On 3 April 2007 Ferret Music released Parasite, the first album by a band from Bay City, Michigan, that had started in 2004 as a joke. Fourteen songs. Under nineteen minutes.
Filed somewhere between deathcore, mathcore and grind, sold off folding tables in VFW halls and played to strangers through a profile page that started the music before anyone had pressed a key, the Michigan band that named its songs after lines from films and television and then ripped nearly every one of them to scrap inside two minutes was See You Next Tuesday, and it belongs among the myspace deathcore bands as surely as any name you remember, even though hardly anyone files it there now.
That is the trouble with the era. Everybody remembers the headliners.
The Top 8, the row of eight favourite friends at the top of every profile, worked like a row of eight lockers in a high school corridor with the same baseball bat swung into every one on the way to the bus. The breakdown was the bat. Every locker took it, every one crumpled around the swing, and the crumple on each one gave away what was stored in it: keyboards in one, three guitars in the next, a sermon in a third, fourteen songs in under nineteen minutes in a fourth. Same swing. Different contents.
The myspace deathcore bands at the top of every Top 8
The story of the profile-page era is usually told through five or six names, and every one of them earned the slot. What keeps them at the top of the row, though, is less what they sold than what they handed down to the bands in the row underneath them, because the bands at the top of a Top 8 were the bands that took the second row on tour.
Riverside's Suicide Silence are on it for exactly that reason. The Cleansing, out on Century Media on 18 September 2007, put the pig squeal and the slow drop on a debut that entered the Billboard 200 at number 94, and the band dragged the second row out on the road behind it: Annotations of an Autopsy took a support slot under them on the 2008 Summer Slaughter UK dates, which Suicide Silence headlined, and Molotov Solution was still riding in their wake on a Suicide Silence headline tour in the autumn of 2010.
Whitechapel earned the slot by putting a third guitarist on the stage, and then by doing the one thing a Top 8 was really for. Formed in Knoxville in 2006 and on its second album by the summer of 2008, the band met a Seattle group called I Declare War on the road in 2007, and when the new label Artery asked Alex Wade which bands it ought to sign, he gave them that name. A friend list, walked into an office.
Released on 12 July 2007 by This City Is Burning, a small independent label, and thirty-three minutes long, the debut that hammered San Diego's name into every Top 8 on the West Coast was Dead in My Arms, and Carnifex earn their place with it because fifteen years later the band was still recording one of its songs again.
Job for a Cowboy belong at the top of the row for the obvious reason and one less obvious. The obvious one is the page the Glendale band opened on MySpace in 2004, where its songs began to find fans around the world. The other is the drum seat it left empty, which became a band of its own in the same town. Chelsea Grin came later, with a self-titled EP in the summer of 2008, and had a first album, Desolation of Eden, out on Artery in February 2010. Despised Icon of Montreal and the Bay Area's All Shall Perish were already on the stages when the pages arrived, the vanguard of the genre. And Bring Me the Horizon, from Sheffield and in so many of those Top 8s, sits on its own question, was Bring Me the Horizon ever deathcore, which has its own answer.
Myspace deathcore one click down: the Ferret row
Click past the headliners and the second row comes up fast, and a lot of it was on one label. Ferret Music, the New Jersey home of metalcore, spent 2007 and 2008 signing deathcore bands that had already built their crowds on their own pages, and two of them, with a third band that rode in the same van, are the clearest proof that the scene ran deeper than its charts.
Formed in Glendale, Arizona, in 2005, after Andy Rysdam walked out of the drum seat at Job for a Cowboy, signed first to Siege of Amida for Juggernaut and then to Ferret, and fronted on its second album by a singer borrowed from another band entirely, the Tucson group A Breath Before Surfacing, the band that was rebuilt from the drum stool the bigger band left empty was Knights of the Abyss.
"A New Darkened Faith" is the song that tells you how that band was found. It went up on the band's MySpace page before Shades came out on Ferret on 24 June 2008, and the profile player did the rest. The singer on it, Dustin Curtis, fronted another band altogether, and the breakdown carried the song either way.
Shingle Springs, a dot on the map east of Sacramento, gave the row Elysia. Started in high school in 2003 as Elysium's Revenge, the band put out its first album, Masochist, in 2006, then lost members so often that Zak Vargas became its one constant. It toured with Knights of the Abyss and Arsonists Get All the Girls, and Ferret signed it.
Lion of Judas came out on Ferret on 10 June 2008, cut over a week in Salem, Massachusetts, with Kurt Ballou of Converge at the desk, by a line-up Vargas had finally stabilised and a singer who had refused to let the name die. Elysia split up later that same year. The record is what is left, a second-row name with a Converge guitarist's week at the desk and no time to follow it up.
The third band in that van was Arsonists Get All the Girls, from Santa Cruz, founded in 2005 with two keyboard players, put on record by Process Records in 2006 with Hits from the Bow and taken up by Century Media for The Game of Life on 14 August 2007, and it is in the row because it proved how far the template could be bent before it broke.
A friend list, walked into an office.
Early deathcore bands from the rest of the map
Not every early deathcore band lived in California, and the ones that did not are the easiest to forget, because they had no Riverside or San Diego scene to stand in. They had a page, a van and a record. That was enough.
Go back to Bay City. Parasite was fourteen songs fired off like a fire extinguisher yanked off the wall of a VFW hall and emptied across the room in one burst, the white blast filling the place and the canister clanging on the floor before anyone could see what had hit them, and that was the point: See You Next Tuesday wrote songs that were over before a stranger on a profile page could decide whether to stay. In 2009 the band went on hiatus.
