Since its first moments of relatively widespread visibility in the 1990s, black metal has become one of the most artistically fruitful styles within extreme metal, as well as one of the most contested. Its emergence into wider public consciousness was occasioned by a rash of serious crimes committed by black metal musicians and fans in Norway in the early 1990s, including a number of arson attacks against historic churches and several murders. These events, coupled with the genre’s penchant for neo-fascist political extremism, provided a wealth of lurid material for tabloid journalists, cultural critics, and eventually academics. Although Norway was undoubtedly the crucible in which the black metal aesthetic was forged, the intervening decades have seen it spread across the globe, with some bands finding significant commercial success. The broader musical style itself has also become more eclectic, although many bands continue to devotedly adhere to a narrower and more rigid definition of the style. However, one aspect that has remained constant within black metal’s existence as a musical practice is the foregrounding of geographic location and local cultures within both the music and the bands’ visual presentation. Although black metal’s aesthetic is tied to the Nordic regions in some respects, this notion has inspired bands around the globe to this day. This chapter focuses particularly on black metal as it is currently being cultivated in the Mountain West in the United States, where the musical and ideological conventions of Norwegian black metal are recontextualised into forms that honour this new location while still retaining key points of Norwegian black metal’s aesthetic and worldview.

Up North

Black metal’s self-actualisation as a coherent musical genre depended on a fairly insular circle of young Norwegian musicians in the late 1980s and early 1990s, who self-consciously determined to chart a path away from the increasing professionalism in underground metal production and musicianship. Instead, the members of bands like Mayhem, Darkthrone and Immortal preferred the rougher-sounding recordings and relatively simplistic music of 1980s bands like Venom, Bathory and Celtic Frost. Although these earlier bands predated the codification of ‘black metal’ as a musical style and genre, they have been adopted into its history as founders. In general, the musical style is less formally complex than death metal, prizing relentlessness and atmosphere instead of rhythmic dynamism and guitar pyrotechnics. The guitar parts frequently employ tremolo-picking, a technique that involves non-stop rhythmic subdivision, while the harmonies typically change at a much slower pace. Black metal guitarists also regularly employ full triads (usually in minor) in addition to power chords, creating a much denser sound. Drummers in black metal bands also make extensive use of ‘blast beats’, which involves intense rhythmic subdivision akin to tremolo picking, resulting in an unrelenting torrent of sound without much sense of groove. Black metal musicians and fans tend to value DIY production aesthetics; low-fidelity or otherwise unorthodox recording qualities are typically interpreted as markers of authenticity rather than incompetence. Although in some ways this conception of black metal was riven with the sorts of rigidities that often plague retro-minded musical endeavours, it also opened the field for new conceptions of black metal in more cinematic, symphonic and avant-garde modes.¹ However, all of these developments ran alongside Norwegian black metal’s brief history as a vector of borderline-terroristic criminality, which necessarily colours its legacy.

This side of black metal’s history also makes it difficult to strike a balance between dutifully rehashing the genre’s violent history or essentially pushing it under the rug. Although this chapter mostly concerns later developments in black metal, it is important to acknowledge that the genre’s global popularity rests at least partly on the graves of Per ‘Dead’ Ohlin, Øystein ‘Euronymous’ Aarseth and Magne Andreasson. Ohlin was the singer for Mayhem from 1988 until his suicide in 1991, which Aarseth subsequently used as a way to promote the band’s evil image. Aarseth himself was murdered in 1992 by Varg Vikernes, sole musician of the band Burzum and session bassist for Mayhem. Vikernes and Aarseth, along with other black metallers, had also been involved in a number of arson attacks against Norwegian churches, most infamously burning the Fantoft stave church near Bergen. Magne Andreasson was stabbed to death in 1992 by Bård ‘Faust’ Eithun, who was then the drummer of Emperor, after propositioning him in a park. With a few exceptions, overt criminality of this sort has been a rarity in black metal in the decades since, but this violent introduction also provided a uniquely powerful kind of publicity and notoriety. After all, there are very few musical genres with an origin story that would be right at home on a true-crime podcast.

In the intervening decades, black metal became a relatively normalised presence within the Norwegian music industry, in marked contrast to its earlier pariah status. Black metal musicians are regularly nominated for music industry awards and sometimes receive commendations from government institutions. To take one recent example, Darkthrone’s 1992 album A Blaze in the Northern Sky was included by the National Library of Norway in an exhibition featuring ‘significant pieces of Norwegian cultural history’, taking a place alongside objects like handwritten scores by the composer Edvard Grieg and a manuscript of Magnus Lagabøtes landslov, a thirteenth-century book of comprehensive national legislation. The Norwegian popular music museum Rockheim has an entire room dedicated to black metal, and the Norwegian government also subsidises international tours by black metal musicians through Music Norway, a programme funded by the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Although black metal is far from the only style of popular music to become respectable after initially being considered disreputable and dangerous, it is nonetheless striking that it has been so embraced by official cultural institutions in Norway.

Yet the official promotion of black metal as a distinctly ‘Norwegian’ style of music also makes a certain amount of sense, given many of the musicians’ intense investment in their own Norwegian-ness. Their black metal lyrics and album covers are full of rugged Norwegian landscapes, wolves, trolls, figures from Norse mythology, and Vikings, mirroring many of the touchstones of nineteenth-century ‘national romantic’ artists, writers and composers, who shaped conceptions of Norwegian national identity during its drive for independence from Sweden. Although many Norwegians certainly found black metal music and musicians off-putting at best, its brand of nationalistic sentiment involves many familiar themes, particularly its focus on Norway’s spectacular landscapes. Similarly, and unfortunately, the xenophobia and racism sometimes found in black metal are also regular features of Norway’s political discourse, although they are generally expressed in more polite terms.² In any case, black metal relied on these existing discourses of Norwegian-ness, often intensifying them in the process, which also gave black metallers a foundation for their reputation and aesthetic that did not necessarily rely on criminal activity.

As a result, black metal’s appeal beyond Scandinavia has often relied on conjuring an exotic, dangerous and magical North for international listeners, many of whom likely have few other points of contact with Norwegian culture. This exoticised fantasy remains important even for the vast majority of listeners, who understand that Norway is not actually populated with bloodthirsty wolves and savage Vikings. The Nordic environment even infiltrated the discourse of black metal musicians, as particular types of guitar riffs and recording aesthetics are regularly described by black metallers as ‘cold’ or ‘frosty’, sometimes in a playful manner but often also with complete seriousness.³

A 2017 episode of the Norwegian talk show Trygekontoret provides a few illuminating moments demonstrating how these exoticised conceptions of black metal have resonated abroad. In this particular episode, the program’s host Thomas Seltzer (himself a musician in the rock band Turbonegro) joins the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem on a tour through Latin America, including stops in Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Mexico. The episode focuses mostly on Mayhem’s bassist, Jørn ‘Necrobutcher’ Stubberud, who was a childhood friend of Seltzer. While the episode does make some jokes at the expense of these fans, including one who confidently states that 70 per cent of people in Norway are metalheads, some of them also seem well aware of the fantasy aspect. When Seltzer asks some Salvadoran fans what they think Stubberud’s house looks like, one man enthusiastically replies that he probably lives in a cave with candles. Seltzer riffs on the idea by suggesting that Stubberud probably also wears a cape and plays a pipe organ, to much laughter. Metal is not always these fans’ only interest in Norway either, as another Salvadoran fan notes that he enjoys the works of Henrik Ibsen and finds parallels between the play An Enemy of the People and the country of El Salvador. The people at Music Norway and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would likely be pleased.⁴

The Trygekontoret episode also highlights how difficult it can still be for Norwegian black metal to escape the violence of its past, particularly for bands like Mayhem, who were directly affected by it. At one point, Seltzer notes that some fans treat Mayhem concerts like a travelling crime scene, tied inextricably to the violent deaths of Per Ohlin and Øystein Aarseth. For his part, Stubberud seems to have resigned himself to the fact that his international musical career necessarily involves bootleggers selling unauthorised t-shirts featuring pictures of his long-deceased bandmates. These include a particularly grisly photograph of Per Ohlin’s corpse (taken by Aarseth when he discovered the body) that wound up on a live bootleg released by a label in Colombia.⁵

However, black metal has also evolved in various ways beyond Scandinavia, even as many black metal musicians continually return to its initial stylistic well. Along these lines, it is possible to speak of a ‘late’ black metal style or constellation of styles, following Dominic Fox’s conception of ‘late’ or ‘belated’ black metal that turns towards introspection, and in which the genre is defined by aesthetics instead of actions. Even though the earlier violence becomes mythologised and even hallowed, there is no desire to return to it.⁶ The music of ‘late’ black metal musicians, particularly those from outside Scandinavia, has further potential to be reflective and self-aware since the genre’s history may not hang over them in the way it does the genre’s progenitors. To be sure, many black metal bands around the world continue to adhere to the original musical aesthetic, with stylistic mimicry becoming almost like a cycle of tribute and renewal. As with genre fiction and cinema, the repetition of familiar materials with only slight alterations is a significant and lasting part of the appeal. Yet black metal has also proved to be quite elastic, allowing it to reflect the cultures and concerns of fans and musicians around the world and to foster individual and idiosyncratic musical explorations.

Black Metal in the Mountain West

One of the hallmarks of black metal music globally is that the musicians regularly foreground their geographic location and specific local cultures and histories in their lyrics, visual themes and musical style, no matter where in the world they are from. The Norwegian bands provided a model of sorts, and their interactions with mythology and folklore, languages and local dialects, historical events, landscapes and traditional rural ways of living proved to be quite adaptable for use in a variety of new circumstances. Some black metal bands go so far as to include traditional instruments as a part of their ensemble, a kind of fusion that is often categorised separately as ‘folk metal’. The intentions behind the bands’ interests in local culture vary from place to place. In some instances, the emphasis on local culture has an undercurrent of chauvinistic xenophobia, but it can also signal resistance to commercial and political forces of globalisation or support for indigenous communities.

Black metal’s fascination with and even reverence for locality and associated customs and cultural memories also frequently intersects with modern neopagan and animist religions, in which physical environments are imbued with sacredness as opposed to locating the sacred in an unreachable heavenly realm.⁷ This reification of nature is at least partly an echo of nineteenth-century Romanticism, itself a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism, but the assertion of local identities in black metal often also involves conjuring visions of a (mostly imagined) pre-Christian past. Black metal’s customary antipathy towards Christianity then often invokes its suppression of ancient local customs in addition to the acrimonious history between mainstream Christianity and rock music more generally. Specific attributes of the local landscape and its flora and fauna also figure heavily in these traditions. In the United States, however, this abiding interest in local identity and cultural memory necessarily involves more recent concerns, as seen in examples of black metal from the Mountain West region, particularly the Colorado band Wayfarer.⁸

Black metal is a relatively recent arrival to the music scenes in this region. Although American black metal bands existed in the 1990s, they were few in number and generally toiled in extreme obscurity, with the possible exception of the California band Von, whose 1991 demo cassette Satanic Blood became legendary in the tape-trading underground (due in part to the fact that it was so hard to find). It was not until the latter half of the 1990s that a dedicated. black metal scene began to coalesce in the San Francisco Bay Area, revolving around the eclectic record stores Aquarius Records and Amoeba Records, and the record label tUMULt, run by Aquarius Records owner Andee Connors. This scene cultivated an initial crop of American black metal bands like Weakling, Leviathan, Xasthur and Ludicra, all of which departed from the Scandinavian model in various ways. Lyrically and thematically, many of these American bands had little interest in the Satanic, Nordic or mythological conceits of their European forebears, writing instead on ‘real-life’ topics like alienation, mental distress, philosophical despair, self-harm and suicide.⁹ Most also tended to eschew the elaborate theatricality, costumes and stage names common in European black metal, at least in part because many of the musicians first cut their teeth in DIY punk scenes.¹⁰

In the wake of the San Francisco scene, a small coterie of younger black metal bands formed in the Pacific Northwest. The Portland band Agalloch, in particular, crafted a musical aesthetic that revolved around long and drawn-out songs and influences from post-rock bands and art-house cinema. Their lyrics often continued to mine the wilderness themes of Scandinavian bands, with a thread of Romantic-era melancholy that finds solace, refuge and healing in the wilds.¹¹ Other ‘Cascadian’ black metal bands like Wolves in the Throne Room and Fauna underscored this wilderness aesthetic with references to animist spiritualities and shamanism. Wolves in the Throne Room often explicitly connect their music with their local forests, such as when the drummer Aaron Weaver describes synesthetically hearing an orange-red ‘vibrational frequency’ during recording, which he connects with the colour of decomposing cedar stumps and a feeling of literal ‘rootedness’ within the forest.¹² The California band Botanist, notable also for relying on a distorted hammered dulcimer rather than guitars, invokes similar themes along a quasi-Lovecraftian path, tracing a concept across multiple albums involving semi-sentient plants reclaiming the earth from humanity.¹³ A number of philosophers, theorists and other scholars have also made connections between black metal and deep ecology, an anti-anthropocentric current of thought that posits revoking any special moral consideration for humanity (as opposed to more traditional environmentalism) and disavowing the philosophical divide between human and non-human.¹⁴ But painting black metal’s love of natural environments as idyllically pastoral is too simplistic; the distorted, frenzied and irrevocably industrialised modern music also speaks to feelings of alienation from nature and the impossibilities of utopian idealism.¹⁵

Given that Cascadian bands’ geo-musicological focus often resembles that of Scandinavian black metal, it is worth noting that the landscapes of Scandinavia and the Pacific Northwest can be quite similar. Both regions are renowned for spectacularly rugged wildernesses full of forbidding mountains and misty forests. John Haughm of Agalloch has mentioned that the evocations of Northwestern forests and landscapes in their album artwork were initially interpreted by fans as an attempt to mimic European black metal bands, which, to be fair, seems like a reasonable first impression.¹⁶ Their artwork may not be a direct copy, but it is clearly a variation on the theme. However, in both cases, these landscapes are also conceived as largely devoid of human civilisation and cultivation, with survival requiring rugged self-sufficiency and an individualistic, even misanthropic, temperament. However, this Edenic conception of the American West as ‘virgin wilderness’ conceals the fact that the region was purposefully emptied of its original American Indian inhabitants through government campaigns of genocidal settler colonialism. Indeed, this kind of rhetoric has been a crucial part of those campaigns, as land cannot be considered to have been stolen if nobody was living there.¹⁷

Wayfarer and Cowboy Mythology

While the Cascadian bands tend to focus more broadly on ecology and environment, the Colorado band Wayfarer explores this more specific regional history of colonial exploitation and national myth-making. These themes run through their recorded output, particularly the albums Old Souls (2016), World’s Blood (2018) and A Romance with Violence (2020), and are evident in their album art, lyrics and musical styles.

