy this dilemma altogether with some creative (and technical) wit. Below are three.

Writing deathcore off is totally fair after your own personal assessment. If you’re in the process, or just curious, these albums have a better chance than most at winning over your breakdown-seeking psyche, or whatever you’re after, really. They’re wildly different in execution and style, but all three are downright deathcore, showcasing what the genre can accomplish — not just recreate — within and at the edges of its boundaries.

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The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza — Danza IIII: The Alpha — The Omega
October 16th, 2012

Even after countless listens, Danza IIII: The Alpha — The Omega still retains the ability to utterly rock my world with its unrepentantly blunt force. Definitely deathcore, but then again not fully, The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza fully congealed as a progressive band on this release, their fourth, final, and finest. If you think the concept of “progressive deathcore” is bonkers or bullshit, you might have some swing in that fight — indeed, the band is literally called The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza, which is ridiculous on its face. And, truthly, Danza IIII: The Alpha — The Omega is nigh unlistenable: from its ballistic production to its schizophrenic songwriting, the band basically deconstructs and reconstructs deathcore from the ground up, fucking up everything in their way while doing it. The breakdown (as a defining element) definitely hones the leading edge of Danza IIII: The Alpha — The Omega‘s assault, but beyond the chugging and slamming are incredible nuances so worth absorbing in a context beyond just deathcore.

Album centerpiece “Paul Bunyan and the Blue Ox” is just that: nuanced to infinity, with mathy constructions interwoven with that lovely open-string pounding that djent later hyper-popularized but also ruined. Samples and synths create cinematic atmospherics while the gears and guts of the song crush mountains; the fury stops mid-way, too, to let something more delicate and pretty emerge from the wasteland only so the band can savagely rip it apart in the outro. The song is the album’s longest, and it’s also instrumental, a nice nod from a deathcore band to the notion that the music actually matters in this subgenre, not just the trendy hats and tough-guy attitudes. A lot of “good” deathcore aims to twist your mind; Danza IIII: The Alpha — The Omega wants to twist your goddamn head off. That is a big difference, and The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza banked on it hard before disbanding, leaving us with a gem so precious it’s actually sorta hard to take it all in at once.

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NovaThrone — Revenants
December 17th, 2015

This is my go-to album for what we’ll call “technical deathcore”: Revenants is pretty much the shining example of what technicality (when utilized correctly) can do with deathcore, much like it does with death metal and the resulting tech-death. In a plain way of saying it, NovaThrone’s technicality helps make their deathcore less rote and repetitive than it might otherwise be — the flip-side, though, is that the band was adept at not letting technicality overpower what should of course be the central element, the breakdown. Revenants breaks down hard, really hard, in both the straightforward fuck-you-up way and the atmospheric way, where synths and abstract noise help create a chaotic headspace that those breakdowns thrive on. It’s that symbiotic relationship between guitar calisthenics and one-note cosmic slamming — two sort-of separate things if you think about it — that NovaThrone captures.

And now here I am talking about technicality and atmosphere, two things which typically destroy each other functionally. Not so with Revanants which remains thoroughly both heady and heavy whether it’s a million notes per second or just a few. This blend on its own is surprisingly difficult to find, but goddamn especially in deathcore. Lorelei, another deathcore band that I covered in the first article, does this as well, but they have a much more modern and stylish approach. NovaThrone achieves a deeper, darker spirit and mood, something much more sinister and with less pretense.

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Born of Osiris — The New Reign EP
October 2, 2007

“Fucking bow down!” This EP is an immediate classic from a band who departed significantly from its rawly technical and unembellished nature. This is not the Born of Osiris you’re either familiar with (their latest release The Simulation was nigh unlistenable) or the Born of Osiris whose sound you just imagine to be a certain way because they’re lumped into “that category” of bands along with Veil of Maya and After the Burial. But neither of those bands, despite having great early-on releases to their names, could match the sheer brutality of songs like EP closer “The Takeover,” with its torpedo ending featuring heavily syncopated pre-djent deathcore chugs. They were nothing but deathcore — and remember, 2007 was right around when Periphery would take off along with djent as a whole.

That’s why this EP is so important, notwithstanding the fact that its 21-and-a-half minutes are simply rife with beautifully technical deathcore riffs (and patterns). It represents that turning point right before djent started to influence nearly everyone in the scene, sorta Meshuggaizing everything in that annoyingly poppy way. Not going to shit on djent here, because I do like some djent; suffice it so say, I much prefer The New Reign EP (as a side note, fuck the remastered edition, the straight-up low-budget one is the way to go) when it comes to this sound as it began to flourish in different directions. In fact, I like this EP so much that I’m actually glad the band hasn’t since matched it. It’s perfect the way it is, alone in their discography as something that truly bites and burns as progressive, interesting deathcore.

