Slam

Built around one blow

The heaviest single object in extreme music, the slam riff is a mid-tempo figure of two or three notes on a guitar tuned to B or lower, palm-muted, syncopated and swung, and the genre is what happens when a band builds whole songs around dropping that object from a height, over and over, until the floor gives way. Blast beats still come. They are the run-up. Under the groove the kick drum stutters, the snare is often tuned high enough to crack like struck sheet metal, and pinch harmonics shriek off the low string like cable snapping under load.

The voice matters as much as the riff. Vocalists push past the death growl into gurgles and wet, bottomless roars, and the high pig squeal is a trained technique rather than a joke. Lyrics survive mostly as song titles. The gore in them is a convention inherited from the parent style, a stock of splatter and anatomy vocabulary that nobody on the floor expects to follow, any more than a crowd follows the words of a jackhammer.

Forged on Long Island, where Internal Bleeding put out Voracious Contempt on Pavement Music in 1995, mixing the blast and double kick of death metal with New York hardcore and hip hop grooves and shoving the breakdown to the front of every song, the style found its second foundry in Dallas. The name came later. The riff came first.

Where the slam floor ends

The heaviest tenant of the low register lives inside brutal death metal and quarrels with it constantly. The parent crowds its songs with riffs and keeps the blasts running. The offshoot clears the room, drops the tempo and swings one figure through it like a wrecking ball through a wall of cinder blocks, and a band can cross from one camp to the other inside a single record. The bills are shared, and so are the labels, with Unique Leader, Lacerated Enemy and Vomit Your Shirt carrying much of the modern catalogue.

Since the 2000s the circuit has spread far past Texas and New York. Manchester gave it Ingested, Moscow Katalepsy, Lisbon Analepsy, South Africa Vulvodynia and New Zealand Organectomy, while Oklahoma City's PeelingFlesh, formed in 2021, dragged the hip hop swagger and the guest spots of a mixtape into the pit. Every scene hits the same note. Every scene hits it a little harder.

Deathcore is the neighbour most often mistaken for it, because both live for the breakdown. The difference is the frame. Deathcore builds its songs on metalcore structures, higher screams traded against low growls, while the offshoot keeps the brutal death metal chassis and lets the groove take over the engine. Some bands straddle the line on purpose, and Vulvodynia has drawn reviews for exactly that. Purists complain while the pit keeps moving.

Where to start

Seven slam albums, from the Long Island blueprint to an Oklahoma crew formed in 2021, each one dropping the same weight from a different height.

• Internal Bleeding Voracious Contempt Pavement Music, 1995

  The debut that defined the style before it had a name, breakdowns and grooves shoved to the front over shifting beats and a New York hardcore swing.

• Devourment Molesting the Decapitated United Guttural, 1999

  The Dallas crew's debut, hailed on release as one of the most brutal records death metal had produced, and the template a whole circuit still follows.

• Ingested Surpassing the Boundaries of Human Suffering Siege of Amida, 2009

  The English debut that carried the Texan riff across the Atlantic, low, lurching and built entirely for the floor.

• Katalepsy Autopsychosis Unique Leader, 2013

  The Moscow band's second album, released in January 2013, brutal death metal density broken open by slams heavy enough to dent concrete.

• Vulvodynia Psychosadistic Design Lacerated Enemy, 2016

  The South African band's second album, two years after forming, crushing slams with deathcore leanings that reviewers heard from the first track.

• Analepsy Atrocities from Beyond Vomit Your Shirt, 2017

  The Lisbon debut, ten tracks in about thirty minutes, science fiction dread hammered into slam at its most compact.

• PeelingFlesh The G Code Unique Leader, 2024

  The Oklahoma City crew's first full-length, eleven tracks with guests from Despised Icon, hip hop attitude swung like a sledgehammer through the slam.