An hour before doors, in a club that holds three hundred, the engineer behind the soundboard runs the kick drum, then each guitar, then the vocal mic, and watches the meters instead of the stage, because a meter has no opinion about the poster or the merch table and registers only four things: how low the open string sits, how slow the slow part drags, how many notes are packed into the bar and how far down the singer can hold a growl before it cracks.
Those four readings are the only honest way to rank the heaviest deathcore bands. Everything else is a vibe.
Picture the van and its trailer rolled onto the steel deck of an interstate weigh station one axle at a time, the plate groaning under every cabinet, every road case and every carton of unsold shirts, and the needle on the scale house wall not caring in the slightest whether the band is any good: it reads the load axle by axle, and when the trailer has been packed past the limit it slams against its stop pin and stays there. Tuning is the first axle. Tempo, density and voice are the other three.
Tuned into what Nail The Mix calls sub-zero territory, produced by its own guitarist and released by Unique Leader on 4 August 2023 on a record called Ashen, the Swedish band that pins the needle hardest across all four gauges together is Humanity's Last Breath. Second place is a different kind of weight. It wins on tempo.
Where a band sits on the list of deathcore bands tells you its era and its branch. The gauges tell you what it weighs, and the two orders rarely agree. The founders of 2002 to 2008 sit at the top of every history and nowhere near the top of this one, because the bands that came after them took a sledgehammer to the floor that the Montreal and California records of those years stood on.
Four gauges for weight
Tuning comes first because it is the gauge the ear reads before any other. Every band on this board is graded by how far under the genre's seven-string floor the low end of its records sits, whether the guitars were tuned there or pitched there after the take, and a guitar tuned far under that floor is not a little heavier. It is playing in the range where a bass guitar usually lives.
Tempo is the second gauge, and it is not a question of how fast the blast goes. It measures how slow the slow parts drag and how much of the song is spent down there, so a band that blasts for forty seconds and then crawls for three minutes scores higher than one that blasts for three minutes and crawls for forty seconds.
Density is the third: how many guitars are stacked on the riff, how many notes each bar carries, and how much of the running time is breakdown rather than build. It is the gauge on which a fast band can outweigh a slow one.
Voice is the fourth. The question is how low the growl goes and how long it is held, which is a different question from how impressive it is, and a long high scream adds nothing on this scale. Low, long and steady reads heavy. Everything else reads as colour.
The heaviest deathcore bands, graded
Humanity's Last Breath takes the top line on tuning and sits near the top on density. Formed in Helsingborg in 2009 with Buster Odeholm on guitar, the band tracked Ashen as its fourth album, and in the ear of Distorted Sound the riffs are of Mariana Trench depth, drilled and cracked by the kit, a jackhammer on a venue's loading ramp that keeps cutting out mid-bite and chewing the concrete again in bursts that never land where the count expects them. Nail The Mix's account of the band's tone talks of pitching recorded audio down by semitones and of Odeholm's liking for the dirtier sound of a real-time pitch pedal. Part of the weight is made after the take. The meter does not care.
Released by Century Media on 4 September 2015 and made, in the account of Distorted Sound, with no bass on it at all, the Hull band that scores highest of all on tempo is Black Tongue, and The Unconquerable Dark is the evidence. Distorted Sound heard riffs that are slow and still enormous with no bass under them. That is the trick. The guitars do the bass player's job the way a pallet jack shoved under a full stack of speaker cabinets does a roadie's, cranking the whole low end of the song an inch off the stage and letting it crash back down on every hit until the plywood splits along the seams, and Alex Teyen's growl is dredged up from somewhere underneath the stack, a fatality finisher in the ear of The Gateway.
"In the Wake ov the Wolf", the second track on the record, is the reading to take. The tempo gauge is the reason Black Tongue sits this high: the band spends much of its running time in the slow part, and Rush On Rock, which scored the record 5.5 out of 10, complained of a lurching, turgid, slow-motion passage cutting across the moments of impact. A complaint about the crawl is a reading on the gauge.
Third on the board is Distant, the Rotterdam band whose Heritage, released by Century Media on 10 February 2023, scores close to Black Tongue on tempo and close to Humanity's Last Breath on tuning.
The Sydney band that announced its record with the single "Red Dot Sight" on 4 November 2022 is To the Grave, and Director's Cuts, released by Unique Leader on 24 February 2023, is that record. Tuning puts it this high. Its tempo and density readings are middling, and they keep it out of the top three.
Fifth, on density alone, is Infant Annihilator. Built in Hessle, near Hull, by Eddie Pickard on guitar and Aaron Kitcher on drums, with Dickie Allen on vocals, the band self-released The Battle of Yaldabaoth on 11 September 2019 and saw it land on the Billboard Heatseekers chart, the list for emerging acts. Its riffs maul the bar line rather than sit on it, a rack of forty folding chairs shoved down a flight of concrete steps, every chair slamming into the next and no two hitting a step on the same beat, and its tempo score is the lowest in the top five, because almost nothing on it is slow for long. Alex Teyen of Black Tongue guests on the title track. The two ends of the weight scale share a singer.
