Beatdown / metallic hardcore
Growled or shrieked. Unintelligible without a lyric sheet. The thing most newcomers bounce off.
In short
Hardcore reduced to breakdowns and slow groove, with barked vocals and lyrics about loyalty and endurance.
How it sounds
- Slow, heavy riffing built entirely around the breakdown.
- Very low tunings with thick, matte guitar tone.
- Barked vocals with gang shouts and lyrics about loyalty, the street and endurance.
Hear what that means
- Two notes and the space between from 0:34
Hatebreed - Satisfaction Is the Death of Desire
The breakdown as the whole song, with the gaps doing as much work as the hits. Written for what a crowd does rather than for a listener.
Open on YouTube at 0:34 - New York hardcore, heavier
The scene's insistence that a record should function in a room, taken to its logical end.
Open on YouTube - Direct address from 2:04
Shouted as statement rather than as verse, with gang vocals arranged into the record on the key line.
Open on YouTube at 2:04
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Every second here is the uploader's own, read from the recording's tracklist.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 90-140 bpm
- Song length
- 2-3.5 min
- Tuning
- Drop tunings, and the guitars are frequently the least melodic instruments in this entire encyclopedia — two or three notes per riff is normal.
- Production
- Dry, heavy and mid-forward, mixed so the vocal and the guitar's chug arrive together. Nothing here is atmospheric.
- Written about
- Loyalty and betrayal, The street, Violence, Self-reliance
What each part is doing
- Guitar The breakdown as the whole song: syncopated palm-muted figures at half tempo, with the space between hits doing as much work as the hits.
- Bass Doubling exactly, loud, and providing the weight the sparse guitar riffs cannot supply alone.
- Drums Marking the syncopation with china cymbal and snare accents, and leaving the gaps the guitar drops into. The two are written together.
- Vocals Shouted or barked, delivered as direct address rather than as verse, with gang vocals on the key line.
What it isn't
That it is metalcore without the tunes. It comes from hardcore rather than from metal, and specifically from the New York scene's insistence that a record should function in a room — the arrangements are written for what a crowd does, which is a legitimate and quite specific design brief. Judging it as failed songwriting misses what it was written to do.
Told apart from
- Hardcore punk Beatdown is hardcore's heaviest and slowest wing, built around the mosh part rather than around speed.
- Metalcore Metalcore has melody, clean choruses and Gothenburg leads. Beatdown has none of those and keeps the breakdown.
- Slam death metal Slam is the death metal genre built on the same rhythmic idea, with gutturals instead of shouts.
- Youth crew / straight edge Youth crew invented the mosh part; beatdown is what happened when it swallowed the song and lost the positivity.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
In New York and New Jersey in the early 1990s, hardcore thickened until only the part that moves an audience was left. Hatebreed took the formula to platinum sales, with two-minute songs and motivational messages. It has the most direct ratio of music to physical movement in the tree.
Descended from
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Crust punk 2.2 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
- Noise rock 2.2 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim. These share no ancestor with it at all.