The Best Grindcore from 2023's Second Half
Hello! Welcome to IO’s grindcore roundup for releases in Q3 and Q4. These features have proved popular, so we’re going to keep them rolling for the foreseeable future. There’s definitely a demand for more grind coverage from music sites. Perhaps the world is ready for the genre to crawl a little further out of the shadows? In recent years, pop culture has embraced its dark and weird side, with music culture in particular seemingly more accepting of strange and abrasive releases. Maybe a Kardashian will soon be spotted wearing a Terorrizer shirt? Or perhaps Charli XCX will include a blastbeat on her next single? Neither feel wholly improbable.
But do we want this to happen? Late-stage capitalism has a knack for subsuming and diluting all forms of “alternative” culture in a desperate attempt to continue its flagging growth. Hell, is such a crossover even possible? Grindcore is what it is because of its unpalatability, its pure fucking whiplash intensity. This horrible music is ours—stay away, tastemaking goons. Still, you can’t help but feel like something’s brewing. Internet music culture is wild, ever-increasingly so. In this strange cultural space, grind has room to develop, and some unexpected crossover in the near to medium-term future is not impossible to envisage.
For now, let’s have a look at the best releases in the genre from the last six months. We’ve already looked at Q1 and Q2; now we’re combining the final two quarters for a bumper rundown. This list attempts to encompass the many faces of grind, from the studious to the silly, the sublime to the ridiculous. It also features at least two releases that, though they will likely be deeply unpopular with purists, point in a direction towards the grind’s genre-melding digital future. Hold on tight.
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July 7, GURKHA COMMANDO BLAST TEAM
Chepang epitomize everything great about grindcore. Styling themselves as “immigrindcore,” the collective originally hail from Kathmandu, Nepal, but now call New York their home. Outraged at the endless political turmoil of their homeland, the raw but dynamic grind of their latest full-length Swatta is a means of expressing anger, but also as a vessel to deliver future-conscious hope, epitomized by the intense beauty of tracks like “Anumati.” Grindcore’s obsession with relentless pace makes it inherently accelerationist—racing towards a future that it’s creating before your very eyes. Grab onto Chepang before they leave you behind.
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Organ Dealer - The Weight Of Being
July 28, Everlasting Spew Records
OK, let’s come back down to earth. The Weight of Being isn’t quite as emotionally-resonant as our two predecessors. Two things immediately reveal as much: that brain-splattered cover art and the label name, Everlasting Spew Records. However, the latest release from Organ Dealer is no murky exercise in throwaway goregrind. Resembling Pig Destroyer at their most linear and obtuse, these 21 tracks add up to a precise and bludgeoning collection, full enough brief changes of pace (the punk beats that open “Gluttonous Abundance,” the grooves of “Recurrence Of Nightmares”) to make The Weight Of Being an engrossing 22 minutes of madness.
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Gravesend - Gowanus Death Stomp
October 27, 20 Buck Spin
Here at IO, we’re always going to praise anything released by 20 Buck Spin, and Gravesend are the venerable label’s most pure grind band. Their latest full-length Gowanus Death Stomp sees the NY mob delve even further into violent, nihilistic brutality. The band’s urban wasteland aesthetic remains as gritty and palpable as ever, while this time around, there’s more focus on raw, caveman blasts, which rampage like a furious neanderthal in a litter-strewn alley. Bordering on war metal but without ever delving that opaque abstraction, this is grind at its most geographically-specific and most filthily entertaining.
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November 10, Strange Mono
Moving from the urban ruins of New York to Los Angeles’ scorched waste, we have the debut from Concrete Caveman. Whereas our previous release was all dirty, miserable anger, Feral is grind at its most gleeful, channeling pit-friendly punk and hardcore as much as grindcore and death metal. The neanderthal metaphor this time would be of a character not unlike the one adorning Feral’s killer cover art grabbing fellow moshers in headlocks so tight their eyes burst from their sockets. The trio call themselves “primordial death punk,” an awesome sobriquet that sums up their riotous approach. Very excited to hear more from this band.