The artwork on these three albums engages with this history in varied ways. The cover for Old Souls, by the Las Vegas artist Adam Gersh, is a sepia-toned black-and-white lithograph of a mountainous landscape featuring a figure emerging from the lower corner pointing at the distant mountains. He has a pair of feathers tied around his bicep, and instead of a head, there are two branches growing from his neck, forming a wooden frame for the web of a dreamcatcher. The dreamcatcher also features a profile of a mountain range within its design. Feathers figure heavily in American Indian design and religious symbolism, as well as serving as cultural markers of honour and bravery. The dreamcatcher likewise is a protective charm with connections to the mythological Spider Grandmother, a benevolent Earth goddess who figures in numerous traditions across American Indian cultures.¹⁸ Gersh’s artwork for posters and merchandise for Wayfarer and their Fire in the Mountains festivals typically involve similar iconography. Given that feathers and dreamcatchers are regularly appropriated by non-Natives in fashion and home décor, it is perhaps worth noting that none of the members of Wayfarer nor Mr Gersh claim indigenous heritage to my knowledge, or, at least if they do, it is not part of their public artistic presentation. Since their use of these symbols is fairly non-specific and highlights their connection to Native cultures rather than divorcing them from their context, they perhaps sidestep potential concerns over cultural appropriation, although opinions might vary. Wayfarer’s last two album covers are derived from historical photography. Their 2018 album World’s Blood uses the photo The Scout in Winter, Crow (1908) by Edward S. Curtis (Figure 16.1), a photographer and ethnologist whose work focused on American Indians. Curtis produced a massive and valuable corpus of arresting and haunting photographs, along with other accounts of American Indian life in the early twentieth century, even though his work definitely fed into the narrative of American Indians as a vanishing people. Finally, the cover art for A Romance with Violence uses the photo Temporary and Permanent Bridges and Citadel Rock, Green River, Wyoming (1868) by the railroad photographer Andrew J. Russell. The photo features a steam locomotive on a raised trackbed, with the butte Citadel Rock in the background. On Wayfarer’s cover, the original is given a dark red tint, with gold filigree patterns in the corners.

Figure 16.1 The Scout in Winter, Crow (1908) by Edward S. Curtis.

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Edward S. Curtis Collection [LC-USZ62-1206] (© Edward S. Curtis)

The artwork also reflects the broader lyrical content of these albums. World’s Blood (2018) conjures visions of a haunted landscape in which ghostly riders meld with thunderstorms, while the closing track, ‘A Nation of Immigrants’, explicitly channels the violence and death of the West’s subjugation and exploitation. A Romance with Violence (2020) shifts the perspective to the settlers and, in particular, a lone gunslinger figure, the Crimson Rider, murderously paving the way for the railroad’s Iron Horse. The final tracks on the album, ‘Masquerade of the Gunslingers’ and ‘Vaudeville’, invoke the way in which historical violence becomes the stuff of entertainment, thus obscuring its brutality. With a little squinting, it is possible to see parallels between these American colonisation narratives and Nordic black metallers’ obsessions with pre-Christian Nordic cultures and religious practices. Indeed, some Nordic black metallers regularly depict the region’s conversion to Christianity as a colonisation. The analogy is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, however, since Native communities continue to suffer real deprivation and marginalisation in the Americas while the Norwegian metallers sometimes seemed to be searching for a form of ‘grievance authenticity’. But both cases propose a drastic re-evaluation of their regions’ respective national mythologies.

Wayfarer’s musical references to the American West are somewhat more elusive, as they often rely heavily on lyrical themes and visual presentation rather than obvious ‘Western’ musical tropes. The general musical style across their albums is heavily indebted to the Cascadian models of Agalloch and Wolves in the Throne Room in their mixture of intense black metal sections, meditative ‘post-rock’ excursions and instrumental interludes. Yet there are points of reference with musical traditions associated with the American West, although tracing them requires a trek through the worlds of mid-twentieth-century film music and the Rocky Mountains’ alternative country music scene.

The music of the American West has a tangled history, including musical pieces that evoke the West (like Aaron Copland's 1942 ballet Rodeo) and the songs and scores of Hollywood Westerns. There’s little doubt that current conceptions of the ‘Wild West’ were profoundly influenced by television and film in the mid-twentieth century, particularly concerning the much-mythologised cowboy or outlaw figure.¹⁹ The films of the actor John Wayne, whose cowboy characters were typically taciturn loners uncomfortable with regular society, were particularly influential. Wayne’s run of successful Westerns and war epics made him an enduring American icon, who embodied for many a certain strain of ruggedly individualistic and politically conservative masculinity.²⁰ Beyond Wayne, the American cowboy embodied a mythic and heroic stereotype standing in for closeness to nature, freedom of movement, and nationalistic sentiment while also operating as a law unto himself, dispensing violent individual justice as he sees fit.²¹ Further, the view of history promoted by classic Westerns provided rationales for America’s expansionist foreign policy in the 1950s while also promoting American exceptionalism, white superiority and male dominance.²² The allure of these films has also clearly not faded in the intervening generations and continues to be regularly called upon by politicians and other public figures.

While A Romance with Violence (2020) explores this mythology in its lyrics, the music itself also employs several references to cinematic music, particularly the short introductory track ‘The Curtain Pulls Back’. This piece functions as a prelude for the album while also providing a sonic mise en scène, somewhat akin to a radio drama. Such tracks are a common inclusion on black metal albums, often involving sounds of medieval battle, wolves, whooshing wind, and sometimes choral or instrumental music in a more ‘classical’ mode. However, the convention is put to slightly different use on A Romance with Violence because its title suggests an audience watching a theatrical performance, rather than a literal setting. This framing implies a sense of distance from the subject, like a metaphorical proscenium arch. The track is produced to sound like it is being played from an antique phonograph, beginning with a few seconds of vinyl noise, transporting the listener to the past by invoking the sonic materiality of old records. The main instrument is a slightly out-of-tune piano, which conjures not only the stereotypical saloon pianist but also the piano accompaniment often found on releases of silent movies. The final seconds before the band enters on the next track include a few record ‘skips’, again highlighting the imagined phonograph while also implying fragility, malfunction, and possibly a measure of artifice.

‘The Curtain Pulls Back’ also subtly interfaces with music used to depict American Indians across generations in American films and other media. Its main musical theme begins with a short descending motif on the scale degrees 1 – ♭7 – 5, invoking the minor pentatonic mode, along with a prominently dissonant tritone later in the theme. Descending minor pentatonic motifs like this one, along with increased dissonances, were regular tropes employed by twentieth-century film composers for scenes involving American Indians, almost always accompanied by tom drums played in a four-beat ‘THUMP-thump-thump-thump’ rhythm. The title sequence of the 1948 John Wayne movie Fort Apache portrays this music’s function clearly. Cowboys, cavalrymen and other white characters are accompanied by peppy, patriotic-sounding music, but whenever a group of Natives are onscreen, the music shifts to a minor-key descending melody with blaring horns, high trilling strings that seem to invoke war whoops, and the requisite thumping drums.²³ It creates a marked contrast and clearly identifies the Natives as the film’s villains (even though at this point they are just trotting leisurely across the prairie on horseback). While ‘The Curtain Pulls Back’ is only played by a piano trio, its minor pentatonic theme bears more than a passing resemblance to these earlier film music tropes, and its main motif is also nearly identical to the beginning of the controversial ‘tomahawk chant’ sung by fans of the Atlanta Braves baseball team.²⁴ It is unclear if this was an intentional choice by Wayfarer, but it certainly aligns with the album’s concern with how colonial violence gets repackaged as entertainment.

However, other ‘Western’ musical touchstones employed by Wayfarer in the album reference a more complicated conception of the West with roots in Italian composer Ennio Morricone’s iconic scores for Italian ‘spaghetti westerns’ like A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). These films featured distinctive twangy, jangling electric guitars that quickly became a new musical signifier for a much bleaker and more ambiguous vision of life in the West. This side of Western film music also became a key sound for ‘alt-country’ or ‘Americana’ bands beginning in the 1990s, with Denver, CO, in particular hosting notables like 16 Horsepower, Wovenhand, Slim Cessna’s Auto Club and Jay Munly. Their music often employs guitar sounds reminiscent of Morricone’s scores, with lots of twangy baritone guitars and spring reverb, along with various mixtures of traditional country music and alternative rock. As opposed to the anodyne country-pop music from Nashville, these bands often inflected their songs with sombre tales of religious apocalypticism, mental illness, violence and gothic weirdness. Such country influences are less overt in Wayfarer’s music, but their softer and more meditative moments feature guitar licks and flourishes reminiscent of country styles. For example, the beginning half of ‘Vaudeville’ from A Romance with Violence (2020) features minor-key acoustic slide guitar licks and handclaps that would fit neatly in an alt-country context.

Wayfarer are also not the only American black metallers to take an interest in traditional American folk music styles like bluegrass, blues and country and to utilise it to reflect on local histories. Probably the most well-known American black metal band to explore what might be called ‘Americana’ black metal is Panopticon, a one-man project by multi-instrumentalist Austin Lunn. His 2012 album Kentucky famously mixed black metal with traditional Appalachian folk music, archival recordings and strike songs like Pete Seeger’s ‘Which Side Are You On’ (1940) to portray the history of labour and environmental exploitation related to mining in the Appalachian Mountains. Lunn continued this artistic trajectory on The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness (2018), which includes several songs in the style of Appalachian folk music. As with bands in the Western region of the country, Lunn’s music unearths hidden and suppressed regional histories that have left deep and enduring psychological and ecological scars that continue to echo in the present.²⁵ Also, beginning in 2014, the Swiss-American musician Manuel Gagneux began experimenting with combining black metal with African-American spirituals, Delta blues and work songs in his band Zeal and Ardor. Thematically, his music mixes occult religiosity with poignant references to racist violence and murder, both historical and contemporary.

Finally, it is worth highlighting that several American black metal bands with indigenous members are also writing music exploring Native identities and history, notably Nechochwen from West Virginia, Pan-Amerikan Native Front from Illinois, and Yaotl Mictlan from Salt Lake City. Nechochwen are a duo whose music calls to mind the expansive songs of Opeth and Agalloch, with extensive classical guitar sections, and deals primarily with the histories of Eastern tribes such as the Shawnee and Seneca.²⁶ Their song ‘He Ya Ho Na’ from the album OtO (2012) also includes a brief interlude featuring sung vocables, non-lexical (but not meaningless) syllables that are used extensively across many Native music traditions.²⁷ Pan-Amerikan Native Front play fairly traditional black metal with a low-fidelity aesthetic, but with album art and lyrical themes referencing the history of Native warfare against colonial expansion. Yaotl Mictlan are focused more on pre-Christian Mexican and Mesoamerican cultures, and their music employs a number of traditional instruments and indigenous chants. But as Nechochwen’s eponymous songwriter has noted, this kind of specificity honours the fact that the history of indigenous cultures in the Americas is entirely too vast and diverse to be reduced to any generalised representation.²⁸

Conclusion

These specific invocations of the troubled past of the American frontier and the ‘Wild West’ also fulfil a fundamental role common across metal music of all stripes. Metal music often aims to transport the listener to other places and to imagine other lives, whether based in reality or not. Whether taking cues from fantasy literature, science fiction, biker subcultures, ancient mythology or historical events, metal has always been fascinated with evoking ‘elsewhere’. Music often provides both a window into other time periods and cultures while also acting as a mirror reflecting one’s own culture. These American black metal bands, however, attempt to briefly open a sliding door into perspectives on American history that have been deliberately neglected and suppressed. Panopticon unearth ongoing histories of class struggle and environmental destruction, while Nechochwen et al. use black metal to celebrate and explore their own Native heritage, in the process reminding listeners that they are not a conquered or vanished people.

However, an important aspect of this lingering myth of indigenous ‘disappearance’ is that American Indian cultures have also long been used by mainstream American culture as symbolic stand-ins representing closeness to nature, an echo of the Enlightenment-era ‘noble savage’. These notions turn up variously in the ceremonies of the Boy Scouts of America, off-road vehicles named after American Indian tribes, famous environmental advertisements, and the numerous new-age movements that have liberally borrowed from indigenous traditions. Given black metal’s general fascination with the natural world, pre-Christian traditions and romanticised pasts, it would perhaps be unsurprising to find non-Native black metal musicians unconsciously reproducing these tropes. In the case of Wayfarer’s albums, though, there is thankfully a deliberate anti-romanticism at work that mitigates against such trite (and premature) eulogies, pulling back the curtain on the way the American West’s founding mythologies have been carefully curated in order to appear appropriately heroic, just and innocent.

Pay attention to metal discourse in print, online or in person, and a simple fact becomes evident: genre labels abound. A cursory glance at almost any metal studies text, metal album review, or comment section on a metal music video reveals a diverse genre vocabulary about which metal participants routinely disagree. One person’s symphonic death metal is another person’s post-black metal, or so it would seem. The present chapter is concerned with how participants interact with these genre names in their practice, focusing on how writers position artists (and artefacts) as well as how artists position themselves in relation to genre and subgenre.

Drawing on metal’s extensive genre discourse, both academic and otherwise, this chapter explores the significance and effects of subgenre qualifiers. After demonstrating the prevalence of genre and subgenre terms in metal, I outline how subgenre qualifiers function to both describe and prescribe participants’ conceptions of metal music culture. Technical death metal acts as a case study of how these qualifiers can be utilised by musicians, critics and fans to variously focus or limit one’s approach to producing and receiving music. For some, ‘technical’ serves as a descriptive term that expresses a general attitude toward music-making and listening, while for others, it demarcates a series of relatively finite rules within which one must operate. Finally, I discuss how artists variously reject or embrace technical death metal in their creative practice.

Conceptions of Genre and Subgenre in Metal

As aforementioned, genre terminology is ubiquitous in metal discourse, ‘academic’ or otherwise. Throughout this book and almost any other metal studies text, readers will find numerous examples of genre names, some widely encompassing and well-known, others ostensibly specific and novel. Moreover, such genre discourse pervades non-academic discussions of metal in newspapers, magazines, press releases, blogs, social media and, of course, in conversations among metal fans of all stripes. Building on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Sarah Thornton, Keith Kahn-Harris elucidates one of the main drivers behind metal’s apparent obsession with genre: ‘mundane subcultural capital and transgressive subcultural capital’.¹ Metal fans may claim mundane subcultural capital ‘by knowing the complex histories of the scene and by having heard the music of its vast number of bands’,² and given that ‘[n]ew (generally young) members entering the scene are frequently disparaged’,³ there is a clear incentive to accrue subcultural capital in order to be accepted by other genre participants. To this end, innumerable books, magazines and websites (including blogs and online forums) construct extensive histories of artists and artefacts grouped within genres or scenes of varying specificity. It is this notion of (varying) specificity with which this chapter is most concerned, but exploring how we might understand subgenre qualifiers requires a brief overview of how these genre histories are constructed.

Whether communicated through prose or illustrated taxonomies, metal historiography is often presented in a broadly chronological manner, and sometimes further arranged by genre. This mode of presentation tends to result in constructions of metal history as consequential; that is, individual genres are regularly characterised as developing in a unidirectional, linear and fixed fashion, separate from one another, and demarcated by an apparent generic lifespan. Most salient for present purposes are those taxonomies that seek to illustrate both the links between various metal genres and the artists or artefacts proffered as representative of those genres.⁴ Sam Dunn’s ‘Heavy Metal Family Tree’ – an arborescent model of metal history displaying genres and relevant example artists alongside inter-generic familial relationships – is perhaps the archetypal exemplar of this model.⁵ Comprising a series of genre titles with lists of representative artists as well as links between genres designed to illustrate their genealogical lineage (for example, ‘grindcore’ is begotten by ‘first wave of black metal’ and ‘thrash metal’), subsequent revisions to the family tree commonly focus on individual genres. Here we locate the significant tension between generality and specificity, an issue most frequently addressed through the notion of subgenres.⁶

Despite this chapter’s title, I have thus far sought to avoid using the term ‘subgenre’ if for no other reason than to circumvent the obvious linguistic problem of relative scale: if metal is a genre, and death metal a subgenre of metal, then technical death metal must be a sub-subgenre of metal (a subgenre of death metal). Moreover, while it is accurate to suggest that ‘death metal’ denotes a smaller grouping than ‘metal’, referring to the former as a subgenre connotes, to my mind, a much smaller, less varied construct than one finds in death metal (or black metal, etc.). Consequently, I refer to metal as a genre as well as exploring metal genres (for example, death metal), perhaps suggesting a designation more akin to Roy Shuker’s ‘meta-genre’.⁷ In essence, this is a recognition of what David Brackett calls ‘different levels of genre’,⁸ and while his usage of the term generally refers to more broad musical categorisation,⁹ it highlights a number of key points regarding the relationship between genres and subgenres. Most obviously, each level corresponds to some notion of specificity, from the general (metal) to the specific (technical death metal), but (sub)genre labels may also be relatively arbitrary and contingent in the sense that an artist might be referred to as death metal by one observer and technical death metal by another. Benjamin Hillier seeks to ‘propose a means for categorizing the different “levels” of subgenres in metal’ through a taxonomy that favours a synchronic view of the relationships between metal genres.¹⁰ In Hillier’s framework, death metal is deemed a major subgenre of extreme metal, while technical death metal is a minor subgenre, thereby avoiding a model wherein genres ‘fragment into sub-subgenres’ and even ‘endless permutations of sub-sub-subgenres that become almost farcical’.¹¹ Absurdity notwithstanding, how might we understand these terms productively?