The middle of the board
Below the top five the tuning gauge flattens into a cluster, and the order among the bands in it is decided by the other three gauges.
Signed to Century Media for Amongst the Low & Empty, released on 28 July 2023, and fronted by David Simonich, the Pittsburgh band that wins the density gauge on breakdown share in this cluster is Signs of the Swarm. The breakdowns do the work. Reviews of the record called them huge and merciless and found the closing one of the title track borderline absurd, and that is the whole of its lead over the rest of the cluster.
The Florida pair score on tempo. Traitors, on Phobias, self-released on 21 February 2025, and Bodysnatcher, on Bleed-Abide, released by MNRK Heavy on 22 April 2022, both lean on the breakdown. Traitors drags harder. Bodysnatcher keeps the two-step.
A guitar tuned far under the genre's floor is not a little heavier. It is playing in the range where a bass guitar usually lives.
The Knoxville band with three guitarists in the front line since 2007 is Whitechapel, and on the density gauge three guitars stacked on one riff outweigh almost anything on this board. Hymns in Dissonance, released by Metal Blade on 7 March 2025, puts that wall on record, and it drops a place on tempo.
Built on a drummer who blasts underneath a symphonic wall and on Pain Remains, released by Century Media on 14 October 2022, the New Jersey band that packs more notes into a single bar than anyone else in this cluster is Lorna Shore. Density lifts it. Tempo drags it back down, because the symphonic wall wants movement, and the long high screams that made Will Ramos famous gain nothing on this scale.
The band that gets onto the board on one gauge alone is Slaughter to Prevail. Its riffs bounce rather than crawl, and Alex Terrible's growl is the reason it is here at all.
The voice gauge reads the same way for every throat in the genre, and the vocalists gathered under women in deathcore are graded on exactly the same scale: how low, and for how long.
| Band | Tuning | Tempo | Density | Record |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Humanity's Last Breath | Lowest on the board | Mid, stop and start | Very high | Ashen (2023) |
| Black Tongue | Very low, no bass | Slowest on the board | Low by design | The Unconquerable Dark (2015) |
| Distant | Very low | Slow | Medium | Heritage (2023) |
| To the Grave | Very low | Mid | Medium | Director's Cuts (2023) |
| Infant Annihilator | Very low | Fast | Highest | The Battle of Yaldabaoth (2019) |
| Signs of the Swarm | Low | Slow | High | Amongst the Low & Empty (2023) |
| Traitors | Low | Slow | Low | Phobias (2025) |
| Whitechapel | Low, three guitars | Mixed | High | Hymns in Dissonance (2025) |
| Lorna Shore | Low | Fast | High | Pain Remains (2022) |
| Slaughter to Prevail | Low | Mid, bouncing | Medium | Kostolom (2021) |
The heaviest deathcore song, by the same gauges
Put a single song through all four gauges and one comes out on top. "Labyrinthian", the sixth track on Ashen and the single that went out ahead of the record in May 2023, comes off the album that sits lowest on this board. On three gauges out of four it is first or close to it. On tempo it is merely slow.
The band put "Labyrinthian" out with a video of its own, and the record it announced is the one this board puts at the bottom of the register.
Tempo and density each crown a different song. On tempo it is "In the Wake ov the Wolf" by Black Tongue, the second track on the slowest record on the board. On density it is "The Kingdom Sitteth Lonely Beneath Thine Hollowed Heavens", the seven-minute third track of The Battle of Yaldabaoth, with Trevor Strnad of The Black Dahlia Murder as guest, the longest song on a record that runs close to an hour. Close behind on density sits the title track of Amongst the Low & Empty, whose closing breakdown Wall of Sound found borderline absurd.
No single song wins all four gauges. "Labyrinthian" places highest across all four, and that makes it the heaviest deathcore song on this board.
The heaviest records
Read as records, the order shifts by the same rules: Ashen by Humanity's Last Breath, Unique Leader, August 2023, carries the lowest tuning on this board across an entire running order; The Unconquerable Dark by Black Tongue, Century Media, September 2015, is the slowest full-length on this board and, in the account of Distorted Sound, was made without a bass; The Battle of Yaldabaoth by Infant Annihilator, self-released in September 2019, is the densest on this board, fourteen tracks and the better part of an hour; and Amongst the Low & Empty by Signs of the Swarm, Century Media, July 2023, is the best case for the middle of the board, proof that a band does not need the lowest tuning on the board to do damage when its breakdowns are huge. Each of those records was beaten out of one gauge, and none of them scores top on all four, which is the honest result of measuring weight rather than feeling it: the summit of the genre is not one tuning or one tempo but the point where low, slow, dense and deep line up, and the record that lines all four up under one girder of a riff has not been made yet.
