A Subjective History of Deathcore
I’ve been dividing metalheads into categories a lot in this series, but that’s mostly because metalheads love being categorized. Here’s my latest theory: there are basically two kinds of heavy music enthusiasts. The first are the people who secretly believe they would’ve been classical composers in another century if only the lute had more distortion because they can shred a little (or think that they can). They care about scales, tempo changes, and playing the kind of riffs that require ergonomic wrist braces.
The second group just wants to watch the world burn in drop C. They’re not looking for obliteration rather than aesthetic transcendence. It goes without saying that I belong firmly to the latter camp, though I maintain a kind of anthropological fondness for the former, the same way you might feel about an intense cousin who only shows up twice a year but always brings weed, fireworks and questionable life advice.
But the aforementioned cousin kind of hates us. He especially hates our spazzy, overdramatic little brother (the one who calls himself deathcore) because he sees him as self-important, under-skilled, and tragically convinced that chugging on the low string is a personality.
Like most ideological conflicts in metal, this one isn’t all that mysterious. It comes down to two things: 1) deathcore is simpler, more visceral, and explicitly designed for people who view the mosh pit as a form of emotional literacy, something the garage-dwelling death metal virtuoso fundamentally distrusts and 2) there’s a generational gap that evolved into a full-blown cultural one. Deathcore kids were raised on hardcore, which was raised on hip-hop sensibility, which means their entire sense of rhythm and rebellion operates on a different frequency.
You can’t mistake a death metal show for a deathcore show. They don’t even feel like the same planet, more like two species of heavy music that share a common ancestor but evolved on opposite ends of the evolutionary tree. And that evolution happened FAST.
But it didn’t happen overnight. Changes were already percolating in the scene years before Job for a Cowboy’s Doom crashed-landed on MySpace in 2005 like a pig-squealing UFO. It just happened to be the first time the internet collectively pointed at something brutal and said, “Wait, wait, wait… what is this?”
So here we are: my entirely subjective, questionably scientific, and probably unnecessary history of deathcore.
Caveman Riffs and The Prehistory of Deathcore
The underlying idea behind deathcore can be traced to one place : New York.
Without the New York death metal scene, deathcore probably never would’ve crawled out of the primordial soup (or, at least, not under the form we know today). And that death metal scene, in turn, owed a blood debt to New York hardcore. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, you had guys from Suffocation and Internal Bleeding sharing the same air and sometimes the same venues with the Cro-Mags and Merauder crowd.
There was a mutual recognition between two breeds of dudes who lifted weights in different ways. Hardcore started going metal a little, death metal started going hardcore a little in their own way and somewhere in the middle they invented a sound that could only exist in a city where confrontation was a daily form of cardio. The groove crept in. The breakdown became ritual. Violence got rhythm.
None of these guys invented the breakdown (Slayer technically did), but they turned it into a design feature. It stopped being an occasional punctuation mark and became a structural pillar, like adding a porch to a house just so you can throw people off it and they clearly had fun doing it.
Meanwhile, down in Baltimore, Dying Fetus were busy turning death metal into something mid-paced, bouncy, and strangely danceable if your idea of dancing involves imaginary homicide. What they played was still unmistakably death metal, but it hinted at a universe of unexplored possibilities. They were foundational to what would become deathcore.
Fun fact: while researching this piece, I realized my favorite Dying Fetus track (maybe my favorite death metal song, period) Grotesque Impalement came from their 1993 demo. The 2000 EP is a rerecording. Turns out the glorious caveman energy is just the sound of a bunch of kids figuring out what the hell they’re doing. The surgical solos and absurd technicality came later. The groove, the dumb, brilliant, body-moving groove was there from day one.
The other crucial building block of deathcore is… well, metalcore. Duh. It had a decade-long head start, and by the time deathcore arrived, the culture had already split into something resembling a self-sustaining ecosystem , one with its own codes, fashion, and physical gestures. Hardcore dancing wasn’t just tolerated; it was celebrated to the point that songs were practically structured around when you’d want to punch the floor.
This didn’t happen overnight. In the ’90s, bands like Integrity, Starkweather, Earth Crisis, and even Converge pushed hardcore punk energy to its breaking point. They were still hardcore kids, but ones who wanted to do more than just tell you how to live your life, they wanted to make you feel it, preferably through complex time signatures and a permanent neck injury.
And, as I’ve pointed out before in this series, once metalcore was invented, it immediately turned into an arms race. Everyone kept upping the ante , faster, heavier, meaner , until the only logical outcome was deathcore: the genre that finally asked, “What if we stopped pretending this was about veganism and whatnot?”
