Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.William Shakespeare, King Lear
Formed in Manchester in May 2006, on record within a year beside Crepitation and Kastrated on a shared release called North-West Slam Fest, and filed by Metal Archives under slam, brutal death metal and deathcore in one genre field, the band that tore the slow groove riff out of slam death metal and bolted it into the slot where a deathcore song keeps its breakdown is Ingested. That bolt is slam deathcore. Everything else in the branch follows from where it goes.
Brutal deathcore does the demolition first. It rips the harmonised leads, the keyboard pads and the clean hooks out of the genre, files the riffs down toward the Suffocation school of brutal death metal until they are chromatic clusters with no tune left in them, drags the voice to the floor of the range and packs the blasts as tight as a drummer's feet can hold them, and it leaves the breakdowns standing exactly where the hardcore side of the family built them. Slam deathcore keeps all of that. Then it adds one riff.
Picture the freight line that runs twenty yards behind a warehouse venue's loading door, and a two-man track crew re-spiking a loose rail while the opening band soundchecks. Two spike mauls take turns on one spike, each swing landing a hair behind the other man's, the steel head throwing a high, clean ping off the spike while the oak tie underneath swallows the blow with a thud you feel through the soles of your shoes, the same pair of strikes eight times over, no variation and no hurry, until the spike sits flush and the crew walks on to the next tie. Then the freight comes through, ninety cars of it, and the whole tonnage rolls over the rail those two men just nailed down. The ping is the snare. The thud is the palm-muted low string. The hair of lag between the two swings is the groove. The mauls are the slam riff, and the freight is the breakdown.
What slam deathcore borrows from slam, and what it keeps
A slam riff is a short figure on the lowest strings, palm-muted, chromatic and swung, syncopated so that the guitar lands a fraction early or late against the kick drum, and it is played four or eight times without a note changing. By common consent it belongs to death metal, and what a slam riff is was settled on that side of the fence in the early nineties, on Long Island and later in Texas. What slam deathcore does with it is a matter of placement rather than invention. The riff goes where the deathcore song was already heading for its drop, and the song keeps the shape a hardcore kid recognises from the back of the room: the verse, the build, the barked cue, the floor falling away.
Two other parts travel with the riff. The snare is cranked so tight that the head barely gives, and every hit comes back as a high, hard ping instead of a crack, a sound that cuts straight through guitars tuned to the bottom of the range. The voice drops to meet it. Slam deathcore singers live in the low gurgle, often pushed lower still with pitch-shifting in the studio, a voice like the garbage disposal in a venue kitchen choking on a dropped spoon, grinding the steel, gargling the drain water and chewing the same piece of gristle until somebody kills the switch. The high scream, the other half of the deathcore vocal trade, gets rarer the deeper a band leans into slam.
In the brutal half of the branch the fast sections do the opposite job. The blasts come off those records like a paint shaker on a hardware store counter, a gallon can clamped in its jaws and rattled harder than any hand could follow, shaking the whole machine toward the edge of the counter, and when the slam riff arrives the motor cuts and the can just sits there, heavy and still, while the room hears what it weighs. Speed sets the groove up. The groove cashes it in.
That makes the relation between the two names arithmetic. Every slamming deathcore band is a brutal deathcore band, because the slam riff turns up inside the brutal package; not every brutal deathcore band slams. In the wider story of deathcore's branches, this is the one that got heavier by what it excised and then by the one riff it took in, and the line between its two names is a single riff type.
Every slamming deathcore band is a brutal deathcore band; not every brutal deathcore band slams.
Slamming and brutal deathcore bands, and the reason each one is in the branch
Signed to Century Media for The Architect of Extinction in 2015 and booked onto the Summer Slaughter Tour in 2016, the Manchester crew that dragged a slam debut, Surpassing the Boundaries of Human Suffering on Siege of Amida in June 2009, into the American rooms where deathcore was being booked kept both names on one catalogue.
Released by Unique Leader on 27 April 2018, the record that tips the band's balance toward the slam half of its name is The Level Above Human. Dave Raffy, reviewing it for Metal Trenches on the day it came out, heard a greater emphasis on slam than on the deathcore elements, slams always inbound and the vocals focused on the lows, and he named "Misery Leech" among the tracks that reached back to the debut. Metal Archives keeps all three genre names on the band for the same reason. The weight shifts between the halves from one record to the next, and neither half is ever thrown out.
Formed in Pittsburgh in 2014, signed to Unique Leader in 2016 and on the label's release schedule with The Disfigurement of Existence on 3 November 2017, the band whose second album Metal Trenches heard sitting more on the slamming side of deathcore than its first is Signs of the Swarm. Metal Archives files it as plain deathcore, which makes it the branch in one line: the form is deathcore and the slam rides inside it.
Absolvere followed on 24 September 2021, and "Totem", which Unique Leader released with an official video ahead of the album, is the quickest way to put a face to the name.
Founded in Durban in 2014 by Luke Haarhoff and Duncan Bentley, and signed to Lacerated Enemy for its middle records and to Unique Leader from 2021, the South African band that carries both of the branch's names in a single Metal Archives genre field, deathcore and brutal death metal, is Vulvodynia. The genre field holds both names at once, deathcore beside brutal death metal, with no border guard between them. Praenuntius Infiniti of 2021 is the place to hear it.