Subgenre Qualifiers

In literal terms, subgenre qualifier refers to a word or affix added to a genre title that ‘qualifies’ or modifies some element of the genre: if death metal is a genre and technical death metal a subgenre, then ‘technical’ functions as the subgenre qualifier. While the connotations of ‘technical’ are more circumscribed and convoluted than one might assume upon first reading (see below), the term ‘technical death metal’ is nonetheless relatively straightforward insomuch as one can clearly identify qualifier and qualified. This distinction is deliberately blurred in terms like ‘death doom’ or ‘deathcore’ such that the genre titles are most productively understood as an explicit amalgam of two distinct genres – death metal and doom metal in the former instance, death metal and hardcore in the latter. Perhaps, then, the simplest way to identify a subgenre is to identify a clearly recognisable subgenre qualifier – technical death metal – while those terms without clear distinction are more indicative of genres. Even when easily identifiable, subgenre qualifiers do not carry obvious connotative meaning: what does it mean to speak of ‘blackened’ death metal? Does ‘symphonic’ mean the same thing when prefixing death metal as it does prefixing black metal? Most immediately, these qualifiers are describing something about the artist or artefact to which they are being ascribed (much like a genre title) but also describing something about the genre itself. At the same time, however, subgenre qualifiers can be interpreted as prescribing something about the artist or artefact and, indeed, the genre. Principally, therefore, subgenre qualifiers function as a way to account for the variety encompassed not only by metal but by metal genres themselves.

In developing a ‘musical syntax’ of heavy metal comprising a ‘set of codes based on musical elements’, Andrew L. Cope utilises a ‘core and periphery model, identifying and situating “key” codes that appear to be present in all forms of metal (the core) and the peripheral codes that become important in the formation of sub-genres; for example, the use of synthesisers in black metal and symphonic metal’.¹² In one respect, then, we might interpret subgenre qualifiers as dictating which codes are deemed core and peripheral within a given subgenre. As such, subgenre qualifiers may function as ‘a sort of “hyper-rule” which establishes [a subgenre’s internal] hierarchy’ or even the ‘“ideology” of that [sub]genre’.¹³ In other words, qualifiers like ‘technical’ and ‘brutal’ not only imply the core or peripheral status of given codes but also (seek to) establish a hierarchy or system of organisation of those codes. Technical and brutal death metal may share many compositional devices, for instance, but ways in which these devices are employed – frequency, function, position in a song, etc. – alongside other devices provide points of departure between the two subgenres.

Having outlined some of the ways we might conceptualise subgenre qualifiers in abstract, we can now turn our attention to how these qualifiers are applied in practice. Death metal provides particularly fertile ground when exploring subgenre qualifiers, including but not limited to melodic death metal, technical death metal, old school death metal, brutal death metal, slam, deathcore and deathgrind. Technical death metal generally refers to death metal bands that play at faster tempos than regular death metal and make heavier use of techniques like sweep-picking and blast beats, while melodic death metal is used to describe death metal bands that play at a slower pace, utilising melodies closer to those found in New Wave of British Heavy Metal than in standard death metal. Prefixes like ‘technical’, ‘progressive’ and ‘melodic’ are also used when referring to subgenres of metalcore and hardcore, while ‘old school’ and ‘neo’ have been applied to thrash metal, and ‘symphonic’ or ‘post’ regularly accompany black metal. Similarly, goregrind utilises human autopsy-inspired imagery, and electro- or cybergrind integrates electronics, specifically including digital drum machines rather than physical drummers, into the wider genre of grindcore. Despite the seemingly arbitrary subgenre qualifiers, each has come to denote a relatively specific meaning in metal discourse.

Some qualifiers are affixed to multiple genre titles, suggesting that such meaning may be transferrable. When prefixing genres like deathcore, metalcore or, simply, metal, ‘progressive’ connotes relatively specific small-scale details: the use of keyboards and/or clean vocals, less reliance on verse-chorus song form, deliberate incorporation of non-metal genres, and a propensity for concept albums. In short, the progressive prefix suggests that the band in question are drawing influence from the lineage of progressive rock, albeit remaining within the boundaries of their particular genre. Progressive metalcore might include ‘[s]ampling, peculiar structures or the introduction of unexpected genres (like jazz, for example) [that] seek to modify the basic metalcore formula’, clearly combining elements of progressive rock without compromising too many elements deemed fundamental to metalcore.¹⁴ Here, ‘progressive’ connotes the incorporation of elements from outside the genre’s normal boundaries. In a similar vein, symphonic black metal introduces new elements into black metal by combining keyboards (regularly utilising orchestral string patches), a more polished production style and clean vocals (solo or choir) with standard black metal genre traits, not too dissimilar from the qualifier’s function in symphonic death metal.¹⁵

While some qualifiers represent the integration of ‘outside’ elements within a genre, others signify a deliberate focus on certain internal elements. Both ‘neo’ and ‘old school’ bands aim to uphold older genre standards, largely eschewing overt stylistic changes that have occurred since the genre first became popular. While ‘neo’ usually refers to bands forming since a genre’s supposed heyday but emphasising older aspects of that genre, most ‘old school’ bands have continued to make music in a certain genre past its initial period of popularity and have avoided straying too far from the original incarnation of that genre. Interestingly, some newer artists are also ascribed the old school qualifier if their music is deemed to carry a similar essence or attitude toward the genre without actively sounding like older artists.¹⁶ Hence, subgenre qualifiers can be understood as circumscribing both the datable, locatable elements of style (for example, riff types, song form, etc.) and the more abstract concept of approach or attitude towards a genre.

Technical Death Metal

As a subgenre qualifier within the title ‘technical death metal’, ‘technical’ functions foremost as an adjective describing a certain version of death metal. On one hand, this descriptor is relatively broad and connotes an approach to death metal that privileges ‘technicality’, ‘a frequently used word roughly meaning “complicatedness”’, as the primary facet of the music (as opposed to ‘melody’, as in melodic death metal, for instance).¹⁷ On the other hand, however, through consistent usage by critics, fans and musicians, technical death metal has come to describe a comparatively narrow set of stylistic markers. In this guise, ‘technical’ routinely connotes death metal that utilises fast tempos, irregular metres, unconventional song structures and the recurrent employment of instrumental techniques that are less frequent in other forms of death metal (to say nothing of the non-sonic implications of the qualifier).¹⁸ These discrete readings are at play when commentators construct lists of the best, greatest or essential technical death metal bands that include artists like Atheist, Death and Cynic (representative of the broad conception of the qualifier), alongside artists like Cryptopsy, Necrophagist and Spawn of Possession (representative of the narrow conception).¹⁹ Readers familiar with these artists will note that the former three bands are older than the latter and, significantly, these older bands might also be deemed representative of other metal subgenres, while the newer bands are almost universally recognised as representative of technical death metal. One of the reasons for this discrepancy, and that between the two readings of ‘technical’ as descriptor, is what I have elsewhere termed ‘generic codification’: a recognisable period (or series of periods) during which certain, specific elements of style come to be identified with a genre or subgenre.²⁰ While some artefacts by the older bands might be accurately described as technical death metal, they do not necessarily include all of the specific stylistic elements connoted by the qualifier, whereas the newer bands mentioned above incorporate most if not all of these elements in their music as a matter of course. Over time, through the ongoing processes of generic codification, technical death metal has become a term both descriptive and prescriptive; that is, in order to be deemed technical death metal, a band must adhere to the unwritten rules of that subgenre by consciously displaying their technical ability at the forefront of their music and do so by utilising a circumscribed variety of compositional and performance techniques.

Read as prescriptive, ‘technical’ carries connotations of constraint, as evidenced when technical death metal band Rings of Saturn were accused of recording parts of Dingir (2013) at half-tempo before speeding them up digitally.²¹ Regardless of their veracity, claims that the band had digitally manipulated their recordings in a presumed bid to sound more technically advanced harmed the artist’s credibility with some participants due to the nature of the subgenre. Rings of Saturn guitarist Lucas Mann is ‘part of a technical metal band; he’s part of a scene which is supposed to value musicianship’, and since his ‘is a band that sells itself on dizzying technicality, breakneck speed and little else. If those two traits are proven inauthentic, nothing is left’; thus, the specific connotation of ‘technical’ is connected directly to the way in which the composition and performance of this music are judged.²² Tellingly, Brad Sanders notes that if ‘the same accusation [was] leveled against Cannibal Corpse, whose chief aim is brutality rather than technicality. Doubtless, the same outrage would ensue, but in this case, it wouldn’t be warranted’, as Cannibal Corpse are not a technical death metal band, when understood in this prescriptive sense.²³ Marcus Erbe notes a similar phenomenon in relation to metal vocalists who uphold an ‘ideal of a voice that remains as unspoiled as possible, either onstage or in the studio’, observing that this concept seemed most prominent among ‘people from technical death metal bands, which is to say by vocalists who place a high value on very controlled ways of growling and/or pig squealing’.²⁴ While the notion of technicality is present in many forms of metal, technical death metal prescribes fastidious attention to displays of a specific version of technicality.

Given the additional level of specificity entailed by subgenre qualifiers, it is unsurprising that artists or albums may become difficult to accurately classify. Some commentators decide, therefore, to avoid ascribing such artists a subgenre at all, while others simply stack multiple qualifiers; thus, Simon Handmaker describes Rivers of Nihil as ‘technical progressive blackened death metal juggernauts’.²⁵ This positioning of Rivers of Nihil suggests a very specific oeuvre that does not correspond neatly to any one death metal subgenre, but neither is it captured by the more general title of death metal. In combining three subgenre qualifiers, Handmaker attempts to marry the descriptive and prescriptive aspects of subgenre titles, describing the amalgam of different subgeneric traits while also implying the flexibility with which the artist uses these traits to avoid prescription. This tension between description and prescription leads to inevitable disagreements when attributing (sub)genres to a given artist or artefact. For example, Hillier classifies Cannibal Corpse as ‘slam/brutal death metal’ while Eric Smialek and Méi-Ra St-Laurent consider them a technical death metal band.²⁶ Likewise, while I have described Rings of Saturn as technical death metal in relation to Dingir, Andrew Rothmund expresses some reservations about the band’s apparent move from deathcore to technical death metal on their later album Ultu Ulla (2017), ‘an okay deathcore album because it’s a pretty great tech-death album’.²⁷ These examples of contested subgeneric affiliation are a direct result of subgenre qualifiers that simultaneously describe the music in general terms while prescribing it in specific terms.

Artist Perspectives on Prescription

Not only the preserve of the fan or critic, but metal artists are also often conscious of these (sub)generic terms. Although members of Rivers of Nihil do not necessarily identify with such a specific subgenre title as Handmaker ascribes them above, both generic label (death metal) and subgeneric qualifier (technical) are clearly known to the band. Hence, former guitarist Jon Kunz contends that ‘[a]t the end of the day, we are a death metal band. We may have some technical stuff going on, but it’s never tech for the sake of tech’.²⁸ Kunz is aware that some may refer to his band as technical death metal, or some variant thereof, but his assertion that any ‘technical’ elements the band employ are not done so in order to be considered technical death metal suggests that he understands the subgenre as prescriptive. Acknowledging the band’s common categorisation as technical death metal, Obscura vocalist and guitarist Steffen Kummerer suggests that ‘it doesn’t matter if a riff or an idea is technical or easy to play [since] [t]he song itself is most important’. Moreover, echoing Kunz, Kummerer contends that ‘[t]here is no need to write a technical song just for the sake of being technical!’.²⁹ In other words, these artists seek to convey both that the term ‘technical death metal’ is too limited to accommodate their musical expression and that while parts of their music might be described as ‘technical’, those parts were not written and performed specifically in order for the artist to be described as such. Nile vocalist and guitarist Karl Sanders goes one step further when stating that for the band’s eighth album, What Should Not Be Unearthed (2015), he ‘decided we were going to be anti-technical death metal’. Sanders explicitly recognises his band’s common subgeneric categorisation as well as their consequent affiliation to artists he may not wish to be associated with: ‘A lot of people call us tech-death, but when I hear tech-death nowadays, there’s lots of amazing playing in those records, but sometimes it gets hard to hear a f**king song’.³⁰ In wanting to be ‘anti-technical death metal’, Sanders is rejecting an overtly prescriptive reading of the subgenre as privileging a notion of technicality above all else, even songwriting.

There are, however, some artists who actively seek to create technical death metal. According to bassist Þórður Hermannsson, Ophidian I formed ‘due to shared affinity for technical death metal, and bands like Spawn of Possession and Necrophagist. … The original plan was simple – to spend time together, party and play technical music’.³¹ Unlike those bands for whom technical death metal is constraining, Ophidian I took direct inspiration from the subgenre and wanted to compose and perform in a style similar to artists who are widely heralded as archetypal of technical death metal. Perhaps no other artist is more emblematic of this positive approach to technical death metal than Archspire. Appropriating and championing a label that other artists seek to avoid, Archspire employ ‘stay tech’ as what vocalist Oliver Rae Aleron calls the band’s ‘catchphrase’, emblazoned on merchandise, used to sign-off social media posts and displayed prominently in album liner notes.³² Indeed, Archspire’s affiliation to a prescribed notion of technicality leads some to suggest the ‘band is a gimmick … they are technical, some may say, to a fault’.³³ But Aleron conceptualises the band’s approach in a more positive light: ‘taking a subgenre of a subgenre of music and elevating it and making it even more obscure, but just really trying to break it down and focus on each individual element to create something that’s more complex and more orchestrated as a total’.³⁴ Rather than feeling constrained by the prescribed nature of technical death metal, Archspire use this perceived limitation in a creative way to explore further those musical elements that seem to dictate subgeneric affiliation.

Insofar as their music is prescribed, Archspire are often regarded as emphasising common technical death metal tropes. Thus, the band are ‘held up as an example of Technical Death Metal at its most outrageously and enjoyably OTT’ thanks, in part, to showcasing a ‘shameless dedication to ludicrous speed’.³⁵ Similarly, the use of ‘compound’ riffs that combine disparate, sometimes contradictory time feels and riff types, ‘requires a high level of proficiency, on which musicians in the technical death metal subgenre (which includes Archspire) pride themselves’.³⁶ Suggestions that the band’s third album, Relentless Mutation (2017), might best be understood by ‘someone who gives it a few careful listens back-to-back’ is evocative of Smialek’s concept of technical death metal’s ‘pleasurable disorientation’ that encourages and ‘reward[s] repeated listenings’ wherein a listener focuses on different elements and their interaction to better comprehend the music’s dense texture.³⁷ Moreover, recalling accusations about Rings of Saturn’s supposed inability to perform their music at tempo, Aleron suggests that Archspire’s ‘goal is that somebody will listen to the album and be like, “Oh, they can’t play that live, there’s no way”, and then they come and see it live, and like, “Oh, you guys can play it live”’.³⁸ In each of these cases, Archspire deliberately embrace components (and criticisms) of technical death metal and utilise them as creative impetus rather than limitation.