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Deathcore sucks, and we all know it. As someone who actually likes deathcore, even I know it. But if we get real about it for just one second, we might realize there’s a different way to go about this music versus other forms of heavy metal. We might also realize that, theoretically, there is a chance some of this deathcore stuff is actually worthy in a grander metal context. It’s true that deathcore serves a unique albeit overly specific purpose: it takes one element of metal (essentially, the breakdown) and makes it the central element. Unfortunately, there’s only so many ways you can slice that pear; fortunately, though, it can be a juicy-ass pear.

Breakdowns are miraculous tools for marrying crowds with bands at live performances: the connection between body and music they inspire is actually something to behold. But, boiled down, they’re simple as fuck, even if made technical in their execution. Bottom line: breakdowns sell tickets and albums. People eat ’em up.

As such, it only makes sense to me that deathcore would be chock-full of soundalike bands — all repeating the same basic formula but with slight variations to produce an identical intended effect among listeners — but with the inevitable diamond in the rough. Lo and behold: this is indeed deathcore in reality. The likes of Suicide Silence and Emmure are no bueno in my book; to me, that is not what deathcore as a genre should champion. And while it’s probably okay to shit on deathcore as overly simplistic, thematically singular, easily commodified, etc., no reasonable person can damn the entire beast for being hideous when, if you focus your sights just so, there are spots of magnificent and complex beauty.

Yes, I am about to make the case that the following deathcore albums aren’t just good deathcore albums (a prerequisite to being on this list), but good metal albums to boot. It’s not just because they’re relatively technical — even though deathcore shines brightest through its interface with technical death metal — but because they’re actually deep-down, complex, well thought-out albums. From storytelling to experimentation to unbridled energy, these will be the deathcore albums you’ll enjoy if you’re to enjoy any deathcore album at all. If you still aren’t into it, that’s totally fair too; nevertheless, I hope these help broaden your perception at least about what deathcore can do as a (sometimes) legitimate subgenre.

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Lorelei — Lore of Lies
February 4, 2014

This is the album I show to tech-death fans who haven’t heard one deathcore band they’ve liked before. As long as you’re okay with liberally applied cinematic synth (not too unlike Shadows of Intent, but trust me, this is better) — and, of course, breakdowns and the accompanying low growls — then Lore of Lies should cut you in half like butter. It’s as poised and tight as any top-tier tech-death album, but tons heavier, groovier, and… well, more fun. And that illustrates a point I want to make about deathcore (which may apply to other metal subgenres in varying degrees): despite all the tough-guy, frowny-face antics and whatnot, the point of this music is to have a good time. It’s supposed to energize you, to get your body moving from a standstill, to reverberate inside your chest.

Lorelei have imbued their masterpiece with tons of dramatic build-ups (the synth helping here greatly) and impressive technicality which keeps the mind occupied while the body follows the groove. With everything going on, they haven’t forgotten deathcore at all: Lore of Lies checks off all the requisite boxes, and then some. Hyperbolic breakdowns are the backbone of these eight songs, with the more technical noodly bits filling in the gaps. The keyboards then help glue everything together, melodically. It’s a lot at once (as deathcore should be), but Lorelei have a penchant for balance too, as demonstrated especially by the self-titled album closer — easily the most impressive feat on the album.

If you’re questioning whether you’re about to hit play on a 12-minute long deathcore song, I don’t blame you. For many, two seconds is enough. For me, though, I just can’t get enough. “Lore of Lies” goes hard as fuck, dances with aplomb, and doesn’t waste a single moment in all of its proggy goodness.

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Slice the Cake — Odyssey to the West
April 1, 2016

All things considered, my favorite deathcore album ever laid to tape. Few albums from any metal genre can match Odyssey to the West‘s homeric scope and incredible complexity, not to mention its flawless execution. The only detectable defect with this package of poetic lyrics, avant-garde musicianship, and monstrous breakdowns is strictly nomenclatural: Slice the Cake is easily one of the worst band names of all time. But who cares, because Odyssey to the West feels like a goddamn odyssey, and not just because it’s 77 minutes long (not even counting its 28-minute adjoining album Odyssey to the Gallows).

