French Deathcore Bands

Ma jeunesse ne fut qu'un ténébreux orage,
Traversé ça et là par de brillants soleils;Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal

Mixed by Stéphane Buriez of the Lille death metal band Loudblast, paid for entirely out of its members' pockets and sold to more than two thousand buyers in France alone after it came out on 18 November 2009, The Hurt the Divine the Light was the EP that kicked the door of French deathcore off its hinges, and the Paris quintet with a keyboard player singing clean over breakdowns that cracked club stages down to the joists was Betraying the Martyrs. A death metal veteran sat at the desk. Remember that.

Almost everything that followed in French deathcore repeats the pattern of that first EP. The players came from a short list in and around Paris and moved from band to band with their instruments still warm; the producers and some of the labels belonged to the country's death metal; and the contracts that carried the records out of France were signed abroad, with American, German and Czech labels, as soon as the music could travel. A scene of that size cannot afford a schism between its two halves, so it never had one.

The sound carries the same alloy. Picture the bench grinder clamped to a workbench in the corner of a rehearsal basement, the wheel at full revolutions and the whole bench walking across the concrete on its rubber feet, until the wheel lurches off true, the guard splits and the housing slams into the cellar wall and tears its own cord out of the socket. The French bands that came out of the death metal side kept the blast spinning at that speed right up to the bar where the breakdown throws the weight. Then the lights are out.

Betraying the Martyrs and the Loudblast connection

Signed in 2011 to Sumerian for North America and, for the rest of the world, to Listenable Records, the French label that would release Loudblast's Burial Ground in 2014, the band that hauled a French deathcore record onto the American release schedule was Betraying the Martyrs. Before the debut came the road. The Survivors Tour of 2010 put the Paris band on European bills beside Whitechapel, Despised Icon and While She Sleeps, and on that tour it met Aaron Matts, a British singer, who replaced Eddie Czaicki, the founding vocalist, shortly afterwards.

Recorded in April and May 2011 at Sonic Assault Studios in Cape Coral, Florida, mixed there by Charles J. Wall and wrapped in a sleeve made by Valentin Hauser, the band's bassist, Breathe in Life arrived in September 2011 and set the template the band would spend a decade sanding down: Victor Guillet's keyboards laid over guitars tuned low enough to rattle the fillings out of a front row. Two guest spots on it map the scene. Czaicki came back to sing on "Life Is Precious", and Kévin Traoré, the singer of the Paris band As They Burn, sang on "When You're Alone". Two guest singers from the Paris scene on one debut. That is the pool.

The touring around the record shows which way the doors opened. The band crossed twelve countries with the Russian band My Autumn in support, and that autumn it went to the United States on a bill with Born of Osiris, Veil of Maya and Carnifex. France was one stop on the tour among twelve, and one of the smaller markets on it. Where the Paris scene sits beside Montreal, Hull and Yekaterinburg is laid out with the other regional deathcore scenes, and the French entry in that list reads as an export business from its first year.

Czaicki's own previous band is the second thread. Formed in Paris in 2006, fronted by Czaicki until 2008 and then by Junior Rodriguez, sent out on the road with Job for a Cowboy and Bring Me the Horizon, and steered into the studio by the same Stéphane Buriez, who produced its debut The Astonishing Fury of Mankind, released on Metal Blade in June 2009, the band that began in deathcore and metalcore and drifted toward heavy metal was Darkness Dynamite. It did not stay in the genre. Its first records sit in it, and its producer came from the death metal side again.

Betraying the Martyrs kept those foreign contracts to the end, through Phantom and Rapture on Sumerian and a last deal with the German label Out of Line, before it announced its split in 2023.

French deathcore bands that signed abroad

Founded in Paris in 2007 by Ronald Pastor on bass, Fabio Meschini on guitar and Milton Bakech on drums, releasing a first album called Aeon's War as a download on 20 June 2011 and then muscling onto a Hellfest stage in 2012, the band that Victory Records signed in an announcement of 4 September 2012 was As They Burn. Victory released Will, Love, Life on 19 February 2013. A Paris band now shared a label with Emmure, and it had not needed a French one to get there.

