Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1985

Grindcore

Emerged 1985 Origin Birmingham, England Subgenres 3 Vocals Growled or shrieked
Heaviness
9
Speed
10
Melody
1

Growled or shrieked. Unintelligible without a lyric sheet. The thing most newcomers bounce off.

In short

Hardcore and death metal compressed into songs under a minute, with continuous blast beats. Napalm Death have a song that lasts one second.

How it sounds

  • Blast beats at maximum speed, songs under a minute, albums of twenty minutes.
  • Short hardcore and death metal riffs with no development.
  • Dual vocals: guttural growl and high shriek, alternating rapidly.

Hear what that means

  • The blast beat from 19:03

    Napalm Death - Scum

    One and a half seconds - the shortest recorded song there is - and the joke is load-bearing: the blast beat makes a song this short a coherent statement rather than a fragment.

    Open on YouTube at 19:03
  • Two vocalists, two registers

    Terrorizer - World Downfall

    A low guttural and a high shriek trading and overlapping, because the range the genre wants is wider than one throat covers.

    Open on YouTube
  • Where the tempo drops out from 7:37

    Repulsion - Horrified

    Full blast, and then a sudden half-time crush with no transition. That lurch is the only structural device grindcore keeps, and everything it does with dynamics it does with this.

    Open on YouTube at 7:37

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
200-320 bpm
Song length
18 sec-1.5 min
Tuning
B or A standard, or whatever the strings will take — tuning is loose because at this tempo pitch is barely perceptible anyway.
Production
Compressed to a paste, and often genuinely lo-fi. The founding record was made for almost nothing, and the distortion of the recording is part of what is being played.
Written about
Political rage, Anti-war, Anti-capitalism, Body horror, on the goregrind side

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Two speeds and nothing between: a blur of tremolo and downstrokes, and a sudden half-time crush. There is no verse-chorus scaffolding to hang anything else on.
  • Bass Distorted past the point of pitch and used as another layer of noise. Napalm Death's bass is a texture, not a harmonic instrument.
  • Drums The blast beat, which is this genre's invention: kick, snare and hi-hat alternating single strokes as fast as the limbs go, around 250-300 bpm. It is the most physically demanding thing in popular music.
  • Vocals Two, usually — a low guttural and a high shriek, trading or layered, because one voice cannot cover the range the genre wants.

What it isn't

That it is not really music, or that anyone could do it. The blast beat is one of the hardest things any drummer is asked to do, and holding one cleanly for even thirty seconds takes years — Napalm Death's Mick Harris was inventing a technique, not failing at an existing one. The brevity is also formal rather than lazy: a song that is over before your ear can settle is a deliberate effect, and the record that established it was consciously arguing with the fourteen-minute prog side of the same decade.

Told apart from

  • Death metal Grindcore shares death metal's vocals and doubles its speed, then throws out the arrangement. A grind song is done in ninety seconds; a death metal song has movements.
  • Hardcore punk Grind is hardcore taken to its logical end — the songs got shorter and faster until structure stopped being possible — with metal's tuning and vocals bolted on.
  • Powerviolence Power violence is the hardcore-side answer to the same question, and keeps the sudden lurching tempo drops as the point rather than as a break.
  • Goregrind Goregrind keeps the form and swaps the politics for anatomy, with the vocals pitch-shifted downward until they stop sounding human.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

Napalm Death released Scum in 1987 with two different line-ups on the two sides and invented a genre. The song You Suffer lasts 1.316 seconds and is in the Guinness Book of Records. Drummer Mick Harris named the style 'grindcore' after the sound of the guitar. It has remained strongly political, especially in its anarcho-punk wing.

Descended from

Branches into

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

  • Mathcore 2.4 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.