…And Then There Was Despised Icon, Then Job For A Cowboy, Then Suicide Silence After That.
Innovation came again from the Great White North.
The word deathcore didn’t technically exist in 2002, but Montreal’s own Despised Icon were busy reverse-engineering it anyway. What they created wasn’t a total break from death metal, more like a mutation. They took Quebec’s long-standing obsession with technical brutality and added an element of chaos that felt new, almost mischievous. Two singers , originally Steve Marois and Marie-Hélène Landry, trading off gutturals and screams like dueling narrators in a horror movie.
The riffs were twisty, the tempo shifts were disorienting, and the breakdowns were no longer optional punctuation marks. They were the reason you showed up. Sometimes there were two or three per song, as if to prove a philosophical point about excess: if one breakdown feels good, more must feel awesome.
In 2004 , a full year before Job for a Cowboy hijacked everyone’s eardrums , drummer Alex Erian stepped up to replace Marie-Hélène Landry on vocals and gave Despised Icon the cleaner, more elastic death-metal-and-hardcore texture they’re known for today. When they’re firing on all cylinders, they sound like what I imagine a collaboration between Dying Fetus and Madball would if the aforementioned collab happened inside a haunted subterranean parking lot. And that’s why I love them. Maybe it’s hometown bias, but Despised Icon has been my favorite deathcore band since, well… basically forever.
But 2005, and Job for a Cowboy’s Doom, was another inception point. No one had heard anything like that until then. Johnny Davy’s vocals weren’t just guttural; they were acrobatic, feral, almost performatively inhuman. He wasn’t the first frontman to make pig squeals into a microphone, but he was the first to own it so unabashedly, spreading those squeals over every track like a toddler let loose with a jar of peanut butter. The song structures were chaotic, the percussion felt improvised, and the breakdowns appeared out of nowhere like spontaneous acts of vandalism. It was music engineered to fuck shit up.
Deathcore still wasn’t cool, but Doom made it undeniable, it became a thing, capital T, italics implied. Job for a Cowboy pivoted toward progressive death metal soon after, but by then the damage was done. They’d crystallized a sound and an identity. Kids congregated on MySpace, half in awe and half in confusion, realizing they’d stumbled upon a new way to rebel against the established order of extreme metal, a form so excessive it made death metal sound almost like parent music.
Then they started pouring out like zombies through the city gates: As Blood Runs Black, All Shall Perish, Carnifex, Whitechapel, Chelsea Grin, Bring Me the Horizon (yes, that Bring Me the Horizon), I Declare War, Gallows for Grace, Jerome. Anybody remember Jerome? They were basically high-school kids writing music heavier than anything you or I were listening to back then, which was a very MySpace deathcore era thing to happen.
All these bands had one thing in common: they hadn’t quite figured out who they were until they heard Despised Icon and Job for a Cowboy. Suddenly, there was a blueprint: chaos as discipline, breakdowns as dogma. And from that horde, one group clawed its way to the top. The most important band of this generation, the one that made deathcore cool was, without question, Suicide Silence.
With frontman Mitch Lucker and their 2008 debut The Cleansing, Suicide Silence turned deathcore into a full-blown cultural happening. Not for the popular kids, they were never invited, but for the actual cool kids. The ones who went to shows you don’t believe really exist, who seemed to live exclusively between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., sustained by energy drinks and existential dread.
Lucker wasn’t just a phenomenal vocalist; he was a charisma monster. As a person, he embodied everything deathcore wanted to project : danger, intensity, a strange mix of self-loathing and self-mythology. If Will Ramos has the gravitas today, Lucker had the spark. He wasn’t just the frontman of a band; for a few years, he was the face of an entire youth culture. When he died in a motorcycle accident in 2012, deathcore lost its first real icon before it ever had time to grow old enough to feel embarrassed about itself.
Although bands like Carnifex, Whitechapel, and Winds of Plague managed to drag deathcore into adulthood, Mitch’s death hit like a blackout. The scene dimmed almost overnight. The survivors adjusted,adding more death metal, a little groove, sometimes even a whiff of radio sensibility (hello Our Endless War). For a while, it felt like deathcore was a closed chapter, something tethered to a specific youth movement destined to fade as its audience got jobs and back pain. But the ear-stretching, vein-popping vocal acrobats weren’t done yet. They had one more run in them.
