Metalcore

From a forum on death and black metal comes this amazingly accurate definition of metalcore

A post-metal genre which rejects the metal style of narrative composition for the post-hardcore style of intense unrelated diversity, borrowing riffs from rock, funk, jazz, metal, emo, punk and playing them in odd tempi and with abrupt changes.

Melodic metal with a lot of breakdowns, but most people lump so many different styles in with it that you can’t really say. Most of it (the stuff I call metalcore anyway) is gateway stuff, kind of the next step up from radio rock.

Metalcore today is something completely different, It still fuses Hardcore and Metal (General Metal, NOT Thrash).. But it has a modern twist on it and focuses on the "Post" aspects so it bearly resembles the early sounds of Metalcore.

What I mean is that bands like Earth Crisis and Strife started working with a thicker more metallic guitar sound, adding groove to their music and using (very striped down) metal style break downs. At the time people were calling it “metallic hardcore”. Those elements are mainly the parts of hardcore that survive in today’s metalcore.

You can't tell me that the trendcore bands of today are using breakdowns in the same manner and DM and thrash bands of the 80's and 90's.

Music that uses the metal skillset to write hardcore-style songs.

Metalcore takes the worst aspects of emo and nu-metal [not that there's many good aspects in the first place] and adds diluted melodic death metal with simple, radio-friendly riffs and catchy verse-chorus form.


melody + screams

melody + clean vox

chugging syncopation

sweep sweep sweep

chugging syncopation

back into melody + vocals

another breakdown

sweep sweep sweep


To me metalcore is just a bunch of newer bands with younger kids who know they have a very discriminating potential older audience who is versed in all the genres and the history of metal. As these youngsters create, they write with the aim to please absolutely fuckin' everybody within the same song. So in any given tune, i can hear Carcass/Arch Enemy, Pantera, Iron Maiden, Korn, Evanessance, Testament and Biohazard. All the genres are covered mostly and they think they've successfully blended them all to create a new style and therefore not only appease, but win over the elite. In other words, songs that make no fuckin' sense musically to those who think genres should maintain some boundaries within which one must operate.