So, given the band name, the grand scale of the thing, and the fact that there’s spoken-word and clean singing (one of my favorite aspects to the album, actually), Odyssey to the West is indeed a hard sell both for deathcore fans and non. Like, you either get really into it, read through the dizzying lyrical content, absorbing its mesmerizing ballet, or it just goes in one ear and out the other. In no way can Odyssey for the West work as muzak; in fact, it comes alive during late, somber nights, something quite unusual for deathcore. There was some drama regarding the band, the album, and the breakup which ensued, but despite all that, we were left with something entirely irreplicable and so wickedly cool.

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Echoes of Misanthropy — Shades of Ugliness EP
July 19, 2014

Heavier than fucking fuck. And unlike a lot of deathcore, extremely fast at times, only to break at the most opportune moment for some ridiculously detuned chugging. My guess is that you’d have to like deathcore already to appreciate Echoes of Misanthropy; on this list at least, they’re perhaps the “most deathcore” of any of the other picks, i.e. relying most heavily on breakdowns. The 12-minute Shades of Ugliness EP — easily their strongest work — relishes in its hyper-aggressive format and frankly hyperbolic trappings.

There’s one big hook here: heaviness. Everything about the Shades of Ugliness EP is designed to serve one ultimate purpose. To be very extremely heavy, at least in that traditional deathcore sense of just slamming planets together to see what happens. But what I appreciate most about Echoes of Misanthropy is their uncanny ability to weave bouts of technicality, blackened blasts, and super-groovy rhythms into something which actually feels like it flows rather than stutters. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t a fan of their debut full-length Faux Narcissism, so I always come back to this EP when I want my skull caved in by a granite fist.

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There have been countless think pieces written about the dangers of white nationalism in black metal, and, as someone who has written one herself, I believe these analyses are entirely justified. Yet, one recent tweet caused me to wonder if there’s another discussion that we have entirely missed:

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Racism and sexism aren’t exactly apples-to-apples comparisons, but as intersecting systems of oppression, they work similarly in a variety of ways. For example, proportionately-speaking, people of color are far more likely to be victims of police violence in the United States, and, for women, there is a significantly higher chance that we will be subjected to violence in our interpersonal relationships. In other words, structural violence is often written into the experiences of historically marginalized groups. While violence against people of color has been carried out in black metal through menacing symbols and sentiment, other metal genres are not blemish-free in terms of illustrating hate-driven bloodshed. The often-blurry line between grindcore and death metal is where hate against women breeds.

Using imagery of women torn apart at the seams while bellowing the details of sexual assault is a significant part of the grindcore brand specifically. That’s not to say that the bands who fall under this umbrella don’t advocate for general gory violence, and it’s also not to say that other eras of heavy music don’t get off scot-free when it comes to maltreatment of women. But, grindcore and deathcore are perhaps the most overt displays of gendered aggression in the same fashion that black metal has housed some of the most explicit instances of white nationalism. The sheer danger of Nazi symbolism in black metal should not be minimized. There also does not need to be a contest of which genre has committed the most egregious offenses. However, now more than ever, it is vital to speak about how violence against women is a form of hate crime.

Rape culture is so ingrained into society that it is hard to conceptualize as a form of terrorism. Everything from underage girls being told their shoulders are distracting to male classmates, to Tool fans insisting that Maynard James Kennan’s rape accuser is lying, to having a president who advocated for “grabbing women by the pussy” falls under this umbrella. These examples do not exist in a vacuum. Since the early 1990s, they have been internalized by the terrorist group known as the Incels. While Contrapoints explains the nature of this Internet-based extremist sect of “involuntary celibates,” the brief summary is that they resent women for refusing to have sex with them — sex being an act to which they believe they are entitled. In worst case scenarios, this rhetoric has bubbled up violently offline, which resulted in the 2014 Isla Vista massacre and the 2019 Toronto van attack.

A killing spree ending in a lawn littered with slain sorority sisters sounds like a plausible plot for a grindcore video, but unfortunately, this was a picture that transcended the confines of fantasy at UC Santa Barbara. Yet, contrary to what you may be thinking, I remain a steadfast horror fan. Ever since I was a little girl, I would watch commercials for the latest scary movie, dreaming of the day when I’d be old enough to walk my happy ass into a movie theater and watch franchises like The Ring or The Grudge. I watched the real-life ghost story docu-series A Haunting every day after school and checked out books on cursed tourist destinations from the library. Accordingly, I became enamored with the folk tales and occult imagery conveyed in doom metal, as well as the solemn sounds of dungeon-rattling depressive black metal. Whether you’re watching, listening, or both, experiencing nightmares play out in an aesthetically pleasing way is as thrilling as a roller coaster at sunset.