Not content to simply accentuate the subgenre’s extant tropes, Archspire have also sought to develop the range of musical expression within technical death metal. According to Aleron, the members of Archspire ‘wanted every element of the band to be as impressive as possible to try to make us stand out a bit’. Whereas ‘in a lot of death metal the vocals are a bit more simple and slower, and then the drums are going hyper-speed and the guitars are crazy’, the members of Archspire ‘wanted the vocals to match the music’. To this end, Aleron studied ‘speed rappers like Tech N9ne and Busta Rhymes and Twista’, focusing specifically on their ‘really interesting vocal patterns’.³⁹ Notably, rather than incorporate rap vocals directly, Aleron utilises a distorted growl vocal tone and builds intricate vocal patterns through a process wherein he ‘count[s] the amount of snare hits on some sections and I’ll try to match my syllables to those snare hits’.⁴⁰ The influence of speed rappers is demonstrated most literally during the introduction to ‘Calamus Will Animate’ (2017) when Aleron matches his syllables to the rhythmic patterns of sampled gunfire, which, according to the band, they ‘blatantly ripped off’ from Tech N9ne’s ‘Stamina’ (2001).⁴¹ While this influence clearly emanates from beyond the traditional purview of technical death metal, Aleron’s integration of the compositional technique – ‘applying this principle of phrasing and of speed to death metal’ – is done in such a way as to support and perhaps further Archspire’s avowed commitment to technical death metal. Rather than draw inspiration from genres outside metal and display those elements prominently as originating from elsewhere as one might encounter in, say, progressive or experimental subgenres, Archspire’s assimilation of a specific type of rap-derived vocal delivery seems motivated by a drive to be more ‘technical’. Aleron developed this technique in order to remain within the confines of technical death metal, to ‘stay tech’, but also ‘to try to give ourselves a unique sound’ in a subgenre that is markedly prescribed.⁴²

Conclusion

This chapter has sought to explore some of the ways in which generic and subgeneric terminology functions in relation to metal participants’ experience of the music culture. In the twenty-first century, genre and subgenre terms are ubiquitous in metal discourse, with participants seeming to employ increasingly esoteric vocabulary to categorise their musical experiences. The accrual and demonstration of subcultural capital offer a compelling motivation for the prevalence of genre in metal discourse, not to mention the variety of genre histories and taxonomies from which participants may become enculturated within this discourse. The ostensibly highly-stratified nature of contemporary metal is achieved through the use of what we might call subgenre qualifiers – those words or affixes that denote a particular version of a given genre. Qualifiers function to circumscribe genre both broadly, referring to a general approach or attitude, and narrowly, connoting relatively specific elements of style as well as the potential arrangement of those elements.

In technical death metal, we encounter a qualifier that generally signifies an approach to death metal that privileges technicality while simultaneously delimiting the forms within which that technicality may be expressed. In this formulation, technical can be understood as variously descriptive and prescriptive. Unsurprisingly, some artists move to reject this apparent constraint and attempt to position themselves as something other than technical death metal. By contrast, a few artists are not only comfortable with this affiliation but, in Archspire’s case, actively situate themselves within the ostensible confines of the subgenre. For Archspire, death metal provides a space in which to interrogate the broad ideology of ‘technical’ through an exploration of the very limits of the subgenre, scrutinising the supposed constriction of stylistic elements to produce something conventional and innovative, a prescribed creativity.

Metal has often been derided for a supposed lack of sophistication, with such criticism frequently betraying undercurrents of snobbery at music perceived to be by and for young, working-class, white men. Metal musicians, audiences and researchers in the 1980s and 1990s responded by comparing metal’s complex structures and musical virtuosity to the more culturally prestigious baroque music.¹ More recently, the extreme subgenre of drone metal, characterised by extremes of slowness, repetition and amplified distortion, has also attracted classical connotations from minimalism, twentieth-century avant-gardes and non-Western art musics. This chapter examines how drone metal and its experimentalism grounded in metal tradition has influenced external perceptions, not just about that subgenre but about metal in general. Evidence for this transformation can be found in the monthly music magazine The Wire, a publication based in the UK and with global coverage and audience. First published in 1982, it covered jazz and improvisation, expanding to consider experimental and global avant-garde music in a serious critical and intellectual manner. Since 2013, largely complete archives have been available online to subscribers.

This chapter traces the magazine’s changing attitude to metal, influenced by its coverage of drone metal, through the straightforward method of searching for and analysing all mentions of the term ‘metal’ in 437 issues from 1982 until July 2020. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, The Wire frequently and explicitly denigrated metal as stupid, this disdain often seeming to relate to prejudices about class and education. Any positive discussions of metal were legitimated through association with more acceptable jazz or experimental musicians or by appeals to exotic and even racialised difference. From the early 2000s, however, drone metal musicians such as Earth, Boris, and especially SunnO))), garnered more approving responses. While sometimes The Wire still painstakingly distanced drone metal from the rest of metal, gradually the overall tone towards metal shifted. After drone metal had been judged worthy of coverage as avant-garde music, metal itself could be retrospectively recognised as having always been experimental. Drone metal, via its links to classical and experimental musics, thereby influenced the perception and treatment of metal more broadly, even prompting revisionist rewriting of historical bias against it in this particular publication. This case study therefore shows how marginal subgenres can affect how the broader genre and its cultural status and value are perceived beyond metal.

Drone Metal

Music that would become known as drone metal emerged in the 1990s, with the 1993 album 2: Special Low Frequency Version by Earth widely regarded as the landmark early recording of what would develop into a loosely defined subgenre featuring extremes of extension, slow repetition and distortion. Drone metal extends beyond the atmospheric slow riffs of doom metal to present more radical abstractions of genre tropes while still grounded in metal’s heavily amplified noise.

Contrasting with other extreme metal subgenres, drone metal did not develop in a local scene but through isolated bands influenced by recordings of other similarly unusual bands. Versions of Boris’ 1996 debut album Absolutego, for example, bore the same subtitle ‘Special Low Frequency Version’ and showed a clear influence from Earth in the extended repetition of extremely slow, distorted metal riffs. Sleep’s Jerusalem (1996, later rereleased as Dopesmoker in 2003) extended their earlier Black Sabbath worship to a single hour-long dirge. When Sleep split, the rhythm section formed the band Om to explore sparse doomy meditations on bass riffs and mysticism. The band SunnO))) emphasised their commitment to amplification by taking their name from amplifier manufacturer the Sunn Musical Equipment Company, even reproducing typographically the company logo, which itself visually signifies sound waves. SunnO))) began playing smoke-filled shows in black cowls in the late 1990s and have continued to develop their massively amplified droning sound. Less well-known drone metal bands lurk at the edges of metal and experimental scenes: Bong’s weird-literature-inspired heavy drones sometimes feature Indian instrumentation; Corrupted alternate between short sludgy hardcore pieces and vastly extended drone doom tracks embellished with piano or harp; Nadja and Black Boned Angel build slow swirls of harsh ambience towards abrasive, cutting riffs; Menace Ruine combine haunting vocals with odd folk-infused distortion. Drone metal musicians claim influence from both metal tradition and experimental avant-gardes: guitarist Dylan Carlson named his band Earth after an early incarnation of Black Sabbath and wore a Morbid Angel t-shirt in the back cover photograph on their best-known record, while in interviews mentioned the minimalism of Terry Riley and La Monte Young as conceptual inspirations.² As the most critically and commercially successful drone metal band, SunnO))) perform at both metal festivals and prestigious classical concert venues; they pay tribute to metal in collaborations with black metal vocalists Attila Csihar, Wrest and Xasthur, while also working with contemporary artists Banks Violette and Richard Serra, and experimental musicians beyond metal.

Finding Metal in The Wire

Having previously enjoyed occasional issues, I subscribed to The Wire in April 2013. Reading every monthly issue since then, I became familiar with the music covered, the writing style, the magazine’s values, and, as with any such publication, the implied projection of those values onto its readership. I noticed a distinctly ambivalent attitude to metal music, even in positive treatments of examples of what I considered to be metal. Some writers were and are more generously disposed to metal, but in the editorial voice and across the magazine in general, metal stood out, needing to be excused or justified in ways that other genres did not. A searchable online archive of past issues provided an opportunity to historically examine The Wire’s discussions of metal. My approach was simply to search this archive for all instances of the term ‘metal’ and, where it referred to the music genre, analyse how metal was presented.³ As expected, the search garnered many false positives, for example, where ‘metal’ described the material, as in ‘direct metal mastering’ in advertisements for recordings, or regarding instruments such as saxophones or the unusual creations of industrial musicians Test Dept, Z’ev or Einstürzende Neubauten. The word ‘metal’ also appeared in song or album titles rather than referring to the music genre; though interestingly, several were examples that influenced drone metal: Coil’s occultist drone Gold is the Metal (With the Broadest Shoulders); PiL’s atmospheric post-punk Metal Box; and especially, the relentless distortion of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. It is likely that some remarks about metal music in the magazine were not discovered by this method if band names like Black Sabbath or Slayer or subgenres like thrash, grindcore or doom were mentioned without using the word ‘metal’. Some of the scanned magazine pages had been damaged or obscured, and automated text processing sometimes rendered text incorrectly, so some mentions of metal may have been lost. However, the method found many examples over nearly four decades of publication, revealing historical changes in metal music’s presentation in the magazine.

Extraction

Metal’s first mention sets the tone for its early treatment in The Wire. A 1982 review reports that free jazz band Catalogue ‘ape the stereotyped postures of Western rock music (the heavy-metal axe-hero, the screaming banshee, etc.). Yet their stance is perhaps more serious’.⁴ Here, metal represents a rock cliché, which can, among other tropes, be mastered by experimental musicians for loftier goals. Bobby Previte is described in 1992 as possessing ‘accumulated wisdom of almost a century of jazz with influences as diverse as Gamelan, minimalism, heavy metal and King Sunny Ade’,⁵ while Branford Marsalis in 1994 plays a ‘mix of everything from jazz with dancehall rhythms, Heavy Metal riffs with blues improvisations to country twang over HipHop beats’.⁶ Metal is one among many options available to the masters of an umbrella music, jazz or an unnamed ‘everything’. In the 1980s and 1990s, some metal-related music is appraised positively, but only if noted jazz or experimental musicians are involved. Projects involving John Zorn and Bill Laswell are mentioned favourably,⁷ though metal is presented as a part-time foray by musicians whose credentials are guaranteed by their contributions to proper jazz and experimental music elsewhere. In one review, Laswell and Zorn are literally ‘traffic cops’ overseeing collisions between metal and other styles.⁸ Musicians who just play metal, or worse, identify with it, are ignored or scorned.

As early as 1992, there appears an article arguing that ‘heavy metal is at last ready for credibility’ and that it ‘essentially experiments with the outer limits of sound’.⁹ But the article cannot resist distancing itself from metal’s ‘inherently reactionary nature’, its ‘endemic sexism’ and the ‘presumed chauvinism of its audience’.¹⁰ Metallica, Iron Maiden, Deep Purple and Diamond Head are mocked, and the only group pictured is, incongruously, grunge band Nirvana. Metal is commended for providing samples for use in rap, for (again) the involvement of Laswell and Zorn, and for production techniques used outside metal: Rick Rubin ‘shouldn’t be forgiven for Slayer’ but is praised for his work with The Beastie Boys.¹¹ Metal is valued only for aspects that have been extracted for use elsewhere.

Reclaimed Metal

Music that resembles metal must be rescued by associations with more prestigious music. Any worth in the Stooges’ classic 1970 proto-punk album Fun House derives from its ‘trans-spectrum overblow of free jazz’, because ‘without that, it would have indeed been the “fast heavy metal” its detractors deplored’.¹² The magazine’s writers criticise what they think metal is trying to achieve, positioning experimental musicians as having casually mastered not only the musical style but its entire aims as well. Peter Brötzmann’s aggressive 1985 saxophone-led free jazz album reportedly out-muscles guitar music: ‘Rock’s supposed “threats” – for example, Heavy Metal or Punk – were just so much fairy cake for Machine Gun people’.¹³ Also trumping metal’s apparent goals is Brötzmann’s son Caspar in 1992, whose music is able to ‘wade through dense gastric sludge to emerge into the implacable clarity of The Riff. Well, if only heavy metal was really like that’.¹⁴ Experimental rock group Zeni Geva are commended with a comparison to the latter musician for doing metal better than metal bands, as their ‘improvisational, Brötzmann-esque guitar fills’ lift them ‘out of the death metal swamp’.¹⁵ Whatever metal tries to do, jazz musicians – especially ones called Brötzmann and ones who play like them – can do better, and they can do more besides.

Metal’s audiences need saving from metal. Describing a noisy 1994 guitar record by Ascension, the reviewer (after yet another reference to a Brötzmann) benevolently hopes for metal (and indie) fans to be saved from the music that is somehow misleading them: ‘This guitar noise desperately needs to reach all those currently being fobbed off with indie jangle and “Heavy Metal”’.¹⁶ Conversely, readers of The Wire can listen to metal sounds if protected from metal audiences. A 2004 review of Kayo Dot approves of the band’s transcendence of everything that is wrong with metal culture:

Disdain for audiences is evident, but there is relief that the metal sounds can be safely removed from them. Zeni Geva reportedly ‘recycled the power and density of death metal as it should have been played, and rebroadcast it to audiences who wouldn’t have listened to a group such as Death’.¹⁸ That review implicitly approves of those who do not listen to death metal since they are able to hear that style played properly by musicians not defined by metal. The text does suggest that the writer has listened to or is at least aware of the metal band Death, showing a similar mastery in listening or critical writing that the jazz musicians are purported to have in playing.

Claims to mastery in listening are, however, betrayed by obvious errors. At first, Napalm Death are from Norwich;¹⁹ then they are from Ipswich;²⁰ before a reader’s letter correctly points out they are ‘Birmingham born-and-bred’.²¹ The nationalities of two notorious Nordic black metal entities are mistakenly reversed: Abruptum described as from Norway²² and Euronymous of Mayhem as from Sweden.²³ In 2008, the magazine describes ‘Leicester’s outlandish Black magic rock group Coven, the nearly men of heavy metal’, mistaking the Californian proto-doom group Coven for the British band Black Widow.²⁴ The magazine portrays itself as knowledgeable, but carelessness about details suggests it wishes only to show that it knows enough about metal to dismiss it.

Stupid Reactions

The problem with metal is openly stated: it is stupid. A 1992 review of a metal compilation makes a striking comparison to the music that was then the magazine’s more usual territory: ‘Metal – stupid jazz, jazz for intimidated teens – shelters unwitting Coltrane’s countless unwitting children’.²⁵ The musicians do not ‘know how or when to end a solo’, they ‘indulge themselves’, the music is ‘clueless’, ‘histrionic’ and ‘insane’, but in the end is described, with benign condescension, as ‘not as totally brainless as all the speed and weight would imply’.²⁶ Elsewhere, metal is fundamentally young and dumb: it is rock’s ‘aesthetically-challenged baby brother’.²⁷ A reviewer observes that ‘[m]etal short-circuits informed opinion-makers and sells directly to unformed kids’.²⁸ Young people are problematically ignoring cultured, educated gatekeepers like The Wire. Instead, in the same piece, a ‘working class-ish’ audience is depicted as attracted to the ‘macho vocal preening’ and ‘arrogant, slag-fluid virtuoso guitar’ of Deep Purple’s ‘idiot pretensions’.²⁹ Here stupidity, as lack of education, is really about class. An article in a themed issue titled ‘In Praise of the Riff’ bemoans that

Hard rock is bad enough; music for halfwits which actually makes you stupid. But metal’s dead-end associations with manual labour (evoked especially by the mention of denim) make it even worse.

