Deathcore never had a year zero, only handovers, and the deathcore timeline is the record of who passed the sound to whom. Counted from a 1985 magazine review that pinned the word on a New York crossover band to a summer of 2026 in which bands formed during the lockdowns were rebuilding the high, ringing snare of the MySpace years on purpose, it runs through a dozen years that each tore the music out of one set of hands and shoved it into the next, from Texas and Orange County to Montreal and Oakland, from Montreal to a free profile page, from the profile page onto the Billboard 200, and from a dead social network onto a phone screen in a locked bedroom.
The band from Montreal that split one microphone between a growl and a squeal and dragged a half-time drop under both was Despised Icon, and its record of 2005 is the hinge the whole calendar swings on. The years before it are rehearsals. The years after it are the succession.
Picture the strip of masking tape along the bottom of the mixing desk in any club on the circuit, where the engineer writes the channel names in marker every night, kick, snare, two guitars, a low voice and a high one, and peels the old strip off with a thumbnail before the next band loads in; twenty years of those strips torn away and kicked under the desk would carry the same handful of words almost every night, with a third guitar scrawled on in 2007 and a laptop line marked for strings and choir after 2020, and the breakdown never once needing a channel of its own, because the breakdown is what every channel on the desk does at the same moment.
The labels on the tape barely change. The rooms do.
Before 2002: a word, three records and a Bay Area band
The word came first and pointed at the wrong music. In 1985 it turned up in Bernard Doe's review of the Mayhemic Destruction demo by N.Y.C. Mayhem for the British magazine Metal Forces, and in December 1996 Terrorizer printed it again, with Nick Terry offering it for the metallic hardcore of Earth Crisis and Merauder. Neither use had a blast beat underneath it.
The sound turned up in 1998 and 1999, in three states at once. Pressed by Solid State, the metal arm of the Christian label Tooth and Nail, Embrace the Eternal by Embodyment put death metal riffs, a guttural voice and hardcore breakdowns on one disc in 1998, Eighteen Visions followed with Yesterday Is Time Killed on Cedargate in March 1999, and Prayer for Cleansing put out Rain in Endless Fall on Tribunal that June, three bands who never shared a stage each wrenching death metal riffs into a hardcore set until the hinges gave, and how those parts reached them is the story of the origins of deathcore.
None of the three stayed. Embodyment lightened up on its next album, Prayer for Cleansing broke up in 2000, and Eighteen Visions were putting melodic vocals into nearly every song by 2002.
Formed in December 1999 by former members of the Bay Area crust punk band Y.F.H., and on record in 2001 with See Through These Eyes, an album it carried across the United States in 2001 with End of All and Boof, the band that held the hybrid together across the turn of the century was Antagony. Ben Orum played guitar in it from the start, helped found All Shall Perish in Oakland in 2002 and stayed in Antagony until 2004. Two bands, one guitarist, no gap.
2002 to 2005: Montreal, Oakland and a website
Founded in Montreal in January 2002 and on record that October with Consumed by Your Poison for the local label Galy, Despised Icon set two singers trading the low and the high inside one bar, while in the Bay Area All Shall Perish pressed Hate . Malice . Revenge through the Japanese label Amputated Vein on 19 August 2003, and across Montreal Ion Dissonance released Breathing Is Irrelevant on Willowtip on 2 September 2003, its riffs veering off toward the odd metres that mathcore would later claim.
The month before that Montreal record, in August 2003, MySpace went live. In December a group of teenagers in Glendale, Arizona, formed Job for a Cowboy.
Then 2005 locked the parts together. Signed worldwide by Century Media in January and on record on 5 April with The Healing Process, Despised Icon drove blast beats through the verses and split them open into drops a hardcore floor could use; Nuclear Blast put Hate . Malice . Revenge back into print the same year; and late in 2005 the Glendale band released the Doom EP, carried by King of the Monsters, an independent label in Scottsdale. Which of those bands earns the credit is the quarrel over who invented deathcore, and the calendar alone will not end it.
What the calendar does show is speed. Three years separated a Montreal debut on a local label from a desert EP that copied the same order of parts.
2006 to 2010: the MySpace class reaches the charts
Metal Blade signed Job for a Cowboy in June 2006 off an EP and a profile page. Bring Me the Horizon put out Count Your Blessings on Visible Noise on 30 October 2006, and the same year Ash Avildsen founded Sumerian Records, the label that would gather the progressive end of the sound.
Then came 2007, the loudest year on the calendar. Genesis, released on 15 May, entered the Billboard 200 at number 54; Despised Icon released The Ills of Modern Man a week later and told MTV News on 8 June that it wanted nothing to do with the word; the first Summer Slaughter tour set out that June; Whitechapel released The Somatic Defilement on 31 July, through Siege of Amida in Europe and Candlelight in North America; and on 18 September Suicide Silence put out The Cleansing on Century Media, which sold 7,250 copies in its first week and entered at number 94.
The package tours of those summers ran like the strokes a bassist gouges into the paint inside a van door with a screwdriver, one for every show, four standing upright and the fifth slashed across them all, and the fifth stroke is the breakdown, four counts of chug and then the line that cuts straight through every one of them.
