Sheffield, 2003. A singer not yet out of his teens is still living in his parents' house, Pirates of the Caribbean has just reached the cinemas, and near the end of the film Johnny Depp's captain, back at the wheel of his own ship, tells his crew to bring him that horizon. One word got bent on the way into a band. Lifted out of a summer blockbuster, sanded down by a single article so that "that" became "the", and then stamped across the shirts and, three years later, across the sleeve of the debut Count Your Blessings, the line now belongs to Bring Me the Horizon. The teenager who bent it was Oli Sykes. He explained it to David Marchese of SPIN on 22 November 2010: the quote stood in for a teenager's wish to tour and see the world.
That is the range deathcore band names come from. Off a screen, out of a comic, from an execution, from a dead end, from a line half remembered. The source is rarely grand, and it rarely matters for long. On a record the name sits over the painting, and the story of deathcore album art starts where the lettering ends.
A name works like the closet door that every house show sooner or later unscrews from its frame and lays across two milk crates in the basement as the merch table. It came out of some room upstairs, a bedroom, a hallway, a bathroom, and by the end of its first summer it has been gouged by belt buckles, scorched by a soldering iron at the cable repair corner, soaked in energy drink and split down the middle by the breakdown that kicked one crate out from under it, so that the kid selling shirts across it in August cannot say which room it hung in. The room stops mattering. The crack is what everybody remembers.
The room stops mattering. The crack is what everybody remembers.
Deathcore band names lifted from screens and pages
The game shelf holds the next case. Formed in Connecticut in 2013 as a two-man studio project with programmed drums, and writing its first records around the Halo novels, where the Shadow of Intent is a Covenant assault carrier, the duo of Ben Duerr at the microphone and Chris Wiseman on guitar was Shadow of Intent. The name and the story sit on one shelf.
Picture a basement where that name would sit: four televisions daisy-chained on a system-link cable for an all-night Halo session, a band rehearsing on the other side of the wall, and the first breakdown shaking the floor so hard that a kid jumps up, his boot snags the cable, rips it out of the back of a console and freezes every screen in the room on the same frame. That is what the drop does to a crowd. Everything stops at once, and then everything moves again.
The comic shelf supplied the next. Named, as its singer Kyle Anderson told the Knotfest interview series Mosh Talks in a piece published on 29 January 2021, after his favourite manga of all time, Kentaro Miura's Berserk, where the Brand of Sacrifice is the cursed mark, the Toronto band that took the title for its own was Brand of Sacrifice. Anderson called Berserk the death metal of anime or manga. "Demon King", from the album Lifeblood in 2021, shows the bargain from the other side: nobody in a pit has to have read a page of Miura for the mark to land, because the riff does the explaining.
Film fed the song titles as freely as the band names. Released by Sumerian on 6 April 2010, carrying a track called "Carlito's Way" after Brian De Palma's gangster picture of 1993, and dragging a gangster picture's title onto the track list of a Texas debut, The World Is Ours came from the San Antonio band whose own name is a full prepositional phrase, Upon a Burning Body. The video store was a library. The whole scene kept a card.
The good names were all taken
The other way to get a name was to run out of options. Speaking to Mike R. Meyer of College Times in an interview Blabbermouth carried on 22 May 2008, two and a half years after the Doom EP of 2005 had made the band's name, the Arizona singer who called his own band's name "a curse in many ways" and said he would change it if it were not too late was Jonny Davy of Job for a Cowboy. His account was blunt. The band had tried generic metal name after generic metal name, found every one of them taken, and Job for a Cowboy popped up.