Inverse Others

Some metal is treated positively. One of the first examples of an encouraging review mentioning metal is in 1991 for the band Oxbow: ‘mogadon metal submerged in volcanic lava … a bizarre fusion of psychotic flamenco and thrash’.³¹ Managing to be complimentary despite referencing mental instability and a sedative drug, the review again situates the music as a mixture rather than just metal. Other than John Zorn or Bill Laswell projects, the earliest band with multiple approving mentions tied to the term ‘metal’ is Body Count, described in positive write-ups as speed metal in 1993,³² thrash metal in 1994,³³ and rap/metal in 1996;³⁴ the first metal band awarded a full feature article were Living Colour in March 1993.³⁵ The song ‘Super Stupid’ by Funkadelic is described as akin to Black Sabbath;³⁶ as featuring one of the greatest riffs of all time,³⁷ and as ‘the greatest Heavy Metal song ever’.³⁸ It is fitting that The Wire considers the best example of metal to be a song with the word ‘stupid’ in the name. Even Michael Jackson’s songs ‘Black or White’ and ‘Beat It’ are ‘disco-metal’.³⁹ The common factor is striking: the most prominent musicians praised in The Wire for playing metal are Black. It is commendable that these musicians received positive coverage, particularly since, as Kevin Fellezs has observed, musicians of colour are often subject to racist exclusion from metal and hard rock institutions.⁴⁰ However, given The Wire’s open disdain for metal, valuing these specific metal musicians and almost no others remains troubling. In a short review contrasting two bands who combine elements of metal and hip hop, when readers are told that ‘New York’s Biohazard, work from within metal [and] LA’s Rage Against the Machine work from without’,⁴¹ it is difficult to avoid the implication that this is because the former band features all white members, while the latter comprises mixed race Black Latino and white musicians. Rage Against the Machine’s album is described as ‘absolutely flawless’,⁴² yet this recognition is tempered by the magazine’s inability to accept them as primarily a metal band. While the term ‘metal’ is mentioned, the review aligns them more with rap, funk and Flavor Flav; ‘their funk discipline is even more honed than their hardcore chops’.⁴³ In a kind of inverse othering, The Wire in the 1990s covers musicians of colour who play metal, but disassociates them, and itself, from metal. In doing so, it colludes from the outside in constructing metal as an essentially white space by rhetorically undermining the ‘metalness’ of non-white musicians in order to situate them as acceptable for discussion in the magazine.

Metal can therefore be commended if distanced from an imagined white working class. A 1999 editorial is intrigued by ‘Maghreb Metal’, thinking that a ‘collision of speed Metal and Berber culture sounds like a real headfuck’.⁴⁴ The same piece expresses curiosity about ‘death Metal units from Cuba and Colombia’ before yet again mentioning Bill Laswell and Funkadelic’s ‘Super Stupid’.⁴⁵ A 1995 feature discussing ‘Malaysian speed metal kids’ and ‘the Black Rock Coalition’ displays its exoticising nature in the article title ‘Lost in Translation’.⁴⁶ Zeni Geva, mentioned earlier in relation to death metal, are categorised in 1994 as ‘Japcore’, reducing them to a juxtaposition of heaviness with national/ethnic identity, and further stereotyped as ‘turning the old Japanese trick of replicating an American model better than its original makers’.⁴⁷ A 1993 article about Islam and metal even highlights how both Muslims and metalheads are stigmatised as exotic.⁴⁸ The Wire in the 1990s fetishizes otherness, rejecting metal that is implicitly white, working class, young and stupid, and considering metal only if it displays non-white or non-Western signifiers.

Enter Drone Metal

Drone metal, as experimental music and then as metal, gradually gains acceptance in The Wire over the two decades since its first mentions in the early 2000s. Initially, drone metal is treated according to the pattern established by The Wire’s previous treatment of metal, where heavy music is worthwhile if it can be rhetorically distanced from metal. By the mid to late 2010s, drone metal becomes accepted as a form of metal music and prompts retrospective revisionism where the magazine, despite its earlier denigration of metal, acknowledges that metal has always been an experimental tradition.

In the early 2000s, qualifications still need to be attached to anything metal-related for it to be presented to The Wire’s readers. SunnO))) and Earth are called ‘Metal method actors’, suggesting that their connection with metal must be role-play rather than sincere.⁴⁹ A 2003 editorial disapprovingly states that metal ‘has remained hidebound by subcultural constraints’,⁵⁰ but views ‘the “meta-Metal” of artists like SunnO)))’ as palatable because it is apparently ‘Metal played by people who aren’t Heavy Metal people, who have no investment in satisfying that audience’.⁵¹ Metal sounds are acceptable if removed from unacceptable metal people. The claim that SunnO))) and others are not ‘Heavy Metal people’ is obviously ideological because it is obviously wrong: SunnO))) members have played in multiple metal bands, performed at metal gigs and metal festivals, run metal fanzines and metal record labels, collaborated with metal musicians and consistently expressed commitment to metal scenes.

An early feature on SunnO))) from 2002 begins with a quote from the band’s guitarist: ‘“I’m a headbanger, what can I say?” announces an unapologetic Stephen O’Malley’,⁵² the interviewer’s added adjective hinting at an unspoken convention that metal should be apologised for, and that refusing to do so is daring. The article describes

an ironic statement, given The Wire’s stern policing of exactly that border from the other side. The initial quote joins a long tradition: in 1987, musician Nigel Manning was evidently conscious of the expectation that shame should be attached to metal: ‘I’ve never lost my heavy metal roots. I still listen to Black Sabbath albums – and you can print that’.⁵⁴ In a 2005 interview, Cambell Kneale of drone metal projects Black Boned Angel and Birchville Cat Motel is treated similarly, his enthusiastic words about metal editorially framed with disdain:

The reporting verb ‘insists’ works in a similar underhanded way to the description of O’Malley as ‘unapologetic’; these terms are used to describe the musicians’ words, but it is the writer who is smuggling in hints that perseverance with metal is somehow contrarian. Then, when Kneale reports a tentative solidarity between metal fans known in antipodean slang as ‘bogans’, the author or editor interjects a translation of this colloquialism, introducing aggressive class prejudice which is not present in Kneale’s use of the term (see, for example, Dave Snell’s work on this term).⁵⁶ Three years later, as if returning to a nagging, unresolved concern, a review of one of Kneale’s projects refers back to this same piece incredulously:

Even by 2008, the magazine seems unwilling to take at face value the words of a musician who straightforwardly professes that metal is important. Nevertheless, the last sentence of the quote suggests the route to metal’s rehabilitation.

Alchemical Transformation

Anti-metal sentiment still appears in The Wire, but acceptance of metal through drone metal reaches a turning point in 2005. An eight-page ‘guide to the core recordings’ of metal features far more drone metal examples than might be expected from its marginal status in the metal world. Of thirty-six featured albums, the first three are by Earth, ten are by SunnO))) or directly related projects, with another four by Boris, two by Corrupted and two by Sleep; the remainder are by black metal musicians, two of whom have since collaborated with SunnO))), or by industrial metal/noise artists.⁵⁸ Drone metal’s centrality to The Wire’s view of metal is consolidated further in 2009 when SunnO))) became the first metal band to feature on the cover.⁵⁹ To date, the only metal bands ever pictured on the front of the magazine are SunnO))), Earth⁶⁰ and Boris,⁶¹ all of whom played drone metal for at least significant parts of their careers. SunnO)))’s cover story coincided with the release of their 2009 album Monoliths & Dimensions, perhaps their most self-consciously avant-garde recording, with a song named after Alice Coltrane, horn players with jazz and experimental histories, and cover artwork by contemporary artist Richard Serra. On this record, The Wire considered SunnO))) to ‘have provided the catalyst for Metal’s recent emergence as a credible avant garde strategy’, after Earth had laid the groundwork in taking their sound ‘some distance from the lewd phantasmagoria of mainstream Metal’.⁶²

Metal now can appear as always having been experimental. By 2013, ‘[m]etal has long been a testing lab for vocal techniques’ for Ronnie James Dio, Bruce Dickinson and Rob Halford,⁶³ vocalists from an era when metal was routinely described by the same magazine as stupid. Two years later, The Wire has completely reversed its previously scornful position: ‘It’s not so much that there is a rich tradition of experimentalism in heavy metal; more that heavy metal is, at its core, an experimental form’.⁶⁴ In 2020, there is room for serious discussion of a ‘death metal avant garde’;⁶⁵ and in 2018, Celtic Frost’s Into the Pandemonium from 1987 is recognised as having ‘helped carve out a space in metal for the kind of avant garde experimentation that is now taken for granted’.⁶⁶ There is even a complaint printed in the letters page, also in 2018, that in the magazine now ‘only metal is appreciated as a proper avant rock form’.⁶⁷ Denigration of metal does still appear, and some writers were already more open-minded towards metal. But drone metal, and specifically SunnO)))’s Monoliths & Dimensions, changed perceptions and prompted a reappraisal of metal in the magazine.

Metal thus emerged from waste to become something of value. It is no surprise, then, to find that writers have often reached for the metaphor of alchemical transmutation. Movement from disdain to qualified acceptance to revisionist approval can be traced through these magical reference points. Godflesh in 2001 are ‘working with superheavy base Metal’,⁶⁸ implying a lumpen material requiring transformation. Such work is successful in 2008 for drone metal band Nadja whose ‘alchemical process transforms ponderous Metal into abstract grandeur’.⁶⁹ By 2009, sludge/drone metal band Gore can also be found ‘transforming leaden Metal into heavy instrumental gold’.⁷⁰ Again it is SunnO))), who are awarded the most extravagant praise in esoteric terms, for their ‘extraordinary alchemical feat of turning base Metal into an open, richly resonating musical platform incorporating spectralist, cosmic jazz and heavy drone influences’.⁷¹ When in 2014 Earth guitarist Dylan Carlson released a solo album entitled Gold, the trope was impossible to avoid, with The Wire even referring in a passive-tense generalisation to the kind of prejudice that had previously been common in its own pages:

Drone metal’s experiments thus initiated a magical, revisionist transformation of perspective for The Wire. The precious value of metal finally dawned on learned gatekeepers of the experimental avant-garde. Metal audiences – the aesthetically-challenged kids, the stupid intimidated teens, the denim-clad halfwits – had known that secret all along.

This chapter considers djent, a subgenre of metal whose emergence in the late 2000s reinvigorated metal practice while simultaneously reigniting debates concerning metal’s identity in the post-digital era. Djent did not begin to come to the attention of metal scholars until relatively recently, mainly due to its having been pigeonholed as an informal, hobbyist activity whose origins as an online phenomenon made it appear somehow remote from the mainstream of metal music practice. Djent’s reputation has also not been aided by the often tongue-in-cheek and sometimes disparaging approach of bloggers and journalists (see later in this chapter) to evaluating it, which has tended to obscure the seriousness of intent of its individual practitioners as well as the importance of the music in its own terms. A particular benefit of the increased scholarly focus on djent is that key lines of enquiry have now begun to emerge that highlight important themes for research. Robert Burns and Allan Moore and Remy Martin, for example, have focused on djent’s progressive musical characteristics, while Steven Gamble, in the vein of much previous metal scholarship, has considered the scene context, here in reference to the online community that congregated around djent during its early period.¹ Another significant line of enquiry, which is also a focus of this chapter, concerns the technological circumstances of djent’s emergence, particularly the post-1990s digital production environments, which were integral to both its creation and dissemination. Djent’s reliance upon digital tools to construct its guitar timbres has been the focus of Matt Shelvock, for example, while Mark Marrington and Robert Strachan have commented more broadly on the importance of digital production environments to the musical aesthetics of the subgenre.²

This chapter aims, firstly, to provide some background to djent’s emergence, focusing upon its musical provenance as well as the technological factors underlying its creation and production and the digital aesthetics these bestowed upon the music’s sound and character. Following this, an overview is provided of djent’s stylistic features, including its progressive musical leanings and gravitation towards electronic and popular music influences. The final part of the chapter considers the polarised critical reception surrounding djent, providing a backdrop from which to consider the subgenre’s position in relation to modern metal, particularly regarding its technological stance, which, it is argued, aligns it with recent trends for situating metal in ever-closer proximity to the aesthetics of post-digital musical practice.

The Emergence of Djent and the Technological Circumstances of its Production

Djent initially began life as an underground internet phenomenon during the early-mid-2000s, becoming recognised as a subgenre of metal music around 2010–11. It is generally accepted that the word ‘djent’ was coined by Misha Mansoor of Periphery as an onomatopoeic reference to the Swedish band Meshuggah’s distinctive palm-muted staccato riffing style, which had a particular influence on his own playing.³ This trope became so closely identified with djent thereafter that Meshuggah are now commonly recognised as the progenitors of djent even though they themselves have tended to downplay this role.⁴ Djent artists also acknowledge the influence of Meshuggah’s guitarists’ (Mårten Hagström and Fredrik Thordendal) use of down-tuned seven-string (and later eight-string) instruments, and the band’s celebrated rhythmic innovations – namely, their superimposed poly-metres and juxtapositions of odd time signatures.⁵ Another frequently cited influence on djent is the band SikTh, hailing from Hertfordshire in the UK, who pursued the progressive paradigm into what might be best described as postmodern territory on their seminal early recordings The Trees Are Dead & Dried Out Wait for Something (2003) and Death of a Dead Day (2006). Their work, which owed much to earlier technical metal, was characterised by rapid time changes, vocals that are part-rapped, part death-metal screaming and part clean-sung, altered guitar tunings and advanced guitar techniques.⁶ The band’s eclectic musical outlook, synthesising frenetic mathcore with ballad-style material and even piano-led classical-style instrumentals, anticipated the pronounced contrasts of style found in djent.

SikTh were also notable for producing their own albums, which reflected the growing importance of the DIY aesthetic within metal production in the early 2000s. This attitude was built upon by djent artists, whose emergence coincided with the explosion of the bedroom producer phenomenon, a movement catalysed by the increased availability of Digital Audio Workstation (henceforth, DAW) software, which was now beginning to substitute for the ‘real-world’ studio. With this democratisation of technology came the decentralisation of music production practice to the home environment, affording musicians the freedom to evolve their music in a situation of relative autonomy from commercial industry trends. A number of djent artists initially began their musical activities as solo ‘projects’, a term commonly associated with solo DIY set-ups during this period, using DAW software as a collaborative substitute for the full-band line-ups they initially lacked, before morphing, in the majority of cases, into full-band outfits.⁷ Among the more notable djent practitioners who emerged from the bedroom producer nexus were Misha Mansoor, initially operating under the pseudonym Bulb, before co-founding the band Periphery, Acle Kahney, guitarist in Fellsilent (and later TesseracT), and one-man operation Chimp Spanner (Paul Ortiz). Djent artists also benefitted from the internet and specifically the social media platforms that had begun to proliferate in the early 2000s, such as SoundClick, which provided a means of sharing musical ideas and songs. In a guest post for the MetalSucks website Acle Kahney summarised the circumstances of djent’s emergence and the importance of the internet:

For Kahney, who was based in Milton Keynes (UK), the internet afforded the opportunity to form a fruitful collaborative relationship with Mansoor, based in the United States (Bethesda, Maryland), with whom he exchanged ideas on equipment and the use of DAW software for recording and the programming of drum parts. Mansoor has indicated that djent evolved organically through the free exchange of ideas and a willingness to share and re-use one another’s material:

Djent artists were thus early pioneers of online collaboration, a concept now increasingly accepted as the norm in contemporary record production practice.