Winds of Plague brought a full-time keyboard player to Century Media with Decimate the Weak on 5 February 2008, Carnifex climbed to number 19 on the Heatseekers chart with The Diseased and the Poisoned on 24 June, and Whitechapel's This Is Exile, out on Metal Blade on 8 July, entered the Billboard 200 at number 118, by Lambgoat's count.
| Released | Band, record | Label | Entry |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15 May 2007 | Job for a Cowboy, Genesis | Metal Blade | 54 |
| 18 September 2007 | Suicide Silence, The Cleansing | Century Media | 94 |
| 8 July 2008 | Whitechapel, This Is Exile | Metal Blade | 118 |
| 30 June 2009 | Suicide Silence, No Time to Bleed | Century Media | 32 |
| 8 June 2010 | Whitechapel, A New Era of Corruption | Metal Blade | 43 |
| 12 July 2011 | Suicide Silence, The Black Crown | Century Media | 28 |
| 29 April 2014 | Whitechapel, Our Endless War | Metal Blade | 10 |
The climb ran on into 2009. Released on 30 June, No Time to Bleed took Suicide Silence to number 32, higher than any other record of that class had gone, and in July Job for a Cowboy walked out toward plain death metal with Ruination. In May comScore counted more American visitors on Facebook than on MySpace for the first time.
The founders paid first. Despised Icon announced its break-up on 7 April 2010 in a statement posted, fittingly, on MySpace, while Whitechapel reached number 43 with A New Era of Corruption on 8 June and that summer the Warped Tour put Suicide Silence, Whitechapel and Bring Me the Horizon in front of crowds who had come for something else.
Every handover broke something on the way, and not once was it the breakdown.
2011 to 2019: the deathcore timeline splits into branches
Released on 12 July 2011 with Jonathan Davis of Korn as a guest, The Black Crown took Suicide Silence to number 28, and Whitechapel answered with a self-titled record in June 2012. In October 2012 Thy Art Is Murder, from Blacktown in western Sydney, put Hate into the Australian albums chart at number 35. Nuclear Blast signed the band three months later.
On 1 November 2012 Mitch Lucker, the singer of Suicide Silence, died after a motorcycle crash in Huntington Beach, California. He was 28. The band played a memorial show with guest singers in Pomona on 21 December 2012, and in October 2013 it named Eddie Hermida of All Shall Perish as its singer.
Lorna Shore released Maleficium, its third EP, on 20 December 2013. Density Records reissued it in March 2014. Opening on "Godmaker", the record dragged black metal into a New Jersey band that had never let it in before, and Carnifex kicked the same door wider on Die Without Hope, released by Nuclear Blast on 4 March 2014; a month earlier, on 4 February, Despised Icon had announced it would play again.
Whitechapel entered the American top ten with Our Endless War on 29 April 2014, Thy Art Is Murder released Holy War in June 2015 and took it to number 7 in Australia, and the branches started to grow away from the trunk. The slam road ran through Ingested in Manchester and through Signs of the Swarm, formed in Pittsburgh in 2014. The downtempo road reached its first album on 4 September 2015, when Century Media released The Unconquerable Dark by Black Tongue, riffs slowed until each chord came down like a ten-pound hammer swung into the hood of a junked car at a scene fundraiser, a dollar a swing, the dents counting off the beat one by one.
The quarrel of the decade broke in February 2017. Released by Nuclear Blast on 24 February, recorded with Ross Robinson, the self-titled Suicide Silence album handed long stretches to Hermida's clean singing, and a petition launched on 4 February asking that it not be released had already passed 5,000 signatures, and the people who had bought the first four albums for their drops sent the fifth one back to the band one comment at a time. Whitechapel brought sung lines in more carefully on The Valley on 29 March 2019, Shadow of Intent self-released Melancholy on 16 August, and in October Century Media signed Lorna Shore, the last move of a decade that anyone tracing deathcore from the first demos on can see was a redoubt being built, not a retreat.
2020 to 2026: the second wave
The clubs went dark in March 2020, and the music went back to the screen it had started on. Released on 11 June 2021, the same day Lorna Shore named Will Ramos its permanent singer, "To the Hellfire" ran just over six minutes toward a closing breakdown that short video apps chopped down to seconds and fired across the world. The EP behind it, ...And I Return to Nothingness, came out on 13 August 2021, the same day Sumerian released Kostolom by Slaughter to Prevail, and Signs of the Swarm followed with Absolvere on Unique Leader on 24 September.
The second wave unarguably had more than one engine. Shadow of Intent self-released Elegy on 14 January 2022 with Blood Blast handling distribution, Lorna Shore's Pain Remains arrived on 14 October 2022 and reached number 6 in Austria, Ov Sulfur put out The Burden ov Faith on Century Media on 24 March 2023, Thy Art Is Murder released Godlike that September, and Job for a Cowboy came back with Moon Healer on 23 February 2024, a death metal record from a band whose first EP had helped start all of this.
The founders crowded 2025. Whitechapel hammered out Hymns in Dissonance on 7 March with Brandon Zackey behind the kit, Shadow of Intent released Imperium Delirium on 27 June, Slaughter to Prevail followed with Grizzly on 18 July, and on 31 October Despised Icon put out Shadow Work, twenty years after The Healing Process, with Erian and Marois still splitting the low and the high and the drop still riveted underneath them.
The first half of 2026 kept the calendar busy. Mauled, an Indianapolis band at the front of the young scene that copies the MySpace years on purpose, released When Your Eyes Are Shut on 12 March, Carnifex moved to Sumerian in May, and that same month All Shall Perish took The Price of Existence round three Texas dates to mark its twentieth year.
The shape of the years from 2002 to 2026 is plain. Nothing in them is a rise followed by a fall. The sound kept turning up in new hands after Despised Icon broke up in 2010 and after the quarrel of 2017. What changed from one stretch to the next was the road the music travelled, never the order of its parts: blast, two voices, then the drop, from a Montreal debut in 2002 to an Indianapolis record in 2026.