Sykes added in the same SPIN piece that names with "killing" in them were overdone in metal, and between them the two singers describe a shelf that was already crowded by the middle of the 2000s. A name taken by default behaves like a trucker hat bought at a truck stop on the first tour, pulled on at the first show because it was there, and still on the singer's head a few hundred shows later with the brim snapped by a stage diver's heel on a breakdown and a salt line baked into the foam, welded on so long that taking it off now would look like a disguise.
| Band | Where the name came from | Who said so, and when |
|---|---|---|
| Bring Me the Horizon | A line near the end of Pirates of the Caribbean, slightly changed | Oli Sykes, SPIN, 22 November 2010 |
| Job for a Cowboy | What was left after every generic metal name turned out to be taken | Jonny Davy, College Times, May 2008 |
| Brand of Sacrifice | Kentaro Miura's Berserk, the singer's favourite manga of all time | Kyle Anderson, Knotfest Mosh Talks, 29 January 2021 |
| Emmure | Immurement, execution by walling a prisoner in | Announcement of Hindsight, 29 May 2020 |
| Thy Art Is Murder | No further meaning: the name has become associated with the music the way a brand identity would | Andy Marsh, Acta Infernalis, 13 September 2023 |
Executioners, gods and the walled-up prisoner
A whole wing of the genre wears the vocabulary of punishment. The Latin word for an executioner is carnifex, and the word is the name that the San Diego County band formed in 2005 has carried through two decades and a hiatus: Carnifex. When the announcement of the album Hindsight went out on 29 May 2020, the text said the name of Emmure referenced immurement, the old execution in which a prisoner is bricked into a wall and left there. A Chelsea grin is another name for the Glasgow smile, the cut from the corners of the mouth, and the Salt Lake City band that put it on a 2008 EP was Chelsea Grin.
An executioner, a sealed wall, a cut mouth. Three names, one job. Each one fires a salvo at a stranger flicking through a record shop rack and tells him what kind of record to expect before a single bar has played, the way a singer's raised hand tells a floor that the drop is one count away.
Myth turns up in the same habit from the other side. The Chicago-area band Born of Osiris went through several names, Rosecrance among them, before settling in 2007 on one that holds the Egyptian god of the dead. The lineage of that name runs through the ones the band dropped.
When the name outlives the people who chose it
Some bands stop asking what the name means. Asked by Acta Infernalis in an interview published on 13 September 2023, nine days before Godlike came out, how he connects the name to the music, the guitarist who has played lead for the Blacktown band since 2010 answered that the name has come to stand for the music the way a brand identity might, with no further meaning, and the man who said so was Andy Marsh of Thy Art Is Murder. That is an honest creed for a band name. The music fills it.
For Suicide Silence the name became a question of loyalty. Mitch Lucker died on 1 November 2012 after a motorcycle crash in Huntington Beach. In January 2014 the guitarist Chris Garza told Music Feeds that keeping the name going kept Mitch alive, and that changing it would have been completely disrespectful to him. Eddie Hermida, from All Shall Perish, had been named Suicide Silence's new singer in October 2013.
The record shows what that decision meant in practice. Put out by Nuclear Blast as a digital release on 23 October 2015, built around the single "Sacred Words" and three live tracks from the band's RockPart Festival set in Hungary on 9 August 2015, and hauling the full Riverside tonnage of the old name onto every stage the new line-up walked onto, the EP Sacred Words carried that name over a new voice. The name held. The singer was new.
A rename leaves its own paper trail, and the demos and shirts printed under a dropped first name belong with what deathcore collectors chase.
Phrases, orders and the long names
Look at the names as a set and one habit stands out: a lot of them are sentences. Bring Me the Horizon is an order. Make Them Suffer is an order. I Declare War is a declaration, Slaughter to Prevail a plan, Here Comes the Kraken a warning, Fit for an Autopsy a verdict, and Through the Eyes of the Dead, War from a Harlots Mouth, A Night in Texas and Signs of the Swarm read like the titles of songs that have not been written yet. None of them reads as a joke. Each one can be shouted across a parking lot and understood.
That is the mechanical point under all of it. A deathcore song is built to deliver one instruction to a crowd, drop now, and a name that already sounds like an instruction fits on the same shirt. The pirate film, the manga and the dead end of taken names were only where the words were found. What made them stick was the music that came after them.