Founded in Jesenice in 2010, on the Austrian label Noisehead with From the Depths on 15 September 2012 and on the German label Rising Nemesis with Void in 2016, the Slovenian band that Metal Archives files under deathcore for its early years, before it moved on, is Within Destruction. Deathwish of 2018, mixed by Will Putney of Fit for an Autopsy, is the last record that sits on this side of the line. What came after 2020 belongs to the nu-deathcore branch.
Rising Nemesis also put out Purgatorium in January 2018, the first full-length by Mental Cruelty, a band formed in Karlsruhe in 2014 and filed by Metal Archives as brutal deathcore for its early years. Inferis followed on Unique Leader on 10 May 2019. The black metal came later. So did the orchestra.
| Band | From, formed | Start with | Why it is in the branch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ingested | Manchester, 2006 | The Level Above Human (2018) | Filed under slam, brutal death metal and deathcore at once |
| Signs of the Swarm | Pittsburgh, 2014 | Absolvere (2021) | Filed as deathcore; a reviewer put its second album on the slamming side |
| Vulvodynia | Durban, 2014 | Praenuntius Infiniti (2021) | Deathcore and brutal death metal in one genre field |
| Within Destruction | Jesenice, 2010 | Void (2016) | Filed as deathcore in its early years, nu-deathcore after 2020 |
| Mental Cruelty | Karlsruhe, 2014 | Inferis (2019) | Brutal deathcore before the black metal arrived |
| Waking the Cadaver | Jersey Shore, 2006 | Perverse Recollections of a Necromangler (2007) | Slam and deathcore together on an American debut of 2007 |
| Acranius | Rostock, 2009 | Reign of Terror (2017) | Metal Archives genre field changes between its early and later pages |
Brutal deathcore at the edges: Waking the Cadaver and Acranius
Formed on the Jersey Shore in 2006 out of a band called Death to Honor, on Necroharmonic with a first full-length, Perverse Recollections of a Necromangler, on 21 November 2007, and filed by Metal Archives as slam, brutal death metal and deathcore for those years and as brutal death metal and hardcore afterwards, the New Jersey crew that hammered the slam riff into an American deathcore debut while the genre's first wave was still selling its shirts off folding tables is Waking the Cadaver.
Formed in Rostock in 2009, on Rising Nemesis with Reign of Terror on 27 January 2017 and still releasing records through Mercy Denied in 2022 and Whiteout in 2026, the German band whose catalogue sits squarely on the border is Acranius. Katarina McGinn of Dead Rhetoric singled out "Kingmaker" as the stomp-friendly track of Reign of Terror, and her verdict on the whole record is where the argument over the branch starts.
Slam vs deathcore
Slam vs deathcore is a question about what a song is built to deliver. A slam death metal song is built to deliver the groove: the slam riff is the payoff and very often the structure, repeated until it becomes the song, and the voice stays at the bottom the whole way down. A deathcore song is built to deliver the breakdown: a hardcore structure, a trade between a low growl and a high scream, a barked cue and then the drop. Slam deathcore puts the first kind of riff inside the second kind of song. The breakdown is still the destination. The slam riff is one of the roads into it.
The line is real and it is blurred, and one record proves both. McGinn heard Reign of Terror blurring the line between deathcore and slamming death metal, with the slam sections integrated with some precision and the odd breakdown that stayed on the deathcore side of the line. Erik T at Teeth of the Divine, five weeks later, heard down tempo slam death metal and complained that the album came across as one 31-minute song with barely any difference between the fast parts and the slow ones. Same riffs, two verdicts. Each verdict points at a mechanism: where the breakdown lands, and how little the tempo moves.
The test that sorts them is the breakdown and the voice around it. On the far side of the fence stand the slam death metal bands, from Internal Bleeding on Long Island to Devourment in Dallas, whose songs are built from the groove outward and owe the hardcore song nothing. On this side stand bands whose songs still drive toward a drop, with a scream answering the growl, even when a slam riff carries the load for half the running time. A band that throws out the vocal trade and the drop together has crossed over. Acranius keeps a boot on each side of the fence, which is why its own genre field changes halfway down the page.
Beatdown deathcore, slamdown and the slow neighbour
Beatdown deathcore is a fans' phrase rather than a label's. Beatdown itself is hardcore, the New York mid-tempo lineage of mid-tempo two-step grooves, shouted or hip-hop cadenced vocals and songs built as a chain of breakdowns, and once the blast beats are gone, which in beatdown they usually are, a beatdown band at deathcore tuning is still a hardcore band. Emmure and Bodysnatcher stand on that edge. Slamdown is the meeting of beatdown with the slam riff, a hardcore band borrowing the groove, and it sits outside that arithmetic; Last.fm lists No Zodiac and Mercy Blow among its names. The families talk over the fence. They keep different addresses.
The neighbour slam deathcore gets confused with most often is the slow one. The downtempo deathcore bands halve the tempo, drop the tuning further and leave long gaps between the hits, so that the song becomes a chain of breakdowns with sub drops rumbling underneath. Slam deathcore does not slow the song down. Its riff swings, lands off the kick and drives the floor into a stomp at whatever speed the song is already running, then hands the room straight back to the blast. Downtempo is a tempo. Slam is a groove. Plenty of bands do both in one song, and the two are still measured with different instruments.
The branch holds together on one condition. Take any band that wears the name, find the slam riff, and listen to what the song does next. If it heads for a breakdown, with or without a scream laid over the growl, the band plays slam deathcore. If it stays in the groove and lets the groove become the whole song, it has moved into death metal's house, and the name on the record should move with it.
