Psychobilly
Sung. Melodic singing throughout.
In short
Rockabilly with slapped upright bass, punk speed and lyrics about monsters. Quiff haircut mandatory.
How it sounds
- Slapped upright bass played hard, as a percussion instrument.
- Rockabilly reverb on the guitar, with punk speed and aggression.
- Quiff haircuts, tattoos and lyrics about monsters, cars and the morgue.
Hear what that means
- Slap bass at punk tempo
An upright slapped continuously at 200 bpm - years of technique, and the reason the instrument survived into a punk context at all.
Open on YouTube - Rockabilly picking, made nasty
Demented Are Go - Kicked Out of Hell
The same double stops and open-string runs as 1956, delivered with punk's aggression through heavy reverb.
Open on YouTube - Where it came from
The Cramps - Songs the Lord Taught Us
Two guitars, no bass, and a reverb-drenched swamp. The Cramps are the hinge between rockabilly, garage and everything psychobilly did next.
Open on YouTube
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 1 of 3 is cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 180-220 bpm
- Song length
- 2-3 min
- Tuning
- E standard on a hollow-body guitar with heavy reverb, and an upright bass slapped throughout at punk tempos, which is far harder than it sounds.
- Production
- Live, loud and echoing, with the reverb from rockabilly kept and everything else made faster and nastier.
- Written about
- Horror films, Sex and violence, comically, Delinquency, Cars and monsters
What each part is doing
- Guitar Rockabilly picking played at punk speed through heavy reverb, with the same double stops and open-string runs delivered with far more aggression.
- Upright bass Slapped continuously at 200 bpm — the genre's central technical demand, and the reason the instrument survived into a punk context at all.
- Drums Frequently a stripped kit with no cymbals to speak of, playing a fast shuffle. Minimal, because the bass is doing the percussive work.
- Vocals Sneered and hiccupped in the rockabilly manner, with punk's aggression and horror-film subject matter.
What it isn't
That it is a novelty crossover. Slapping an upright bass continuously at 200 bpm is a serious technical discipline that takes years, and the genre has sustained a devoted international scene for four decades on the strength of it. The horror imagery is the surface; the reason the scene exists is that the playing is genuinely hard and genuinely fun to watch.
Told apart from
- Rockabilly Psychobilly is rockabilly at punk tempo with horror lyrics, and it keeps the upright bass that everything else in punk abandoned.
- Horror punk Horror punk shares the subject matter and uses a normal punk band's instrumentation — electric bass, no slap, no reverb-drenched picking.
- Punk rock Psychobilly is a punk-era genre that refused punk's instrumentation, which is unusual enough to be its defining trait.
- Deathrock Both are theatrical and horror-derived. Deathrock comes from post-punk and goth; this comes from 1956.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
The Meteors set the rules in England in the early 1980s, including an explicit ban on politics in the lyrics. The scene then moved to Germany and Japan, where it remains strongest today. It is a small genre with a very loyal audience and a strict dress code.
Descended from
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Garage rock revival 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
- Garage rock 1.4 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
- Neoclassical metal 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.