The route was not unique to Paris. Out of Grenoble in 2011 came The Walking Dead Orchestra, whose first album Architects of Destruction appeared in 2013 on Klonosphere, a French label with distribution through the French arm of Season of Mist. Klonosphere was the first floor. The exit was the American label Unique Leader, which signed the band on 3 April 2017.

Written over two years and recorded, mixed and mastered by the band itself with no outside producer in the room, Resurrect came out on Unique Leader in October 2017, and its video for "Resurrect the Scourge" went up on the label's own channel. The press release around the signing filed the Grenoble band under death metal, with a return to straight old-school riffs promised, and that is the point of it: the deathcore half of the scene and the death metal half could share a roster.

Bordeaux took the same staircase a step further into technical death metal. Formed there in 2013, Exocrine put out Unreal Existence in 2015 and Ascension in 2017 on the French label Great Dane Records, then moved to Unique Leader for Molten Giant on 17 August 2018 and Maelstrom in 2020. Grenoble and Bordeaux on one American roster a little over a year apart: the label was mustering what the small French labels had started.

Deep In Hate, Benighted and the death metal half

The neighbour on the death metal side is older. Formed in Saint-Étienne in May 1998, recording every album since Insane Cephalic Production in 2004 with Kristian Kohlmannslehner at his Kohlekeller studio in Germany and signed to Season of Mist for Asylum Cave in 2011, the grind-soaked death metal band whose singer guested on Global Flatline, recorded in 2011 by the Belgian band Aborted, is Benighted, with Julien Truchan at the microphone since the first day. Benighted files itself as death metal. It is the room next door, and the wall between the two rooms is thin.

That wall was knocked through in Paris. Formed there in 2003 or 2004, the date is given both ways, with Only the Strong Survive behind it in 2007 and Origins of Inequality in 2011, the band that signed a multi-album deal with the French label Kaotoxin, announced on 23 April 2014, and released Chronicles of Oblivion that June was Deep In Hate. Nicolas Bastos had played drums in Aborted before he played them here. Sven de Caluwé of Aborted guests on one track. The band toured with The Black Dahlia Murder. The deal was reported as a French deathcore signing, and every name around it came from death metal.

The label put it on film. Kaotoxin's video for "New Republic" was shot live at Sonisphere in 2013, a deathcore band from Paris playing a European festival stage. Deep In Hate released Disobey in 2018 and split up the same year.

Further north the crossover runs the other way. Together since 2009 in the north of France, near the Belgian border, with Honor Before Glory out in 2014 and Nameless King released through Miasma in 2019, the band that crossed to the Czech label Lacerated Enemy for Made of Stone on 1 December 2023 and brought in Kirk Windstein of Crowbar to sing the title track beside guests from Misery Index and Benighted is Embrace Your Punishment. Spirit of Metal files it as deathcore, while reviews of Nameless King hear slamming deathcore and brutal death metal with hardcore in the joints. The two descriptions fit the same record, and the guest list settles which half it borrowed its friends from.

Paris also supplied the technical end. Started in 2005 under another name, renamed Atlantis Chronicles, signed to Coroner Records for the 2013 debut Ten Miles Underwater and to the French label Apathia for Barton's Odyssey in March 2016, the band that went down into the trench is technical death metal by its own filing. Its relevance here is company: it was one of the Paris bands on the bill of the last Betraying the Martyrs show, at the Trabendo on 27 January 2024, beside As They Burn. The same few names turn up on both sides of the border between the genres, again and again.

A scene of that size cannot afford a schism between its two halves, so it never had one.

ten56. and the Paris players who never sit still

The pool is clearest in the band that came last. Formed in 2020 by Aaron Matts while he was still Betraying the Martyrs' singer, named after a police radio code, and built from Steeves Hostin, who had joined Betraying the Martyrs on guitar for Rapture and later moved to bass here, Arnaud Verrier on drums and Quentin Godet on guitar, the second of them with a past in the progressive band Kadinja, the band that dragged French deathcore down to a slower, bouncier, nastier register is ten56. Hostin and Verrier had both played in the Metz djent band Uneven Structure. The first bassist, Nicolas Delestrade, came from the Paris metalcore band Novelists.