Deathcore is for the Children
Deathcore never technically died off. Even Suicide Silence kept going after Mitch Lucker’s death, with Eddie Hermida from All Shall Perish stepping in to replace the irreplaceable as well as any mortal could. Then, in 2021, it came roaring back to the forefront of metal culture.
The catalyst for this second run was Lorna Shore, a New Jersey band that were midlisters at best until they brought in their third (well, technically fifth) frontman, Will Ramos. Tom Barber had left for Chelsea Grin, and CJ McCreery was fired after allegations of being a terrible boyfriend (which, if we’re honest, is a very deathcore kind of scandal). All that turnover cleared the ultracharismatic vocal mutant to redefine the genre.
His version of deathcore was operatic, bombastic, almost cinematic. Less a style of music than an escalation ritual, a competition to see who could make the craziest, most inhuman noises to the most ridiculous, digitally enhanced breakdowns and still call it a song. They call it blackened deathcore, I call it irresponsible artistic experiments and I mean it in a good way. Well, sort of.
Many of the old bands resurfaced and became more popular than ever. Chelsea Grin, Thy Art Is Murder (who are maybe my second or third favorite deathcore band), Oceano, The Acacia Strain, Fit For An Autopsy, all found new audiences in the streaming era. But the real story was the younger blood. Bands like Shadow of Intent, a Connecticut four-piece that always flirted with the border between deathcore and symphonic death metal, started foreshadowing what the genre would eventually become.
They redefined what it could sound like, making it bigger, grander, and more theatrical without losing its violent heart.
There also was a slew of new, younger bands influenced by nü metal like Slaughter to Prevail, Paleface Swiss, Left to Suffer, Brand of Sacrifice, and Mental Cruelty, all clearly raised on Slipknot and early Korn. If you can imagine Slipknot sounding even more jacked up than they already do, you can imagine what this nü deathcore sounds like. I know it sounds like a sexy proposition, but there’s something kind of fast-foody about it that rubs me the wrong way. It’s almost too much. You have to work your way up to your anger. Tell a story. Going full blast from cover to cover doesn’t hit the same for me.
Speaking of which, that leads me to what Lorna Shore, Shadow of Intent (and to a lesser degree Whitechapel) are doing now. I get why it works, the ambition, the bombast, the flex, but it also challenges the limit of what the hell a song even is. Sometimes it feels less like composition and more like a bunch of dudes trying to one-up one another in a contest to sound as insane as humanly possible. Listening to Lorna Shore can feel like a chore sometimes, let alone sitting through an entire album. How many nine-minute tracks with four breakdowns can you really survive before you start feeling sonic vertigo?
It’s seen as the blueprint for the future of deathcore, but blowing up breakdowns and vocal acrobatics like they’re pro wrestling spots isn’t a substitute for songwriting. I’m not sure what the future holds for deathcore, but I think it might have to pull back a little to hit harder again. By the way, I know I’ve dunked on Whitechapel a lot in this piece, but truthfully? I enjoy their music more than most of the bands I’ve named here.
Before I leave, here are five songs to better understand deathcore. At least from my perspective. It’s not the genre I’ve historically given the most attention to, so it was an interesting challenge to write about it:
Job For A Cowboy – Entombment of a Machine :The moment deathcore became a thing. The collective “oh, this is new.” This song brims with iconoclastic, youthful energy and bravado. It’s technical without being noodly, dramatic but ferocious. It launched an era.
Suicide Silence – No Pity for a Coward : This is where deathcore fully diverges from death metal, not just musically, but spiritually. The energy and lyrical focus are personal, visceral, raw in a way most metal acts shy away from. Songs like this are the lifeblood of an authentic connection with an audience.
Whitechapel – Let Me Burn : I don’t know if you could technically call this deathcore, but it’s just a great song. I owe Phil Bozeman this one after all the swipes earlier. It’s emotional, it’s mean, and it’s better than it needs to be.
Lorna Shore – To the Hellfire : The song that jolted an entire genre back to life. It would’ve been a great moment in extreme music even if the band didn’t immediately try to make everything sound bigger and crazier afterward. Still, it has a seriousness and gravitas that will outlast its imitators.
Thy Art Is Murder –Godlike : I could’ve gone with a newer Despised Icon song (they’re awesome), but Thy Art are a perfect example of a band that stayed the course while trends came and went. This sounds infinitely more interesting to me than the ultra-bombastic stuff dominating deathcore today.
* Follow me on Instagram and Bluesky to keep up with new posts *