The technological circumstances of the production of djent, including the use of the DAW for recording and programming musical parts and digital effects to process guitar sounds, played an important role in shaping the aesthetics of the subgenre. These technologies engendered a unique sonic fingerprint, summarised in the words of got-djent.com spokesman Sander Dieleman as a ‘simulated’, ‘processed’ aesthetic with ‘no rough edges’.¹⁰ A particular preoccupation of djent artists was with achieving an ideal ‘djenty’ guitar tone. This was the subject of continuous debate and discussion within the djent community on online forums such as got-djent.com, and amongst bloggers and YouTubers. As limited technological resources precluded the use of complex hardware set-ups, djent artists achieved their sound using a combination of characteristic guitar pickups (such as Bare Knuckle’s Aftermath humbucker) and software and hardware-based digital amplifier modelling technologies, including Fractal Audio Systems’ Axe FX and the Line 6 Pod Farm software and HD Pro hardware. They also experimented with freeware plugins, audio software made available at no charge on the internet by third-party developers, to simulate the required signal chains, another consequence of the budgetary constraints of the bedroom production scenario.¹¹

With this equipment, djent guitarists were able to evolve a distorted guitar timbre that exhibited both a low-range heaviness appropriate to metal and a distinctively crisp, dry character. Here digital tools permitted precise control of the signal path via gating, compression and simulated amplifier configurations, together with the facility to build up a detailed inventory of easily retrievable presets. The cultivation of djent tone served more than a merely aesthetic purpose, being designed to allow for clear articulation of the relatively sophisticated pitch structures found within the power chords typically employed by these artists, as explained by Shelvock in reference to Animals as Leaders, Periphery and TesseracT:

Also fundamental to the post-digital character of the djent sound were the MIDI-programmed drum parts, which were drawn from software-based drum sample libraries. In the early period, these were often created using Toontrack’s now-iconic Drumkit from Hell, a resource that had significance for djent artists, as it was one of the earliest sample libraries to be designed specifically for a metal performance context. Adding to the aura, this particular sample library had also been recorded by Meshuggah’s drummer Tomas Haake at Dug-Out Studios in Uppsala, Sweden.¹³ Djent artists programmed their drum parts using sequencing software such as Steinberg’s Cubase and Propellerhead’s Reason, the latter emulating a real-world rack-based studio set-up and including digital modelling of earlier sampler technologies.

Another popular software tool amongst djent artists was Native Instruments’ dedicated drum sampler plugin, Battery (released in 2002), which enabled highly refined editing of sampled drum sounds.¹⁴ Interestingly, the drum programming aesthetic remained central to djent bands’ creative processes even when they had moved fully into live band performance. In some cases, this was a matter of practicality. Misha Mansoor, for example, who began his musical life as a drummer before moving to the guitar, has commented that, compared to the degree of control afforded by sampled drums, he found live drums to be far more troublesome to record, edit and mix.¹⁵ Elsewhere, drum programming served a particular creative purpose, as in the case of Animals as Leaders, who retained this approach on their second album, Weightless (2011), despite having recruited an actual drummer – Navene Koperweis – in the meantime. Discussing the making of the album in an interview for Modern Drummer, Koperweis gave a succinct account of the MIDI-based process of creating the album’s drum parts:

TesseracT drummer Jay Postones also developed his drumming in relation to software tools, typically evolving his drum performances from demos provided by guitarist Acle Kahney, containing parts programmed using Superior Drummer, which he would attempt to replicate physically on the kit. Postones implied that this would entail trying to find a way to play a programmed part that at first sight might seem impossible: ‘Sometimes I’ll hear it and think, “Yup, that’s something I can’t play – I’ve got to learn how”. I like trying to re-create the ideas he’s had. I don’t try to overstep the mark, because Acle has got a clear vision of what he wants it to sound like’.¹⁷ Postones also remarks on the importance of using DAW software (Cubase in this instance) as a vehicle for clarifying a drum pattern idea before attempting to realise it using the kit:

The comments of Koperweis and Postones illustrate the extent to which digital tools informed the conception and realisation of djent, with the software here taking on an essentially collaborative role by assisting in the generation of rhythmic material that might not have been imagined when using the drumkit in a more traditional fashion. Even the very fact of engaging with the DAW from the perspective of more conventional performance activities, such as the tracking of guitar parts, left a mark on the character of djent as Mansoor observed regarding the evolution of his own very precise guitar performance style: ‘When you’re playing that way you start to focus on parts of your technique that make all the difference in the world. Things you’d never have noticed if you weren’t sitting in front of a computer and hearing your playing back. It taught me how to play guitar’.¹⁹

Djent as a Style of Music

Djent began to crystallise as a recognisable genre of music around 2011, by which point the term was being used to describe the work of a wide range of artists. Joel McIver’s Metal Hammer feature (April 2011),²⁰ for example, included the following in its ‘league of djentlemen’: Periphery, Vildhjarta, Animals as Leaders, Elitist, Of Legends, After the Burial, Born of Osiris, Skyharbor, Chimp Spanner and Mnemic, several of whom were now signed to high profile established, or up and coming, metal labels including Roadrunner, Century Media, Prosthetic, Sumerian, Nuclear Blast and Basick.²¹ Having surveyed the output of these artists, McIver noted that ‘the djent tag’ was becoming applicable ‘to a relatively wide range of sounds’.²² Unsurprisingly, given the subgenre’s progressive musical provenance, virtuosic rhythm and lead guitar performance skills are central to djent. The influences here are wide-ranging, including the progressive metal styles of guitarists such as Dream Theater’s John Petrucci, but also (in the cases of Misha Mansoor and Tosin Abasi, for example) styles from outside metal, including contemporary jazz and jazz-rock fusion.²³ Hence the harmonic language of djent is often constituted of complex chords and dense textures derived from the polyrhythmic layering of guitar parts, sometimes involving up to three instruments simultaneously (see Periphery’s work, for example).

At the same time, djent guitarists also showed leanings towards more traditional styles of top-line lead playing, such as Chimp Spanner, whose melodic approach is reminiscent of Steve Vai or Joe Satriani. While djent riffing is certainly a defining aspect of the style, as encapsulated by the characteristic djent ‘breakdown’, djent artists also favoured calmer, more ambient material in the form of reverb saturated and/or delay-effected clean arpeggiated guitar, employed as intro/outro material or to provide interludes between tracks. Instances can be found in much of the work of TesseracT, including the early Concealing Fate EP (2010) and subsequent debut album, One (2011), Periphery on Periphery (2010), Uneven Structure on Februus (2011), Chimp Spanner on At the Dream’s Edge (2009), Skyharbor on Blind White Noise: Illusion and Chaos (2012), and Vildhjarta on Måsstaden (2011).

While a number of djent bands employ vocals prominently, the styles adopted can vary considerably, one key characteristic (seen in the work of TesseracT, for example) being the frequent alternation between clean sung and death metal style screaming, which is sometimes amusingly referred to as ‘good cop, bad cop’ technique. It should not be assumed that vocals are central to the work of all djent artists, however, as illustrated by Chimp Spanner and the trio Animals as Leaders, whose music is entirely instrumental in conception. Misha Mansoor’s remark that Periphery’s self-titled first album (2010) ‘was written to be an instrumental album and vocals were thrown on top’²⁴ suggests that djent artists did not necessarily see themselves as beholden to song formats. Indeed, many djent compositions appear conceived in a manner consistent with instrumental music, adopting elaborate formal structures worked out over extended time frames, with many tracks lasting between 5 and 7 minutes, and in some cases even longer (see, for example, the 15-minute ‘Racecar’, which concludes Periphery’s debut LP). Djent albums and EPs are likewise conceived as multi-movement compositional structures linked by conceptual themes, in some cases, such as TesseracT’s Altered State (2013) and Periphery’s double album Juggernaut – Alpha/Juggernaut – Omega (2015), on a grandiose scale befitting 1970s progressive rock.

Many djent recordings also show a marked influence of electronic music aesthetics, which manifest themselves in various ways. Often electronic styles are introduced for short periods at certain points in tracks to add colouristic interest, such as the chiptune-esque arpeggio introduction to Chimp Spanner’s ‘Bad Code’ (2009), or the Aphex Twin-like beats heard briefly at the beginning of Periphery’s ‘Jetpacks Was Yes!’ (2010) and outro to their track ‘Totla Mad’ (2010). Elsewhere, electronic music gestures are integrated more substantially into the proceedings, such as Animals as Leaders’ track ‘On Impulse’ (2009), which includes ‘glitch’ style passages of mangled percussion and, in the acoustic guitar introduction, looped material, giving the impression of skipping audio.²⁵ Such examples can be regarded as a further by-product of the post-digital context of djent production, engendered by exposure to the possibilities of the DAW for the creative manipulation of sound. Looping, for example, is a DAW-induced compositional construct, which encourages the user to copy and paste short passages of recorded audio – bass lines, guitar riffs and drum parts – producing the effect of literal repetition more commonly associated with sample-based music.²⁶ Another interesting instance is Swedish band Vildhjarta’s track ‘Benblåst’ (2011), which contains musique concrète-like passages of metallic clanking juxtaposed with a delay-effected noise loop, suggesting links to industrial music.

Working in the DAW also encouraged artists to utilise software-based sound design tools, including synthesisers and samplers. Chimp Spanner’s sound on At the Dream’s Edge (2009) and the All Roads Lead Here EP (2012), for example, is strongly defined by the synthesiser, which he uses to generate introductions, interludes and ambient backdrops to his riff and lead playing. Unsurprisingly, he has listed Brian Eno and Vangelis as particular influences on his musical thinking.²⁷ Elsewhere, French guitarist Rémi Gallego, known as The Algorithm, engaged directly with tropes of contemporary EDM, fusing characteristic djent-style riffing with elements of dubstep (see the track ‘Trojans’ on the 2012 album Polymorphic Code). Gallego’s approach, which was aptly labelled ‘djent-step’, was consonant with developments that had been taking place in US metal, most notably in the work of Korn on their 2011 album The Path of Totality.

As djent began to proliferate during the early-2010s, it also showed itself to be amenable to fusion with a range of other popular music genres. One notable synthesis was ‘rap-djent’, pioneered by the British band Hacktivist, hailing from Milton Keynes (also the home of TesseracT). The band’s eponymous debut EP, released in 2012, melds typical djent riffing with clean singing and a rapped element that has obvious roots in British grime.²⁸ Rap-djent was in one sense an iteration of the rap-metal fusion that had characterised 1990s US-American nu metal and its earlier prototypes, but now with a distinctly British tint.²⁹ One of the most contrived fusions of djent with the wider popular music sphere occurred on Djent Goes Pop (2011), an album released for free on Facebook by the Djent-Lemen’s Club.³⁰ This multi-authored (and almost parodical) effort included mash-up style re-workings of (then) contemporary material, such as Lady Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’ (2008) and Rihanna’s ‘Russian Roulette’ (2009), utilising audio samples from the original recordings, as well as imaginative cover versions of earlier mainstream pop favourites such as George Michael’s ‘Careless Whisper’ (1984) and A-ha’s ‘Take on Me’ (1984). What this, and the work of Gallego and Hacktivist, tended to highlight was the extent to which djent’s most recognisable elements – particularly its power chord riff – had quickly become self-contained clichés that could be readily re-inserted into other musical contexts, rather as a hip hop artist might treat an iconic drum-break. It also served as reminder of the general ambivalence of djent artists towards being pigeonholed in terms of any one specific musical genre – including metal.

The Reception of Djent

A survey of the critical literature (typically magazine articles, posts on blogs and forums, and YouTube videos) that appeared in response to djent from the time of its emergence in the late 2000s reveals that its effect was to polarise the metal community, in some quarters being welcomed for its freshness and innovation, while in others inviting vociferous ridicule and derision. The main sticking points for commentators negatively inclined towards djent can be succinctly summarised in the remarks made by The Mad Israeli, a regular blogger for the No Clean Singing website (writing in November 2011):

Elaborating each of these reasons, in turn, The Mad Israeli painted a picture of a subgenre that had become a cliché. This included criticism of the onomatopoeic use of the word ‘djent’ itself, which had become even more problematic since it had also taken on verb status (‘to djent’, ‘djenting’) as well as the presence of the ‘scene kids’, who had seized upon and over-exposed particular djent characteristics: ‘All they have are 7- and 8-string guitars and a load of unnecessary clean and ambient overlays to boring, open-note grooves that are, dare I say, worse than the drivel Slipknot put out’. His criticisms of djent production were levelled at the homogeneity of the djent sound that had been engendered by the persistent use of digital tools in the music’s creation:

John Hill, another outspoken metal critic, wrote a particularly scathing commentary on djent for Vice in 2014, entitled, ‘It’s time for djent to djie [sic]’. Hill’s article’s overall position was that djent was little more than a fashionable offshoot of metalcore:

Then, taking Periphery as the exemplar djent’s shortcomings, Hill deconstructed the subgenre further:

Elsewhere, the MetalSucks website, which acted as a placeholder for much of the online commentary on djent during the 2010s,³⁴ was less abrasive in its approach, tending to take a more tongue-in-cheek attitude to representing the scene, as illustrated by the titles of posts such as, ‘The Debate Rages On: Is “Djent” a Genre’ (2015) and ‘Scientific Proof that Djent is a Genre’ (2015). It also featured video content, which gently poked fun at the clichés of the music, such as YouTuber metal guitarist Jared Dines’ annual parodies of djent guitar style, Andrew Baena’s³⁵ ‘Random Djent Breakdown Generator’, a software algorithm, which triggered short pre-recorded segments of djent riffing over a drum loop, and Rob Scallon’s ‘The Discovery of Djent’, which suggested that creating a djent track was simply a matter of copying and pasting a single power chord multiple times on a DAW arrange page. Much of the commentary was curated by MetalSucks blogger Vince Neilstein who, while generally sympathetic to the more high-profile djent bands, was outspoken in his criticism of djent hybrids such as djent-step and djent-rap.³⁶

The more serious and balanced online commentary on djent tended to come from journalists representing commercial metal magazines, such as Europe’s Metal Hammer and Kerrang!, which provided strong promotional support for the music as it emerged into the mainstream. Metal Hammer (UK), for example, published several articles devoted to djent artists from the early 2010s onwards, particularly TesseracT and Periphery, who were undoubtedly the most prevalent (and as time went on, least djent-like) of the bands associated with the scene.³⁷ Writing for Metal Hammer in April 2011, Dom Lawson remarked of djent that ‘as daft as its name might be, this burgeoning scene sounds a lot more like the future of heavy music than anything else out there right now’.³⁸ Djent was also given significant coverage in guitar hobbyist publications such as Total Guitar and Guitar Player, which naturally foregrounded the music’s guitar-centred virtuosity and the ‘gear’ culture surrounding it. There were also occasional articles in the British press, such as Jamie Thomson’s ‘Djent, the Metal Geek’s Microgenre’ (another somewhat tongue-in-cheek framing), which situated djent in relation to recent electronic music and the soloistic practitioner innovations associated with that field:

Thomson also suggested that djent’s proliferation via the internet represented an important paradigm shift for metal music:

