Skate punk
Sung. Melodic singing throughout.
In short
Faster, more technical pop punk with two-beat drumming and short solos. The soundtrack to skate videos.
How it sounds
- Very fast tempos with two-beat drumming and technical transitions.
- Clear-toned bass with its own often highly technical lines.
- Vocal harmonies everywhere, even at 220 bpm.
Hear what that means
- The drummer's endurance test
Double-time hi-hat over a fast backbeat, held for three minutes. Much harder than it sounds and the genre's real technical bar.
Open on YouTube - Bass doing more than roots
Busy melodic counter-lines at 220 bpm, which is the least-noticed difficulty in the genre.
Open on YouTube - Harmony at speed
Sung harmony held accurately at a tempo that makes accuracy hard. It sounds effortless because these bands were extremely well drilled.
Open on YouTube
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 2 of 3 are cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 180-230 bpm
- Song length
- 2-3 min
- Tuning
- E standard, bright and thin, with the guitars mixed for clarity at speed rather than for weight.
- Production
- Clean, fast and very well recorded — this is technically accomplished music made in proper studios, which separates it audibly from the hardcore it descends from.
- Written about
- Skating, Politics, sceptically, Adolescence, Jokes
What each part is doing
- Guitar Fast downstroked and alternate-picked chords with octave hooks, and short melodic solos that pop punk generally does without.
- Bass Busy, melodic and technically demanding — frequently playing fills and counter-lines at 220 bpm, which is the genre's least-noticed difficulty.
- Drums Double-time hi-hat over a fast backbeat, a skank the drummer has to hold for three minutes. Much harder than it sounds and the genre's real technical bar.
- Vocals Sung with harmony on the chorus, nasal and clear, carrying an actual melody at a tempo that makes that difficult.
What it isn't
That it is pop punk that happens to be fast. The technical bar is genuinely higher: the bass parts are busy, the drumming demands endurance most punk does not, and the vocal harmonies are sung accurately at tempos where accuracy is hard. It sounds effortless because these were extremely well-drilled bands, which is a good reason to be suspicious of how easy it sounds.
Told apart from
- Pop punk Skate punk is pop punk's faster, more technical Californian wing. Same chorus writing, much harder to play.
- Melodic hardcore Melodic hardcore shouts where this sings, and is more politically earnest. The tempos and the guitar work are close.
- Hardcore punk Skate punk descends from hardcore and kept the speed while adding melody, harmony and studio polish hardcore refused.
- Easycore Easycore adds metalcore breakdowns to pop punk, and is what part of this audience moved to in the 2000s.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
Fat Wreck Chords, run by NOFX's Fat Mike, and Epitaph built an entire California scene in the early 1990s, tied directly to skate culture and Powell-Peralta videos. The genre exploded internationally and faded commercially around 2000, though it enjoys a steady European revival.
Descended from
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Neoclassical metal 2.2 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
- Garage rock revival 2.2 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.