Easycore
Sung and screamed. Clean singing and harsh vocals trade off, often chorus against verse.
In short
Pop punk with hardcore breakdowns glued into the middle. Sweet chorus, hammer at the end.
How it sounds
- Pop punk verses and choruses interrupted by a hardcore breakdown.
- Modern production with guitars tuned lower than in classic pop punk.
- Sung vocals alternating with short shouts.
Hear what that means
- The switch, mid-song
Four Year Strong - Rise or Die Trying
Pop punk octave hooks into a syncopated half-time breakdown within eight bars, with the bass following through both so it does not sound like two bands.
Open on YouTube - Two vocalists, two genres
Sung chorus and screamed breakdown, usually from different members. The audiences for both had already merged by 2009.
Open on YouTube - Before it had a name
New Found Glory - Sticks and Stones
Pop punk with hardcore in its bones, five years early. The genre is a formalisation of what these bands were already doing.
Open on YouTube
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Each opens at the start of the recording.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 150-190 bpm
- Song length
- 3-4 min
- Tuning
- Drop D on pop punk's bright guitars, so the breakdown has weight without losing the chorus's clarity.
- Production
- Bright, loud and heavily compressed, with the pop punk sections produced like pop and the breakdowns produced like metalcore. The seam is deliberate.
- Written about
- Friendship, Adolescence, Heartbreak, comically, Not growing up
What each part is doing
- Guitar Pop punk's octave hooks and barre chords alternating with metalcore's syncopated palm-muted breakdown, frequently within eight bars.
- Bass Following the guitar exactly through both modes, which is what keeps the switch from sounding like two different bands.
- Drums Fast pop punk backbeat, then a half-time breakdown marked with china cymbal. The drummer is signalling the genre change.
- Vocals Sung on the choruses and screamed on the breakdowns, usually by two different members — pop punk's harmony and metalcore's harshness in one song.
What it isn't
That it is a cynical hybrid. It is an unusually literal one — the name was a joke that stuck — and it documents something real about its moment: the pop punk and metalcore audiences were the same people by 2007, and bands were simply writing for the rooms they were actually playing to.
Told apart from
- Pop punk Easycore is pop punk with metalcore breakdowns inserted. Remove the breakdowns and it is pop punk.
- Melodic metalcore The same two ingredients weighted the other way — metalcore with a sung chorus rather than pop punk with a breakdown.
- Skate punk Skate punk is faster and more technical with no breakdowns and no screaming.
- Emo pop Both are 2000s commercial descendants of punk with big choruses. Emo-pop is theatrical; easycore is cheerful.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
New Found Glory experimented with the combination in the late 1990s, and Four Year Strong made it official with their 2007 album. A Day to Remember took the formula onto big stages, alternating pop songs with near-metalcore ones. It is a genre that has never taken itself too seriously.
Descended from
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- NWOTHM 1.0 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
- NWOBHM 1.0 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
- Pirate metal 1.4 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.