Situating Djent within/without Metal

Having outlined the circumstances of djent’s emergence, its characteristic features and given a sense of its reception by the metal community, it remains to offer some concluding thoughts on how djent may be situated in relation to the metal genre. It is interesting to note, given what has already been highlighted regarding the polarization of opinion on djent, that the position of the djent community has itself been one of ambivalence towards the ‘djent’ label. In an interview published by the Djentle-Music website in 2014, got-djent.com spokesman Sander Dieleman observed that ‘the word djent just seems to cause a lot of polarized reactions … most of them [the djent bands] don’t actually identify themselves as djent, like if someone says “hey you’re djent” then they’ll reluctantly acknowledge it’.⁴¹ The main issue here is clearly the limited onomatopoeic signification of the word ‘djent’ itself, which most djent artists recognise is simply insufficient to encapsulate the scope of their individual musical remits. One of the most outspoken critics of the djent label has been Misha Mansoor, to whom (ironically) the origin of the word ‘djent’ is credited. Interviewed for the Kerrang podcast in 2011, Mansoor acknowledged that while the word djent was certainly applicable to aspects of Periphery’s music, namely the djent style riffs employed, this was a relatively insignificant facet of a far less easily definable whole.⁴² Instead, Mansoor preferred to see Periphery’s music, and that of his djent contemporaries, as simply ‘progressive’. This was also Dieleman’s conclusion:

Djent’s affinities with the progressive metal subgenre, as has been observed, are not difficult to discern, being rooted in the musical styles of foundational bands such as Dream Theater and Tool and foregrounding ‘specialist’ approaches derived from technical and ‘math’ metal (Watchtower, Meshuggah, Dillinger Escape Plan) and less easily classifiable forms of postmodern metal (SikTh). Considered in relation to such predecessors, djent’s sophisticated guitar-centric harmonic and melodic languages, its rhythmic and formal complexity and openness to musical perspectives outside metal, are hardly out of place. In these terms, djent may thus be considered to reside comfortably within the lineage of progressive metal as outlined by commentators such as Sam Dunn and Jeff Wagner.⁴⁴

There is also an alternative approach to situating djent, however, which relates to the technological circumstances of the music’s evolution. Specifically, djent can be regarded as a standalone post-digital form, whose musical identity, while founded upon key metal tropes (such as the distorted power chord riff), is at the same time uniquely the product of its practitioners’ engagement with digital tools and the musical aesthetics these engender. In particular, this can be seen in the centrality of digital amp modelling software and programmed drums to djent’s sonic identity, and more generally in the DAW-engendered electronic music traits that can be detected in many djent recordings. Robert Strachan, recognising this fact, has gone so far as to conclude that djent is an example of a ‘cyber-genre’, whose characteristics are ‘simultaneously resultant from, and reflective of, the contexts of digitization’, and to which the ‘widespread availability of computer-based production technologies’ is integral.⁴⁵ Where recent metal music is concerned, this description is not applicable only to djent, but also to the music of many contemporary metal-oriented artists, whose output in various ways reflects the consequences of the new digital tools for genre-situated musical practice. It is a relevant perspective, for example, on the work of Genghis Tron, whose use of Ableton Live facilitated their stark metal-EDM fusions in the mid-2000s, and Igorrr (Gautier Serre), an architect of ‘cybergrind’, whose accomplished death metal pedigree was radically re-contextualised through DAW-based micro-edited genre mash-ups.⁴⁶ It is also applicable to the work of veteran metal artists Korn, who on their album The Path of Totality (released in 2011, hence coincident with djent’s emergence into the mainstream) purposefully re-aligned their metal outlook with the emerging North American dubstep scene, necessitating the radical re-thinking of their idiom through the paradigm of the DAW.⁴⁷ These, together with djent, illustrate the ways in which metal, like many other forms of late twentieth-century popular music, has inevitably become implicated in new forms of post-digital musical practice in which genre constructs appear to have become largely redundant.

Genre is complicated. Musical genres at once seem intuitive, yet any closer examination of them yields contradictions and uncertainties. Disagreements inevitably arise surrounding genre labels, boundaries, levels of generality, properties, connotations, chronologies, and any other tangible evidence that genres exist in a meaningful way. Despite these traps, genre categories continue to facilitate communication as much as confuse it and, as much as musicians may insist on not being funnelled into them, there remains a pervasive fascination with them among anyone who wishes to make sense of music. Rather than do away with genre, or strive to demarcate its details with increasingly Herculean taxonomies, I have found that the most meaningful discussions of musical categories tease out the sometimes counterintuitive ways that they behave in practice. How do genres come to exist? How do they compare with one another? Why are some relationships between genres and texts more complicated than others? This chapter aims to introduce readers to debates about musical genres through a historiographical study of metalcore, a particularly slippery genre term and thus an instructive one.

My understanding of metalcore (a genre portmanteau of ‘[heavy] metal’ and ‘hardcore [punk]’) differs somewhat from other authors, whose historical narratives and timelines will be outlined further below. For one, I understand it to be an umbrella category that encompasses other genre terms such as the New Wave of American Heavy Metal (widely abbreviated NWOAHM), screamo and deathcore. As Lewis Kennedy has shown,¹ many metalcore enthusiasts separate these categories entirely or assign the term metalcore to different repertories covering different time periods than I do. I treat metalcore as an umbrella term that combines those subtypes because they overlap somewhat in style traits and audience demographics, and because they have comparable reception histories. With reception history in mind, I view metalcore as an especially challenging example of what I call an abject genre of metal music.²

To introduce readers to this concept, my chapter begins with an overview of commonalities that metalcore shares with other abject genres. It then outlines diverse historical accounts by other authors to argue for a more complex view of chronological and conceptual boundaries than an individual narrative might allow. Finally, an analysis of Currents’ ‘Silence’ (2017) provides an example of metalcore as an amalgamation of stylistic qualities from multiple sources, following Kennedy.³ This chapter demonstrates the utility of abject genres as a concept for understanding metalcore from multiple angles. Using metalcore as a particularly challenging case study in genre historiography, it argues that metalcore’s complexity as a genre can teach broad lessons about genre in popular music.

Metalcore as an Abject Genre Category

Setting aside momentarily what abjection entails, abject genres may be thought of as categories of metal music that are frequently viewed with suspicion by metal fans as inauthentic imitations of ‘real’ metal, which gain popularity as fashionable trends. Moreover, in their derision of these genres, fans tend to invoke groups of people who face discrimination in the metal scene and broader society.⁴ Thus, abject genres involve several key concepts that reveal aesthetic beliefs within the metal scene and socio-political relations between fans. These concepts and their associated traits are summarised in Table 20.1.

A time dimension subtends an abject genre’s emergence and fall from popularity. While, in practice, this is more complicated than simply assigning a chronological start and end date to a genre, rough timeframes of decades do align with the three major instances that I argue characterise metal history since the 1980s: glam metal during the 1980s, nu metal during the 1990s, and metalcore during the 2000s. These may each be thought of as moments in time when certain styles of metal gained mass popularity with audiences that may not otherwise listen to metal. Such popularity draws a well-documented suspicion amongst metal fans towards the apparent inauthenticity of mass commerce.¹⁰ While a full exploration of this value system lies outside the scope of this chapter, it is common among fans of more traditional forms of metal to perceive abject genres, like metalcore, as a diluted misinterpretation of metal’s stylistic codes by non-fans.

Stylistically, abject genres are frequently dismissed as simplified metal with an exaggerated gimmick. All three instances involve verse-chorus forms that fit within a radio-friendly four-minute format. Nu metal eliminated guitar solos while exaggerating downtuned guitars for groove-driven riffs. That is, while bands like Pantera were routinely lowering their tunings by as much as one-and-a-half steps, nu metal bands like Korn added a seventh string to accommodate tunings as low as a perfect fifth below standard tuning. Metalcore, especially deathcore, became known for its ‘breakdown’ sections that conventionalised the slowed sections that thrash and death metal bands had explored in the late 1980s to early 1990s¹¹ and that Suffocation had especially developed in the early 1990s for death metal.¹² In contrast to the chromatically shifting power chords of Suffocation’s breakdowns, deathcore breakdowns nearly dispense with pitch changes altogether, emphasising rhythm, sometimes on a single, low open guitar string. In a particularly extreme example, ‘Word of Intulo’ (2011) by Emmure is a breakdown-like track that consists entirely of a single note for over a minute. Despite exhibiting multiple forms of rhythmic complexity – syncopations, hemiolas, cross rhythms, motivic extensions – it has been mocked over YouTube by fans who sarcastically cover it with apathetic expressions and provide ‘guitar tablatures’ consisting of strings of zeros. While such covers are done affectionately by fans of deathcore, the punchline about apparent simplicity draws from the same critiques made by its detractors.

A lyrical dimension can be observed that unifies each of the abject genres in opposition to other forms of metal. As I have shown in more detail elsewhere, this difference can be thought of as a split between heavy metal’s traditional emphasis on supernatural themes and abject genres’ emphasis on quotidian lyrics.¹³ While Iron Maiden’s ‘The Number of the Beast’ (1982) epitomises heavy metal’s fantastical lyrical imagery, glam metal band Poison’s ‘Nothin’ but a Good Time’ (1988) focuses its fantasy escape around themes of everyday life. In contrast to the black metal lyrics of Emperor’s ‘I am the Black Wizards’ (1993), Korn’s ‘Faget’ (1994) presents its audiences with relatable nu metal lyrics about high-school bullying. The death metal lyrics of Hate Eternal’s ‘Two Demons’ (2005), rife with archaisms (‘reveal thyself’) and references to ‘beings’ and ‘souls’, cultivates a decidedly supernatural feel compared to the NWOAHM band Lamb of God’s ‘Laid to Rest’ (2004), which depicts the potentially supernatural theme of a murder victim’s revenge with everyday slang. As Marcus Erbe notes in his analysis of male frustrations in deathcore lyrics, metalcore vocalists construct authenticity around their lyrics being expressions of personal experience¹⁴ in contrast to what Michelle Phillipov sees as a lack of personal identification in 1990s death metal lyrics.¹⁵ I have argued elsewhere that death metal vocalists do undergo a more figurative kind of identification in their physiological imitations of large beasts.¹⁶ One might infer then that this figurative identification with beasts would also apply to deathcore vocalists whose growls are similar to those used in death metal. However, lyrical differences between death metal and deathcore parallel how the two genres construct authenticity differently. And it is that difference between quotidian, personal identification and supernatural, figurative identification that generally distinguishes abject genres from more traditional forms of metal.

A social dimension characterises each of the abject genres, reflective of socio-political tensions within the metal scene. Glam metal, as Robert Walser’s pioneering study of gender-play within the style demonstrates, dealt with male anxieties towards women by appropriating the spectacle of androgyny to express control over women and rebel against dominant men.¹⁷ Nu metal incorporated musical and visual codes of Black cultures through its use of rap and DJ scratching from hip hop as well as its baggy clothes and visual celebration of commodities (i.e., jewellery, cars); dreadlocks became increasingly fashionable during the 1990s as worn by the members of Korn, Soulfly and Coal Chamber. Screamo, whose loose status as a ‘-core’ genre can be seen in derisive nicknames like ‘Christcore’,¹⁸ bears a connection to the demographic category of teenage youth, as did nu metal with the nickname ‘mallcore’ (which is sardonically gendered as well). In music journalism of the 2000s and retrospective writings more currently, one finds screamo (and its root term ‘emo’) associated with terms like ‘scene kids’ that accompany fashion stereotypes associated with dark, asymmetrical hairstyles, black eyeliner and Myspace selfies.¹⁹ Thus, in their criticisms of why they find abject genres uncool, metal fans frequently invoke subtle antagonisms towards three categories of identity: women, racial Blackness and teenage youth. Tensions around these demographics reflect continuing forms of discrimination broadly found within the metal scene and are an important reason why I unify those genres with the descriptor ‘abject’.

Abjection, a concept analysed in Julia Kristeva’s The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, refers to something unknown and threatening that provokes disgust and terror.²⁰ While its literal manifestation might lie in various forms of human waste, the urge it provokes to destroy it can be transferred psychically to social entities such as threatening demographics of people, upsetting kinds of discourses, or troubling categories of music. Intense discomfort, essentially, is the experience of abjection, coupled with the need to obliterate it and rid oneself of the threat. Such an explanation may bring to mind some of the darkest examples, such as mass genocides and hate crimes. Indeed, as metal studies have shown during the past two decades,²¹ serious forms of discrimination continue to affect the global metal scene, and the ways that abject genres are denigrated within fan discourses is one useful window into those often subtle prejudices.

Historiography of Metalcore

As one might expect with any genre of popular music, authors have presented conflicting accounts of what the term metalcore means. In some ways, acknowledging this diversity of accounts is almost a historiographical truism, not merely because different authors inevitably harbour different subjective viewpoints. More subtly, it also relates to the unstable ways in which genres emerge. As one finds with hard rock and heavy metal during the 1970s – terms that were used inconsistently and interchangeably at the time – authors writing about metalcore during its emergence write about it differently than those writing a decade or more later. But even speaking of an emergence of metalcore, as though such a time reference exists within a stable time frame, oversimplifies the history of the term. Any time frame, such as the one I provisionally gave above, will conflict with some accounts that give other dates. A bounded numerical range like 2004–2007 also simplifies chronological boundaries, not merely because one might debate whether a point of origin ought to be placed at 2003 or 2004, but also because genres, as a rule, do not emerge from the head of Medusa without precedent. Rather, they gradually coalesce in a process of discursive iteration and citation. That is, with every new iteration – such as a recording, concert review, rock interview and conversation among fans – the existence of a genre category becomes cited and re-cited, and thus more recognisable. This process occurs inconsistently over long or short spans of time, more in certain spaces (geographical, subcultural, discursive) than others, and variously among different agents (e.g., fans, critics and musicians) who engage with music in sometimes separate ways with differing levels of intensity. As a result of this rather chaotic soup of communication, any historical origin must be stipulated with some arbitrariness and any time span necessarily represents an approximation.²²

While this is true of genre in general, metalcore is especially messy. To begin with, the term itself suggests hybridity and points to its roots in speed metal and hardcore punk, known in combination during the mid-1980s as ‘crossover’.²³ Ian Christe, a music journalist writing in 2003, frames metalcore as being interchangeable with crossover: ‘in 1987 most new names played a cross-pollinated S.O.D.-style hybrid called metalcore, or simply crossover’.²⁴ Each of the examples he lists comes from the 1980s, an early chronological focus that fits the relatively early date of his publication. More so than authors writing in the late 2000s and in contrast to those of the 2010s, Christe’s perspective took place when metalcore was beginning to be recognised in the form that later authors know it. In other words, the emergence of the NWOAHM and its growing popularity as an abject subgenre (i.e., broadly popular, yet suspect in the metal scene for that popularity) would likely have seemed to be a curious but vague development at the time of writing. However, one does get a fascinating glimpse at Christe’s view of these bands in his afterword, where he intriguingly positions a wide range of 2000s metalcore as an authentic antidote to inauthentic pop punk. For Christe, the ‘new breed metalcore scene’ – represented by the more melodic strand of Himsa, Freya, (early) Poison the Well; and the more aggressive strand of Hatebreed and Converge – functions as a response to pop punk in the same way that 1980s crossover bands rebelled against glam metal (‘hair metal’ for Christe) in the mid-1980s.²⁵ The inauthentic status of an abject genre, it is clear, is relative to the observer.

Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman’s Definitive Oral History of Metal gives a precise time range for metalcore (1992–2006) and mentions a start date for deathcore (2007).²⁶ Such an account indicates that they view the genre terms as separate categories, ones that have a historiographical relationship of chronological succession. In Wiederhorn and Turman’s oral history, metalcore ends as deathcore takes its place. Like Christe above, Wiederhorn and Turman trace the history of these genres back to crossover in the 1980s, providing an end date for that music in 1992, the same year that they state metalcore begins.