Horror takes another direction, however, when it masks expressions of hate. While my experiences as a woman in metal have largely been positive, there have been a few unfortunate exceptions. When I was 21, I attended a festival out of state by myself, the fodder for my first-ever piece of music journalism. After watching one of my favorite bands perform, I ran into a man with whom I was familiar from my local metal scene. His band — a popular grindcore act — was headlining the following day. After being followed by a strange man prior to arriving at the venue, I was happy to see a familiar face. After becoming increasingly intoxicated, I agreed to go back to his hotel with him. Nevertheless, I can still see snippets of the events in my head.

We walked into his private room and immediately went out onto the balcony to smoke. Eventually, and at first, consensually, he bent me over a chair, and we began hooking up. As things moved back inside, I was growing increasingly done. After going at me some more in bed, I told him that I was in pain and asked him to stop. “Oh, are you hurting?” he said in a seemingly sympathetic voice that feels sarcastic in retrospect. Still, he proceeded on. I was so exhausted that I just laid there and watched the ceiling spin until eventually, it was over. I managed to get my clothes on and leave as he called after me. I stood under the hotel’s portico staring vacantly into my Uber app, trying to snap back into reality enough to figure out how to get back to where I was staying.

I made it back safe that night, but I continued to live in denial about what had occurred for years to come. He had said that he had believed in my writing and that he could help me. I told myself that I would just have to subject myself to his treatment if I really wanted a career. It took me experiencing a suspect situation with another man to realize that I was encountering a pattern in my life; one that cannot necessarily be prevented but can change course by cutting off men whose minds have become fully infiltrated by toxic attitudes. Unfortunately, on the heels of this festival, I came home with my self-esteem in the gutter. I woke up one day to a friend request from the frontman of a regional deathcore band. I accepted.

At his invitation, I went to see one of his band’s shows. I got knocked down in the pit trying to photograph them, but I didn’t mind. I had the mentality that any musical event was a potential feature. After their set, I was excited to show him the digital previews of the photos. He was less than enthusiastic, alleging that he doesn’t like pictures taken of him while he’s performing. He proceeded to get jealous as I spoke with the show’s promoter (who, ironically, tried to get me to go to hotels with him when I wasn’t old enough to drink by bribing me with alcohol). Growing tired of the whole situation, I eventually left, but he stayed persistent. I woke up the next day to 40 Facebook notifications all from him. He had liked about all my photos from the past year. The texts poured in as well. Afraid to outright reject him, I tentatively agreed to go to a show with him.

I woke up on the day in question feeling under the weather. Yet, I dragged myself into work at 6:00 a.m. and surprisingly got a text from him at that early hour. He told me how excited he was for our date and I responded letting him know that I had a sore throat and body aches, but I would try to power through. I was disappointed in his response, but not surprised: You better not cancel on me. I shivered, and not just because I was feeling feverish. Knowing that he has music videos featuring underwear-clad women being tied up and mutilated made it all feel so much more menacing. His text became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I confided in a girlfriend and she encouraged me to no-show. I did, and I blocked him on all platforms, too. She and I stayed in instead, ordering Chinese, drinking Coronas, and watching Sex & The City — a night well-spent.

The reality of dating as a straight woman is that in the back of my mind, I’m always wondering if this is going to be the guy who cuts me up and throws me in a dumpster. At 24, I still grapple with the feeling that I constantly owe men something just by being in their presence. I must tread carefully to decline advances onto their god-given right to my body so that I do not encounter life-threatening danger. It is so easy for a grindcore band to indulge violent fantasies that they claim are encased in fiction, but it is so hard for me to carry the burden of what the implications have for my real life.

A lover of the macabre, I am confident that there is a way to incorporate horror into metal without putting entire sects of people in danger. Ghost, demons, and all things that go bump in the night are fair game, but my body is not. Of course, I’m not intending to speak for all women, and I acknowledge that some may legitimately enjoy listening to stories of mutilation and are aroused by consensual bondage practices. Just for me, as a woman who has been through horrific realities, I will not condemn radical figures in black metal while giving grind and deathcore a free pass. My right to live should supersede the freedom to express hate-motivated twistedness.

While I acknowledge I cannot silence these bands, I can at least say enough is enough and put them on indefinite mute.

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Shortly ago, Chicago death metal quintet Warforged released an audiovisual magnum opus. Here it is:

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Monumental albums, especially in death metal, are nothing new. Owing to the subgenre’s vast diversity (and the wide applicability of its tenets), every shadowy corner you discover will contain a gemstone among the inevitable trove of dust bunnies. Even more seldom are the bands who visit those corners for the benefit of their sound’s context rather than for opposition or antithesis. This is the functional heart of what it means to be “progressive” (which is different than sounding “proggy”): not to recycle, but to learn. Not to reinvent, necessarily, but to reimagine. You’re allowed to reuse old parts, but they better construct something bespoke. And bespoke I: Voice is, despite it being so fantastically familiar and relatable in all the right ways.

