February 1985, Inner Ear Studios: four musicians from Washington, D.C. set up in one small room facing each other, with no separation between the amplifiers, the lights off and a strobe going, and tracked the music live, in Guy Picciotto's own words, until the improvised ending of the last track ran the tape off its reels.
Recording in the dark, releasing its only album through Dischord in June 1985 with Ian MacKaye and Michael Hampton producing, and hauling hardcore's fury toward melody and confession until the old two-minute formula came off its hinges, the four-piece that handed a new word its first evidence was Rites of Spring. The press called it emocore, emotional hardcore. The musicians hated the name.
Twenty years later another hardcore descendant got mistaken for that one. Is deathcore emo? No. The two share a grandparent, and between 2006 and 2010 they shared an audience, a look and a website, but the music leaves hardcore by opposite doors, and every part you can check says so.
Picture the photo booth in the lobby of an all-ages hall, working a double bill. It prints the same strip for every face behind its curtain: the flat-ironed fringe, the black eyeliner, the ring in the lip, the band shirt, four frames of a look that the emo bill and the deathcore bill bought at the same counter. Then the deathcore band drops its first breakdown on a string tuned down to A, the lobby wall takes the hit, and the booth walks off its levelling feet, rips its curtain rail out of the brackets and spits out a fifth frame of pure blur. The camera caught the haircut. It never stood a chance against the breakdown.
Is deathcore emo? How the MySpace years crossed the wires
The look crossed first. The scene style grew out of the emo subculture in the American early 2000s, and the music it gathered up ran from metalcore, crunkcore and pop punk to, by the middle of the decade, deathcore, which is a list of what one audience played on its profile pages rather than a family tree. The fringe came from emo's side of the room. The breakdown came from the other side.
The words for that audience's music piled up faster than anyone could sort them. The Village Voice wrote MySpace emo in February 2007, in a piece on Hellogoodbye, as a genre name for what came off the profile pages, and the labels kept multiplying because the same listeners clicked through emo, screamo, metalcore and deathcore pages in a single sitting. A name made for a crowd got read as a name for a sound.
Deathcore's quarrel with every neighbour it gets mistaken for has its place in the story, and in each case the confusion started with company rather than parts. The record that shows the company best is not a deathcore record at all.
Cut in Connersville, Indiana, between May and June 2009 with Joey Sturgis producing, released by Sumerian on 15 September 2009 and filed by Alternative Press as scene music with emo and screamo inside it, the English debut that packed death growls, drop-tuned open-note breakdowns, clean choruses and synthesizer leads onto a single disc was Stand Up and Scream by Asking Alexandria. It is the mix-up in one package. To an emo fan the growl and the breakdown sounded brutal; to a death metal fan the sung hook and the trance lead sounded like scene music. What separates it from deathcore is simple. It hands its chorus to a clean voice.
Post-hardcore and the scream that shares the microphone
Post-hardcore is the neighbour most often filed beside deathcore by mistake, and its division of labour explains why the mistake never survives a careful listen.
Recorded in February 2004 at James Paul Wisner's home studio and released by Solid State on 15 June 2004, the Florida record that split its vocals between a screamer at the front of the stage and a drummer who took the melody was They're Only Chasing Safety by Underoath, with Spencer Chamberlain screaming and Aaron Gillespie answering him in a clean voice.
"Reinventing Your Exit", the lead single in February 2005, is the trade in miniature. The scream drives the verse, the sung line takes the chorus, and the two voices pass the song back and forth like a duet. In post-hardcore the scream is half of a conversation. In deathcore it is half of a different one, a high shriek answered by a low growl, and the song is not waiting on a tune.
Two years later the same band put out Define the Great Line on Tooth & Nail on 20 June 2006, and an AllMusic review heard heavy drop D riffing under its emo pop leanings. Drop D lowers the bottom string by a single whole step, and that is where deathcore's guitars only begin their descent.
Tuning and the breakdown: one retunes to ring, the other to hit
Released by Polyvinyl in September 1999 after a May session with Brendan Gamble producing, the Illinois trio's debut that put nearly every song in an alternate tuning and left the open strings to ring, one of emo's cornerstones, is American Football, by the band of the same name, American Football.
That is what emo does with tuning. The open strings are left to shimmer, a chord hangs in the air, and the song breathes between quiet and loud. Deathcore retunes for the opposite reason.
Emo retunes sideways, for colour. Deathcore retunes downward, for impact.
Shown in a Premier Guitar rig rundown on 21 September 2022, the guitarist whose seven-string Music Man guitars carry the songs in drop A and drop G for Chelsea Grin is Stephen Rutishauser. A, on that bottom string, sits a fifth below the lowest note of standard tuning. At that depth the string stops behaving like a note and starts behaving like a drum.
The deathcore breakdown is built on exactly that: a single palm-muted note on the low open string, repeated in lockstep with the kick drum at half time, with the whole tonnage of the band set down on each hit. Post-hardcore has breakdowns too, and hardcore wrote the textbook for them, but the twinkling emo of American Football has no use for one, and a breakdown in drop D sounds like a door shutting where one in drop A sounds like a floor caving in under the stage.
The growl, the blast and the rare clean chorus
The voice settles what the tuning starts. Deathcore's low vocal is not a melody sung roughly. It is a growl, set against a high scream and sometimes a pig squeal, and on the drop it works like a touring van drifting onto the rumble strip of a two-lane highway after midnight: a roar with no pitch in it coming straight up through the floor pan, shaking the bolts out of the seat rails and springing the latches on every hardware case in the back. An emo chorus is written to be sung back. A growl is written to be felt.
Then the riffing. Tremolo-picked runs over a blast beat and the chromatic crawl along the low strings came into deathcore straight off death metal records, and that low chromatic riff is no part of emo's vocabulary. The San Diego screamo of Heroin and Antioch Arrow in the early 1990s pushed hardcore toward dissonance and dynamics. Deathcore pushed it headlong into Suffocation. That descent is the schism, and it is beyond dispute on any record from either side.
The exception proves the count. Released by Nuclear Blast in September 2008 and entering the Billboard 200 at number 126 on just under five thousand copies in its first week, the Oakland-recorded album that let a clean voice into deathcore songs was Awaken the Dreamers by All Shall Perish, and its title track carries sung vocals, a rarity in the genre. The clean line arrives as a guest inside a song still built on the growl and the breakdown. In post-hardcore it owns the chorus. Here it is let in once, and the blast beat is waiting for it on the way out.
The emo label still gets thrown at the genre as a jab, and the jab belongs with the bigger question of why is deathcore hated, which turns out to be about parts rather than looks.
So deathcore is not emo, and it is not post-hardcore either. For a few years it shared their audience, their platform and their clothes. What it never shared is the music. Emo tunes its guitars to ring and gives its chorus to a singer. Post-hardcore splits the microphone between a scream and a sung hook. Deathcore drops to A, keeps the hook away from any clean voice, and builds every song toward a breakdown that a growl rides all the way down. Same family. Opposite direction.