Another notable aspect of their history is their framing of subgenre tributaries. Their chapter on metalcore begins by alerting readers to how metalcore cannot simply be a combination of metal and hardcore punk but rather should be viewed as a collection of influences, among them ‘American post-punk and noise-rock’, as well as ‘avant-garde prog rock, straight-edge, and/or screamo’.²⁷ For Wiederhorn and Turman, then, these subgenres represent related influences but not metalcore proper. Rather than debate whether these subgenres belong inside or outside metalcore, a better point might be to acknowledge the porousness of genre boundaries in general and observe how Wiederhorn and Turman’s account reveals the richness of different subgenres that make metalcore a complex concept. Certain subgenres may seem more centrally relevant to metalcore, depending on one’s vantage point: straight-edge might seem most pertinent if one views metalcore in terms of lifestyle and attitude, American post-punk might seem more related than avant-garde prog rock if one thinks chronologically and geographically with the NWOAHM in mind (more on that below), and from a reception standpoint of abject genres, screamo appears most targeted for ridicule, which is why my earlier work on abject genres treats it as a subgenre of metalcore.²⁸

Lewis Kennedy’s research on metalcore represents the most theoretically sophisticated and complete account of the genre to date. An expert on its bands and recordings as a fan and musician, his dissertation²⁹ and publications related to it³⁰ synthesise research on hardcore punk and metal and offer compelling historical narratives that take current genre theory into account. One of his arguments is that metal and hardcore punk exist in a symbiotic relationship. Despite uneasy tensions existing for decades between fans and musicians devoted to one tradition or the other, Kennedy observes that metal and punk are ‘very difficult to separate from one another’ due to their reliance ‘upon one another for continued influence and inspiration’,³¹ and that factions from within both traditions continuously fail to. Some genre purists within hardcore attempt to resist what they see as the stylistic dilution of hardcore within hybrid styles like crossover and metalcore. Thus, he cites the members of hardcore band Madball affirming their allegiance to hardcore in their lyrics and titles.³² This gatekeeping by hardcore fans and musicians mirrors similar discourses among metal fans.³³ From both sides, metalcore is viewed with suspicion in a futile attempt to police the mixing of styles and ideologies. It is also against that suspicion that crossover and metalcore bands – metalcore positioned as potentially the ‘spiritual successor of crossover’ – construct a narrative of themselves as struggling in opposition to genre purists.³⁴

The other important argument Kennedy makes is that metalcore became recognisable in its present form due to a stylistic process he calls codification, involving the so-called New Wave of American Heavy Metal. A loose nod to the more widely known NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal), the NWOAHM is a subgenre of metal that emerged in popularity around 2004. It combined stylistic traits taken from melodic death metal, thrash metal and groove-oriented bands like Pantera with the tough, no-nonsense sensibilities (e.g., titles and band names, ideals of authenticity) and quotidian lyrics of hardcore punk. In a way suited to its awkward acronym, the NWOAHM was only loosely recognised as an emerging style, debated by fans and critics as to its significance. The codification taking place is the retrospectively recognisable process of moving from an initially loose observation that comparable bands like Lamb of God, Shadows Fall and Killswitch Engage were gaining popularity towards a ‘reification of certain elements of style and the simultaneous diminution of others’.³⁵ Kennedy cites how writers around 2005 were including the odd time signatures and non-standard song forms of The Dillinger Escape Plan as representative of metalcore, while later authors such as Wiederhorn and Turman exclude those as precursor traits.³⁶ Gradually, the most recognisable musical features of metalcore became breakdowns, riffs influenced by melodic death metal, high-fidelity production and clean singing alternating with vocal roars (a distorted style communicative of quotidian anger more than the inhuman stylisations of death metal grunts). The codification of these traits, I would argue, stylistically unites subgenres like deathcore, screamo and the NWOAHM, which is another reason why I treat metalcore as an umbrella term.

The Sound of Metalcore

‘Silence’ (2017), a song by the metalcore band Currents, offers an example of metalcore understood in its post-codified sense, as an exemplar of narrowed stylistic traits,³⁷ as well as its abject sense, as a mixture of genre markers associated with different abject subgenres. Some of these markers are extramusical and exemplify the lyrical divide between the supernatural themes of extreme metal and the quotidian themes of metalcore. According to an interview with vocalist Brian Wille, the lyrics of ‘Silence’ focus on the relatable, everyday theme of different pressures he and his fans might encounter in life:

In ways seldom encountered in death and black metal lyrics, ‘Silence’ is thus partly autobiographical and, if the nod to parents is significant, relatable to a youth audience. This aspect bears emphasis when speaking of metalcore as an abject genre. Much scholarship on metal treats the music as an emblem of youth cultures.³⁹ Rarely is youth discussed in metal scholarship as a target for discrimination.

Musically, the song contains all the elements of metalcore cited by Kennedy: ‘the combination of clean and distorted vocals, high-fidelity, polished production, and a clear influence from melodic death metal’.⁴⁰ That clear influence is partially found in the verse-chorus song form shown in Table 20.2. Familiar verse-chorus song structures are, as I have shown,⁴¹ one of the features of melodic death metal that contribute to its reputation for being ‘melodic’, or musically accessible. Another influence from melodic death metal can be heard in some of the song’s diatonic guitar riffs that focus on higher-register melodic figurations (Figures 20.1a, 20.1b).

Figure 20.1a Melodic figuration during the first verse (0:20)

(© Eric Smialek)

Figure 20.1b Melodic figuration during Breakdown 1 (2:03)

(© Eric Smialek)

Looking at other features in Kennedy’s quote above, the song’s use of clean and distorted vocals demarcates the change from screamed verse to sung chorus, changing the mood from frustration to vulnerable, emotive reflection. Such introspection, and the characteristic shifts in song form that accommodate it, are strong markers of related abject subgenres like screamo and nu metal.⁴² When combined with a second-person lyrical address, screamed and sung settings dramatise romantic conflict, emotional exasperation and intensity with a highly personal feel. Indeed, all of those things can be heard at the pivotal, stop-time moment that ends the song’s bridge at 3:29 and acts as a pickup to the final breakdown section. At this moment, the accompaniment stops to emphasise the roared words, ‘f**k you, I’m moving on!’. This is the kind of direct, quotidian catharsis that I argue is generally antithetical to extreme metal and more traditional forms of metal centred around supernatural or mythological themes. Even the obsession with murder found in death metal tends towards exaggerated, ‘brutal’ violence rather than personal, relatable disputes.

Lastly, the song does indeed boast a hi-fi, polished production with a careful mix of sounds, balanced throughout different registers and skilfully varied for rhetorical effect as the song moves through different sections.

Perhaps the most dramatic instance of this rhetorical effect comes in the song’s two breakdown sections. In metalcore, the breakdown represents a song’s sectional climax,⁴³ the peak of a song understood as a sectional plateau rather than a brief instance. Breakdowns represent moments of climactic contrast during a song that emphasise slower tempos and unison rhythmic playing between the guitars and kick drums while vocals perform independently of the rhythmic groove. In his article devoted to exploring the breakdown and its varied meanings in twenty-first-century metal, Steven Gamble explains that breakdowns serve a communal and cathartic function during live shows, when vocalists sometimes create anticipation for them during stage banter and prompt fans to mosh extra hard when they happen.⁴⁴ To demonstrate their primacy for fans, Gamble points to the significance of online curatorial collections of breakdowns extracted from their song contexts in ‘best-of’ compilations. As Gamble notes, ‘no such curatorial practice exists around the best metalcore verses’ or other metalcore song sections, demonstrating that ‘it is clearly the breakdown which constitutes the climax and key section of [metalcore] tracks’.⁴⁵ He observes that fans in YouTube comment sections provide time stamps for breakdowns, singling out those sections for discussion.⁴⁶ In fact, according to YouTube’s ‘most replayed’ feature, the most replayed moment of ‘Silence’ is the beginning of Breakdown 2 at 3:30, about which I will say more further below.⁴⁷

While the breakdown normally functions similarly to the bridge section of a verse-chorus song, that is, as a contrasting section two-thirds of the way through the song, it is arguably even more prominent in ‘Silence’. Here, two breakdowns occur in important places, midway through the song and at the end, each punctuating the end of a verse-chorus grouping. One significance of this double appearance is that the song breaks from its usual atmosphere twice to rhetorically intensify the song. In other words, what happens during these sections is marked for semiotic importance because fans recognise that breakdowns are meant to be extra heavy. The other aspect of significance is that the song’s two separate breakdowns draw their semiotic codes from different subgenres – nu metal, melodic death metal, NWOAHM and djent – providing an opportunity to analyse how codes from different subgenres can operate within the same song and contribute to metalcore in similar ways.

The first breakdown is quite representative of the kinds of deathcore breakdowns that gained popularity in the mid-to-late 2000s. Like the Emmure track ‘Word of Intulo’ mentioned above, the beginning of the breakdown distils the guitar to a single low pitch (or power chord) that stutters through a syncopated rhythm (Figure 20.2).⁴⁸ This is the characteristic, low open-string approach to breakdowns in deathcore in contrast to the shifting power chords of earlier precedents in the 1990s.⁴⁹ That reduction in pitch activity focuses attention on rhythm and creates a jarring, strobe-like effect through the guitar’s syncopations. Even though there is plenty of musical activity throughout, the breakdown is arranged in such a way as to make time feel like it has slowed. If one measures tempo through snare pacing on beats two and four, the breakdown occurs in half-time relative to the previous chorus. That contrast between sections is further dramatised through the impact of the breakdown’s initial downbeat. Heard best with headphones, it involves a diving low pitch, likely made by a drum trigger, which makes the power of the downbeat linger until the syncopations take over on beat two. That combination of half-time and an explosive downbeat that lingers through a pitch descent creates the extra slow, weighty feel of the breakdown conducive to moshing.

Figure 20.2 Single-note, syncopated rhythm Breakdown 1 (1:46)

(© Eric Smialek)

Some genre markers further colour the atmosphere of this breakdown as well. The middle-register melodic pull-offs heard near the end of the breakdown (2:03) suggest an influence from melodic death metal, typical of the NWOAHM. The minor-second dissonances that serve as a pickup to the initial downbeat and that recur as a momentary slide (1:50; see also the later instance marked ‘loco’ in Figure 20.3) and as a background effect (1:55) recall the aesthetic of affliction characteristic of nu metal bands like Slipknot and Korn before them. The voice as well carries signifiers of genre through the roared vocals heard in the verse. Its appearance in the breakdown continues the earlier alternation between intensity (verse roars) and introspection (chorus singing) typical of metalcore. In this particular breakdown, one can even hear a simultaneous contrast between the more lyrically decipherable roars of metalcore and the less decipherable growls of death metal partway through (1:55), useful for comparing the two vocal styles.

Figure 20.3 Markers of djent during the second breakdown (3:30)

(© Eric Smialek)

The second breakdown, which ends the song, involves a similar punctuation of the downbeat and stuttering low guitar, much like the first breakdown. However, here one can hear markers of djent, arguably a newer abject subgenre that emerged following deathcore at the beginning of the 2010s.⁵⁰ Djent, a genre term that onomatopoetically imitates the sound of its guitars, focuses on rhythmic and metric complexity, influenced by the style traits of the progressive metal band Meshuggah, its progenitor. Like Meshuggah, djent bands eschew power chords in favour of single-note riffs around one octave below standard tuning. This extra-low pitch makes an appearance in the second breakdown of ‘Silence’ and is perhaps most noticeable in the slow, Meshuggah-like bend at 3:39 (see Figure 20.3). Djent sounds in the second breakdown not only contribute to the section’s sense of heaviness but also continue earlier instances where the genre can be heard: the clean-tone introduction is reminiscent of djent/progressive-metal band Animals as Leaders’ ‘CAFO’ (2009); the first verse (0:17) also involves the extra low E, which provides it with a djent feel; the muted rhythm guitar during Chorus A (0:37) also resembles Meshuggah.

Finally, the rap-like delivery of the roars in Verse 2 (0:59) and Chorus B (1:22) suggests the influence of nu metal; and the gang vocals – collective shouting (or singing in this case) to accent particular lyrics – that occur in Chorus B (1:18) recall conventions from hardcore punk.

All of these strong markers of different genres mix together to reveal how metalcore in 2017 had assimilated numerous earlier styles. Most notably, with the exception of the gang vocals from hardcore punk, each of these styles could be said to come from abject subgenres. Thus, stylistically, as well as lyrically – and sartorially as a glance at the band’s short haircuts and skinny jeans will show – Currents break from the generic conventions of metal in ways that better suit metalcore, understood broadly as a combination of multiple abject subgenres.

Conclusion

This chapter has provided a condensed overview of metalcore in terms of genre theory, historiography and musical style. I began with some theoretical observations about genre in general, noting that metalcore represents an especially tangled instance of genre that can be instructive for learning about popular music genres more broadly. The notion of an ‘abject genre’ served as a conceptual lens throughout the chapter, necessitating an extended review of how metalcore fits within a decades-long, ongoing history of abject genres in metal. One of the reasons why that frame is pedagogically helpful is that it foregrounds the importance of nuance and uncertainty in historiography. Questions of what counts as an abject genre and what time frames apply to an example naturally arise when investigating trends in mass popularity, and their answers tend to be more elusive the closer one’s example gets to the present. More than other abject genres, metalcore has proven to be slippery for assigning dates and delimiting what subgenres count within it as an umbrella category. While I have stipulated some provisional answers – namely NWOAHM, screamo and deathcore for subcategories and a terminus post quem of 2003 or 2004 – a closer examination of other authors’ historiographies reveals those answers to be one among several narratives. Indeed, those authors have unique explanations for how the above subgenres relate to metalcore historically: Kennedy views the NWOAHM as codifying metalcore during the mid-2000s, and Wiederhorn and Turman view deathcore separately from metalcore, suggesting an upper limit around 2006, just prior to deathcore’s early popularity. The advent of djent at the end of the 2000s may be another upper limit, depending on whether one sees a shift taking place at that time, from metalcore to djent, comparable to the shift that took place during the early 2000s from nu metal to metalcore. Arguably, in both instances, metal fans redirected their suspicions from one ‘inauthentic’ trend to similarly dismissing the newer one that replaced it in mass popularity.

My analysis of ‘Silence’ reveals a musical side to that possibility by exploring a track that involves both the stylistic features of metalcore and some djent traits within the same song. Within the span of a single track, one can hear multiple markers of abject genres: a verse-chorus format within a radio-friendly timespan, breakdown sections, lyrics involving introspection and vulnerability, rap-like vocal delivery reminiscent of nu metal, melodic guitar riffs that were central to the NWOAHM’s codification of metalcore, and markers of djent in multiple sections. Taken together, these features demonstrate metalcore’s assimilation of earlier metal styles, especially traits associated with other abject genres.

Throughout, I argued for reasons why I conceive of metalcore as an umbrella term and an example of what I call ‘abject genres’. Those reasons involve key intersections with other abject metal subgenres, detailed throughout the chapter, and key differences between metalcore and more traditional forms of metal. Importantly, those observations are not limited to musical sound but extend to traits such as lyrical subject matter, sartorial fashions and sometimes implied audience demographics. While the scope of this chapter does not permit a thorough investigation of fan statements, reception studies reveal that their discussions of genre and value judgment are frequently framed with categories of identity.⁵¹ It is this broad range of observations – musical, lyrical, sartorial, verbal/discursive – that reveals the social importance of abject genres as a concept. My application of the term is not meant to be a personal value judgment about metalcore but rather a recognition of metalcore’s turbulent reception within the broader metal community.