Forty-five thousand dollars of shirts, and a tour that never left the driveway.
Printed ahead of a spring 2020 co-headlining run with 3Teeth, boxed and billed before a single van door slid shut, and itemised on 16 April as the largest line in a tour debt of $58,200, five weeks after the whole run had been cancelled on 12 March, the bill that showed where a deathcore band keeps its money belonged to Carnifex, and the man who posted it, with the band's total loss put above $250,000, was Scott Ian Lewis, the San Diego band's singer.
The shirts were the biggest single cost. They were also meant to be the biggest single income: by the projection Lewis posted, the tour expected $110,000 from the merch table against $107,000 in every guarantee the promoters had confirmed. It had taken fifteen years of touring, in his own account, to earn the band its highest guarantees ever. The cotton still outran the stage.
That is deathcore merch culture with the romance stripped off and the arithmetic left standing. The shirt pays for the diesel, the shirt pays the crew, the shirt walks the band's name out of the venue on a stranger's back, and when the whole itinerary was cancelled, it was the shirt that stayed behind in the boxes, a dead tonnage of black cotton with a tour printed across the back that would never be played.
Picture the shirt as a sandwich board, two sheets of painted plywood strapped over a teenager's shoulders with the band's name lettered on the front board and the back board both, and then picture him walking into the pit for the last breakdown of the night: the boards slam into every body that reaches him, the straps rip at the shoulder, a corner punches a ceiling tile clean out of its grid, and at midnight he walks across the parking lot with a split plank hanging down his back and the name still legible on it. Whatever the breakdown did to him in the room, the board carries out into the street.
That is the whole trade.
The flyer that walked out of the room
A paper flyer lasts a week on a telephone pole. A shirt lasts years, goes to school, to work and to the bus stop, and everywhere it goes it reads one band's name to people who never chose to hear it. For a genre with almost no radio, that was the media plan. Nobody wrote it down.
The MySpace years sharpened it. A profile photograph was a square the size of a stamp, the kid in it was very often wearing a band shirt, and a shirt in a profile picture was a link the kid never had to type: anyone scrolling through a friend list saw the name, looked it up and hit the autoplay. The band paid nothing to rent the space, and was paid for the privilege of filling it.
Death metal shirts had worked the other way. By the mid nineties their lettering had grown into tangles of thorn that only the initiated could pick apart, and the shirt worked as a password: a stranger who could name the band from the branches was already inside, and one who could not was meant to stay out. Deathcore's audience wore those shirts too, and the riddle stayed a badge. The deathcore band's own shirt had a different job, which was to recruit, and that is why it carried logos a stranger could read from the far side of a bus.
A password keeps people out. A flyer drags them in.
Deathcore merch culture and the arithmetic of the table
Posted to Facebook on 21 December 2015, in the year of Holy War, three years on from the album Hate and its official video for "Reign of Darkness", naming money as one of the biggest reasons and putting his own earnings and his bandmates' at between sixteen and eighteen thousand dollars each over six to seven years, the farewell that turned a deathcore singer's exit into a public argument about touring economics came from Thy Art Is Murder, and the singer who wrote that the band had been broke for years was CJ McMahon. The band answered that the support of its fans had let it carve out a small income over the previous two years. Neither side said where that income came from.
Two weeks later the sums arrived. On 6 January 2016 Digital Music News ran a reply from Derek Brewer, a manager who said he had never worked for the band, laying out a sample month for a band drawing about five hundred a night, thirty shows in a van with a trailer, and the shape of his budget is the shape of the whole economy.