I love death metal, and that’s why I love I: Voice above nearly every other death metal album heretofore laid to tape. In its homeric undertaking, Warforged went full do-or-die, all-or-nothing, even to the extent of self-producing the above hour-plus album video to significantly enhance the listening experience. This is Prerequisite #1: Go Big, or Go Home. Beyond that, though, is the sheer depth and variety of Warforged’s sound, which fulfills Prerequisite #2: Do Everything, and Do Everything Well. From tech-death to deathcore, I: Voice not only contains it, but nails it hard, all underneath a cosmically dense and dark atmosphere to boot. Then there’s the hardest one of all, Prerequisite #3: Be Remembered. For that, we have yet to see, as I: Voice does require some significant digestion and it literally just came out.

My humble opinion, though, is that Warforged should be the top pick right now for an addition to the league of modern death metal’s current torch-carriers (e.g. Rivers of Nihil).

I’ll be honest, when I sat down with the entire band in a Chicago suburbs basement to conduct a full-on interview about I: Voice, I was taken aback by the extent to which I had preconceived their personalities based on the album’s sound and tone. I: Voice doesn’t take itself seriously all the time (e.g. the air-instruments in the video’s second track), but it is unquestionably moody and dark, especially during late-night insomniatic solo listens. I wrongly expected the troupe to be much more mathematical about their music (partly influenced by how the album’s technicality impressed me), finding instead that they were a fun-loving bunch of progheads with penchants for both outrageous tomfoolery and holistic death metal excellence. We’ve written before about how death metal by definition shouldn’t be stuck up its own ass all the time, and Warforged champion the balance between creating serious art but not sullying attitudes about the whole enterprise.

So, it is with great pleasure that we present the below interview as a compliment to the incredible I: Voice video, should you wish to learn more about the band, the album, and the talented-as-hell people behind it. A huge thank you to Adrian Perez, Warforged’s vocalist/pianist, for the setup and editing of this video, as well as the rest of the band for taking the time to talk shop (and shoot the shit a bit, too).

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I: Voice hit shelves officially on May 10th via The Artisan Era.

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The immortal paragons of punk and metal, though often ideologically immiscible, ceaselessly collide year after year to form uncanny alliances and new combinations. Though these odd mixtures typically incorporate subgenres of metal that already offer themselves toward the primal unruliness and unglamorous severity of punk (such as crossover thrash, grindcore, grunge, etc.), there are rare instances of more avant-garde interpretations of both genres coming together to form truly unprecedented emulsions.

One such example is Seattle’s forward-thinking yet ferociously primordial math-grind duo Pound. Formed in 2009, Pound have from their inception operated around the central musical concept of combining grindcore, math, d-beat, and sludge metal into one animalistic, hyper-complex crossover entity. In anticipation of the release of their upcoming second album ••, the group have unleashed a vivacious music video for “x_–_+_–_x_–.+_–_x_–+_–,” the record’s eighth track and third single — check out an exclusive stream below:

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Shot in a cold, mechanical monochrome, the clip’s claustrophobic shots jarr between guitarist Ryan Schutte and drummer David Stickney, creating a dissonant visual atmosphere that mirrors the structure and attitude of Pound’s sonic material. Intertwining the raw, seething aesthetic mentality of grinding mathcore with the deft musicianship, unconventional rhythms, and unbridled creativity of djent and death metal, “x_–_+_–_x_–.+_–_x_–+_–” progresses gradually and hypnotically despite its breakneck pace, and provides a consummate outro to the intense eight-song album.

Like the auditory equivalent of Morse code, this album-closing song writhes across its four minutes utilizing endless variations on a singular rhythmic theme, with harsh distortion, feedback, and brutally sludgy breakdowns dispersed throughout to momentarily dissipate the whirlwind of percussion. The immaculately grimy yet polished production on this track (and the album as a whole) can be attributed to legendary sound engineer Dave Otero, with whom the group collaborated at Otero’s Westminster, Colorado studio Flatline Audio. The effectiveness of their teamwork is readily apparent on ••: throughout its entire 30 minute length, the record effuses the filthy post-human energy of an unfinished industrial basement, all without losing an ounce of clarity or veracity.

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•• releases on May 31st via Silent Pendulum Records. Stream two more tracks below:

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