Founded as a duo by a drummer and a guitarist in Cleveland on 11 September 2001, filled out to a full band in 2003, signed to Rotten Records off a demo and sent out to tour Carnal Repercussions in 2008 until the touring itself wore the line-up down to the bone, the Ohio band that put out a second album, Ares, on 15 September 2009 and announced it was quitting a little over six weeks later was Salt the Wound. Two albums in two years, and the last American show was at home in Cleveland on 9 January 2010. The record says the rest.
Seattle's I Declare War put out What You Deserve on its own in 2006 and Amidst the Bloodshed on the small Compton Records in 2007, the year it met Whitechapel, which is how a band from the far corner of the map got its third album, Malevolence, onto Artery in 2010. Las Vegas sent Molotov Solution, a band that shared a 2006 split with the German group War from a Harlots Mouth, signed to Metal Blade (announced in January 2009) and released The Harbinger on 9 June 2009, with lyrics about government conspiracy that set it apart from the gore and heartbreak on the pages around it.
South Carolina's Through the Eyes of the Dead went the other way, toward death metal craft. For Malice the band travelled to Erik Rutan's Mana Studios in St. Petersburg, Florida, recorded in February and March 2007, and Prosthetic released the album on 21 August 2007 with Rutan's name on the sleeve, which for a band from Florence, South Carolina, was a long way up.
The Northeast and the Midwest sent their own. Emmure began in 2003 when Frankie Palmeri from Queens met two brothers from New Fairfield, Connecticut, on an internet message board in the same year MySpace opened, and Goodbye to the Gallows, its first album for Victory, out in March 2007, carried the beatdown of the New York hardcore clubs into the row. Cook County, Illinois, sent Oceano, and Oceano gave the row Adam Warren, a vocalist who worked in the low register.
Recorded in the autumn of 2008 with Joey Sturgis at The Foundation in Connersville, Indiana, and released by Earache in April 2009, Depths runs thirteen tracks, and Adam Warren's low growl comes up through its breakdowns like a floor sander run the length of an empty storefront, one long low grind that goes on until the old lino is stripped to bare concrete. By August 2008 Oceano had already been banned from several clubs, in part over its promotional photographs.
Two more names belong to the American row, and they are Californian after all. Riverside's Impending Doom, a Christian band started on 31 October 2005, had Nailed. Dead. Risen. out on Facedown in 2007, and Upland's Winds of Plague, which took its name in April 2005 from a line in an Unearth song, put keyboards over the drop. They are early marks of every branch of the genre that would split off in the next decade, the Christian line and the keyboard line, along with the Sumerian bands, Veil of Maya, Born of Osiris and After the Burial, who chopped the riff into odd shapes.
| Band | From | Record | Label | Released |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| See You Next Tuesday | Bay City, Michigan | Parasite | Ferret | April 2007 |
| Through the Eyes of the Dead | Florence, South Carolina | Malice | Prosthetic | August 2007 |
| I Declare War | Seattle, Washington | Amidst the Bloodshed | Compton | 2007 |
| Knights of the Abyss | Glendale, Arizona | Shades | Ferret | 2008 |
| Elysia | Shingle Springs, California | Lion of Judas | Ferret | June 2008 |
| Salt the Wound | Cleveland, Ohio | Carnal Repercussions | Rotten | 2008 |
| Annotations of an Autopsy | Lowestoft, England | Before the Throne of Infection | Siege of Amida | 2008 |
| Oceano | Cook County, Illinois | Depths | Earache | April 2009 |
| Molotov Solution | Las Vegas, Nevada | The Harbinger | Metal Blade | June 2009 |
2000s deathcore bands outside the United States
The page had no borders, and neither did the row. Formed in Lowestoft, on the Suffolk coast, in 2006, releasing an EP called Welcome to Sludge City in 2007 and a first album, Before the Throne of Infection, on Siege of Amida in 2008, the English band that took a support slot under Suicide Silence on the 2008 Summer Slaughter UK dates was Annotations of an Autopsy.
"Welcome to Sludge City" is the title song of that 2007 EP, which first came out in June 2007 on This City Is Burning. The title names the address the band meant to live at, a city of sludge, and it kept that address in its titles for more than a decade, down to World of Sludge in 2019. Nuclear Blast signed the band in March 2009, and in August 2008 its drum seat went to Lyn Jeffs of Ingested, a Manchester band formed in 2006 that was still making records twenty years on.
Further off, the pattern held. Despised Icon in Montreal had been the practitioner on the stages since 2002, a year before MySpace opened, and in Sydney Thy Art Is Murder came out of the same years with a debut EP of its own in 2008. Neither needed a Californian postcode. Both needed the page.
What the second row left on the floor
Several of these bands came apart within a year or two of their best-known records. The rout came fast: Elysia split in 2008, Salt the Wound announced its end in October 2009, See You Next Tuesday stopped the same year, and Knights of the Abyss lost most of its original members at the start of 2009. The ordnance outlived the bands. Their records went on being passed between friends long after the pages that carried them had gone quiet, burned copies of burned copies, a xerox of a xerox.
Some of the threads are still pulled tight. In July 2022, fifteen years after Dead in My Arms, Carnifex released a new recording of "Lie to My Face" with Adam Warren of Oceano singing on it, two bands of the same class on one track, and when Oceano toured the fifteenth anniversary of Depths in 2024, I Declare War was on the bill. That is the same friend list, still answering.
The bands at the top of the row are where most histories of the genre stop, and the bands in the second and third rows are where the genre actually spread, a scene of small labels, borrowed singers, home-recorded demos and tours booked by people who had met through a comment wall. For the rest of the history, the decade after these records is where the template the second row had copied, bent and toured to exhaustion turned into a craft with branches of its own.