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Show guarantees, 30 nights at $2,000 | $60,000 |
| Gross merch, 30 nights at $750 | $22,500 |
| Merch costs: goods, venue fees, shipping | -$9,000 |
| Management and agent commissions | -$17,025 |
| Crew, including a merch seller at $650 a week | -$10,800 |
| Van, trailer, fuel, tolls, hotels | -$11,350 |
| Production, per diems, incidentals | -$6,380 |
| Left for five musicians | $27,945, or $5,589 each |
Read it mechanically. The line items add to $54,555, though Brewer prints $52,060 once as the expense total, and the $27,945 he leaves for the band is the figure that follows from the line items. Merch is a little over a quarter of the gross, and after its own costs, its share of commission and the wage of the person selling it, it still accounts for a little over a fifth of what the five musicians take home. Strip the table out and each of them clears a little over four thousand dollars for thirty nights of breakdowns. The figures are attested by nobody but the man who drew them up. The proportion is the point.
The two accounts need not cancel out. Brewer's month assumes rooms of five hundred; a band still climbing toward them earns its shirts long before its guarantees. Every nightly sortie from the van is underwritten by a folding table, and the table is the only line on the sheet that the band itself controls.
The house takes a fifth
So the table became a fight. Venues have long taken a cut of what bands sell on their premises, commonly put at around 20 percent of gross, and it is taken off the top while the printer's bill, the shipping and the freight are still to be paid. A band carrying its own shirts, its own seller and its own risk hands a fifth of the night to a building it has already filled.
Touring North America in the support slot under Erra in the summer of 2022, behind its 2020 album A Quiet Place to Die, whose official video for "Akudama" had already gone out through SharpTone Records, and stopping a set to tell the room that the venues were taking 20 percent of everything the bands on the bill sold, the singer who told the crowd to spend its money on a shirt rather than at the bar was Lochie Keogh, and his band was Alpha Wolf, out of the heavy end of Australian metalcore. Nobody in the room needed the economics explained.
The mechanism behind his request is simple. The last breakdown of a set works on the room like a fist slammed on the glass of the pinball machine in the club lobby: the machine locks out, the flippers go dead, and every ball on the playfield rolls down past them into the one hole at the bottom, and at the bottom of a deathcore room that hole is the merch table, where the line forms within a minute of the final hit. The song sends the crowd to the shirts. The building takes its fifth off the line.
The song sends the crowd to the shirts. The building takes its fifth off the line.
That is why a band defends the table harder than any other part of the night. The stage belongs to the promoter and the schedule to the curfew; the table is the band's own garrison at the back of the hall, the only ground in the building where it sets the terms.
5XL, the joke that knows the sums
Every working economy grows a joke about itself, and this one grew a shirt size. The 5XL gag is the scene reading its own receipt out loud, and nobody on record owns it. Underneath the punchline sits the arithmetic of the table: a band that lives on cotton ends up telling its jokes in cotton.
Nobody buys a 5XL to fit it. A fan who takes the largest size off the rack is buying the joke and the shirt in one sale, and the sale lands on the same sheet as every other line of the night. Whoever does it is making a statement about loyalty, and knows exactly what the money does at the table.
What the shirt shares the job with
The rest of the outfit had other jobs. What the swoop, the snakebites and the skinny jeans were for, under bad club lights and on small profile pictures, is the history of deathcore fashion, and it is a story about being seen. The shirt is about being read, and being paid.
Sleeves, logos, pits, jokes and the tables that pay for the vans are the working parts of deathcore culture, and each points back at the moment in the song that moves the crowd.
The screen took over part of the job in the 2010s: a clip reaches whoever is awake at two in the morning, and the long road of deathcore music videos from cheap warehouse shoots to film sets is the same trade carried onto a phone. The shirt never stopped selling. It just found company.
What the table kept alive
Carnifex came through. Its Bury Me in Blasphemy EP had come out on 7 December 2018 with an official video for the title track through Nuclear Blast, World War X followed in August 2019, the band kept touring and recording after the spring of 2020, and Lewis wrote at the time that it would survive with the help of its fans and its label. The fans, in practice, meant the table.
So the shirt is not a souvenir. It is a wage, an advertisement and a membership card in one object, bought at the back of a room by people who understand all three. A band in this genre stays on the road on the receipt for the shirt as much as on the ticket, and the music's job, every night, is to fill the line that writes it.
