Metallic Hardcore: The Past, Present, and Future of Heavy Music by Ethan Whiteaker

Metallic Hardcore: The Past, Present, and Future of Heavy Music

Ethan Whiteaker

Modern heavy music has heavily influenced my enjoyment of music writ large. Some absolutely killer acts have been releasing music these past few years, and I wanted to shine a light on what is an underappreciated part of the heavy music scene. The genre: metal-influenced hardcore or, as I and many others like to say, metallic hardcore.

Metallic hardcore is deeply influenced by the beatdown hardcore of the 80s and 90s, but has the production style of modern metal. This distinction is important because modern heavy music has been vastly increasing in production quality over the last two decades. People like Will Putney, Ross Robinson, Paul Levitt, and Devin Townsend have all made a name for themselves in heavy music production and have helped to raise the industry standard for production. With this production quality boost came a great thing: more fusion between different styles of heavy music.

Heavy music has historically not been able to replicate their live sound within studio recordings. Technological difficulties with drop-tunings, gain overloading, and the general logistical problem of finding a producer who was able to do a half decent job with that style of music made creating a good studio sound difficult, but these problems are being fixed and even rendered almost obsolete in the modern era. New editions of common Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) and other music software, as well as industry-standard recording gear have been catching up to the heavy music scene and allowing the full spectrum of its music to be recorded.

With the notes on production out of the way, I can finally talk about the music itself. Metallic hardcore is heavily influenced by the hardcore punk tradition, featuring the lower drop-tunings of death metal and the -core subgenres. Drop-tunings themselves have been in music since the days of jazz and blues music, but they were exaggerated by the beatdown hardcore scene. Beatdown would eventually be combined with thrash to create metal, which gives metallic hardcore an almost circular history in its modern sonic landscape.

Image: Billy Bratton

Another facet of the modern metallic hardcore scene is the insistence of oldschool hardcore punk values such as the DIY-ethos and the supporting of other groups in the scene. This is part of what makes this new wave of hardcore so rooted in past music tradition. Looking forward to the future of heavy music in general, metallic hardcore is paving the way for more groups to follow a DIY-method of management while still making music that is produced just as any pop album is. Metallic hardcore is bridging the past, the present, and the future in a manner in which hasn’t been seen, since the grunge movement’s surge.

To talk about some specific bands you should check out, I highly recommend Knocked Loose–probably the most popular example of this subculture of the heavy music scene. Their albums have been produced by Will Putney of Fit For An Autopsy, and are some of the most heavy, raw sounding mixes a band could hope for. Their debut

album, Laugh Tracks, takes the beatdown sound of the past and infuses it with 808 type bass drops and the hardest pre-breakdown calls to come out of hardcore in the past decade. Their follow up album, A Different Shade of Blue, and latest EP, A Tear in the Fabric of Life, take this sound and continue in the band’s path of brutally cathartic lyrics with their fun beatdown riff-style. Knocked Loose fights a tradition of toxic masculinity present in past beatdown hardcore bands with emotionally vulnerable lyrics, and through their actions advocating for women’s centers with their merch drives. The modern metallic harcore scene’s fighting of previously imposed barriers for marginalized groups are part of what makes this scene so special. Knocked Loose is just one example of a band that is working to correct this scene’s troubled history.

Another band fighting the norms of beatdown and hardcore in general is Sharptooth. Their debut album, Clever Girl, is a politically charged whiplash focusing on themes of oppression and retaliation to said oppressors. Lead singer Lauren Kashan has gnarly screams and the stage presence of a 20 foot giant stomping through the woods as she runs across the stage. Her lyrics forge a connection with the audience that is unparalleled. This band is very underrated and needs more attention, so check them out if you like a more classic hardcore style that is infused with the modern beatdown type metallic hardcore. Some other related bands to check out are:

◆ Jesus Piece

(straight beatdown, politically charged lyrics)

◆ Code Orange

(more metalcore-ish)

◆ Great American Ghost

(brutal riffs, more beatdown)

◆ SeeYouSpaceCowboy (mathcore)

◆ Vein

(mathcore adjacent)

◆ Converge

(progenitors of modern mathcore type hardcore)

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