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Fawn Limbs & Nadja - Vestigial Spectra
November 24, Roman Numeral Records / Wolves And Vibrancy
This list aims to cover the many strands of grindcore, from the raw and irreverent to the dense and elaborate. Vestigial Spectra falls firmly in the latter category. An unexpected but quite brilliant collaboration between the Canadian drone duo Nadja and Pennsylvania techgrind trio Fawn Limbs, Vestigial Spectra is unlike any other heavy release this year. Each of these accomplished seven tracks are wildly-unpredictable, encompassing apocalyptic electronics (“Blueshifted) head-scrambling mathgrind (“Black Body Radiation Curve”), resplendent post-metal (“Metastable Ion Decay”), and so much more. A properly knock-out release that constantly keeps you on your toes in service of some jaw-dropping extremity.
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August 31, Self-Released
Jumping onto some powerviolence now (genre purity be damned), we have the self-titled debut by Norway’s TÆL. Sixteen tracks of bass-heavy powerviolence that’ll quake your soul, these songs are brilliantly-structured, full of fun samples (including the funny exchange between David Lynch and Harry Dean Stanton that opens “Anspent”) and utilize an odd production style that marries crystalline drums alongside the genre’s requisite murky bass tones. Mixed and mastered by Will Killingsworth, formerly of Orchid and Ampere, TÆL’s debut serves as a great calling card from the fledgling Norwegian trio.
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moreru - 呪詛告白初恋そして世界
November 30, Musicmine
Y’know how in the introduction to this feature, I involved the idea of Charli XCX using blastbeats? Well the latest from Tokyo’s moreru isn’t a million miles away from it. A bravura fusion of grind, screamo, hyperpop, noise, and more, this is ultra-contemporary music of the most brain-frying kind. Thrillingly free of limitations, there’s electronic beats (“EMO SCREAMO 2045”), glistening solos (“自爆殺戮渋谷交差点”), pitch-shifted vocals (“夕暮れに伝えて”), and so, so much more. Despite its frenetic shifts, the whole thing feels pretty cohesive. It’s like so much of hyperactive internet culture: Don’t think too much about it; just let it spin your head off its axis.
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Jarhead Fertilizer - CARCAREAL WARFARE
December 8, Closed Casket Activities
The previous full-length from the awesomely-named Jarhead Fertilizer Product of My Environment was one of the best deathgrind releases of the last few years. This year’s CARCAREAL WARFARE ramps everything that worked so well about its older sibling right up to eleven. The blasts are more feral; the squeals are more obnoxious, and the grooves more, well, groovy. Intriguingly, the Maryland four-piece have also started introducing some fabulously-creepy atmospherics, as highlighted by the interlude “Torture Cage.” These moments make this tight but varied collection all the more intimidating—a dank, decrepit cell you’ll never want to escape from.
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Cognizant - Inexorable Nature of Adversity
September 11, Anomalous Mind Engineering
A dark labyrinth of techgrind mania, Cognizant’s second LP Inexorable Nature of Adversity is a convoluted head-spinner that’s as thrilling as it is disorientating. Recalling the skeletal technical death metal of Pyrrhon and the intricate dissonance of Gorguts, this is heavy music at its most audacious and exhilarating. The manic musicianship is a thing to behold, in particular the razor-sharp drumming of grind veteran Bryan Fajardo (Gridlink, Phobia, Kill The Client). The short runtimes make the intense complexity all the more whiplash-inducing, adding up to a dense, scary, and often masterful collection.
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November 3
Grind of the murkiest variety, Chiaroscuro is painted in the same jet-black hues as its title. Iowa’s Closet Witch make one hell of a racket, infusing their manic strain of grindcore with screamo and hardcore. Vocalist Mollie Piatetsky possesses a truly terrifying shriek, backed by instrumentation that blurs into a harrowing layer of gauze-like distortion. A guest spot from Full Of Hell’s Dylan Walker exemplifies the like-minded artistry on display across these 13 tracks, which come close to transcending genre limitations, in favor of pure, beautiful extremity. You get the feeling that it won’t be long before Closet Witch put out a properly game-changing release.
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September 15, Prosthetic Records
We’ll end on what will probably be a divisive album. BLIND EQUATION’s second album is a hyperactive and ultra-contemporary collection of cybergrind. Its digital textures and video-game aesthetic will likely turn off many, but death awaits is an undeniably fascinating release. Incorporating elements of glitchcore, deathcore, and hyperpop, this is cybergrind for the internet-age, full of energy and eager to smash together a wild fusion of sounds. It’s brash and over-the-top, but if you sift through its synthetic sinews, there’s surprising levels of emotion and humanity to be discovered within death awaits.