Count the doors in that one line-up: Betraying the Martyrs, Kadinja, Uneven Structure, Novelists. Four bands from three corners of French heavy music, emptied into one. It is the clearest exponent of how the scene has always worked, and it is why French deathcore never needed a large number of bands to keep producing new ones.

The music is not the Betraying the Martyrs sound with the keyboards removed. "Sick Dog", premiered in September 2021 ahead of the EP Downer: Part 1 on Out of Line, moves like a trampoline in a back garden with a grown man landing on every downbeat, the springs snapping off the frame one by one until the mat splits along the seam and drops him onto the lawn. That is nu metal's bounce carried into deathcore's weight, and Wall of Sound, premiering it in September 2021, filed it as nu-deathcore.

Downer: Part 2 followed in January 2023. In September 2024 Matts sang on "Still Cursed" by the Danish deathcore band Cabal, a trade of voices across a border that the French bands make as easily as the Paris players change rehearsal rooms. The second album IO came out on Out of Line on 5 September 2025, and the band took it out on its first headline tour of Britain and Europe that September.

Out of Line is a German label. So the most recent heavy record from Paris travelled the same way as the first one did fourteen years earlier, through a foreign contract, and it was made by some of the same hands.

Hellfest and the road out of France

France does have one asset that no foreign label can provide: the country's largest metal festival sits at home. Hellfest booked Betraying the Martyrs for Main Stage 2 on 15 June 2012 and again for the edition of 16 to 18 June 2017, and As They Burn played the 2012 festival before the Victory deal was announced in September 2012. A Paris deathcore band could play to a festival crowd in the tens of thousands without crossing a border once.

But a festival slot is a shop window, not a circuit. The touring that built these bands ran outward. Betraying the Martyrs went to North America in 2011 and came back for the Summer Slaughter tour in 2017, on a bill under The Black Dahlia Murder and Dying Fetus with Oceano, Rings of Saturn and Lorna Shore. Deep In Hate went out with The Black Dahlia Murder across Europe. ten56. took IO into British and European clubs as a headliner. The money and the audience were abroad, and the bands went where they were, in a van whose rear axle sagged to the bump stops under the cabinets, every pothole slamming the springs down on the beat like a breakdown with no riff before it.

The newest arrivals start from that position rather than working towards it. Formed in 2018 in Lille, Solar Eruption released its first full-length, The Demon's House, in 2023, thirteen songs of technical deathcore made in a country where the genre's first EP had been mixed by a death metal man fourteen years before. Nobody in the new generation has to argue that French deathcore is possible. Betraying the Martyrs carried out the demolition of that argument in 2011, with a Sumerian contract and a United States tour behind it.

The record shows one habit the French bands share, set against the other European scenes: they used the death metal next door as a supplier rather than a rival. Loudblast's singer at the mixing desk, Aborted's drummer behind the kit, Benighted's guests on a record from the north, a band filed under both names by its own reviews: the scene was small enough that it had to borrow, and it strip-mined its nearest neighbour for producers, drummers and guests. The scenes that formed elsewhere in Europe took different ingredients, and Switzerland, Slovenia, Sweden each built theirs in their own way.

The plainest test of the French case is the first line-up of a single band, formed in 2020, which holds the singer of one of the scene's first exported deathcore records, a guitarist from the same band, and players from three of the country's other heavy bands. That is not a coincidence of friendships. It is how a small scene keeps its music moving: the same players, reforged into a new line-up and signed wherever the next contract is offered.

Sources and notes

• Wikipedia (fr): Betraying the Martyrs
• Spirit of Metal: Deep In Hate signs with Kaotoxin Records
• Dead Rhetoric: Deep In Hate signs with Kaotoxin Records
• Lambgoat: Unique Leader Records signs The Walking Dead Orchestra
• Wall of Sound: Aaron Matts propels ten56. into action with Sick Dog
• Spirit of Metal: Embrace Your Punishment