Booked into Blue Light Audio Media in Phoenix in May 2005, with Cory Spotts at the desk, six tracks to cut and a first pressing that nobody but the five of them was ever going to pay for, the Glendale teenagers who would turn the deathcore EP into the yardstick an entire scene was measured by were Job for a Cowboy, and the room held nothing a record label had bought: no advance, no A&R man, no deadline but the band's own.
Twenty-three minutes came out of it. That was enough.
Released in December 2005, first in a pressing the band put out itself and then through King of the Monsters, a small label in Scottsdale, Doom went out exactly as it was cut, and within a few months the plays piling up on one profile page had shredded the stack of unopened demo envelopes that every label mailroom in America still kept by the door. The record was the opening case. It was not the only one, and it was not an accident of one band's luck.
Across the four years of the scene that grew online, from a Riverside disc in September 2005 to a Sydney one in August 2008, the deathcore EP was not a stopgap between a demo and an album. It was the format the scene ran on, and it ran on it because every constraint the bands faced pointed at the same length: the money, the player on the page, the slot on the bill and the label's appetite for a sample before a contract.
Why the deathcore EP was the right size
Money came first. An album meant ten songs or more, days in a room billed by the hour and a run of discs with a printed booklet, while an EP meant five or six songs, a few days with an engineer and discs that could go out in whatever packaging the band could afford. Released on 18 May 2006 by Enclave, the first EP by Carnifex shows how far down that floor went. Five songs, nineteen minutes.
The page did the rest of the arithmetic. A MySpace band profile in 2006 carried a maximum of four uploaded tracks, so a band with twelve songs was carrying eight it could not show anyone. The songs fought for those slots like six plugs fighting over the four-outlet power strip behind a drum riser, the loser yanked out by its cord mid-chord whenever someone needed the socket, and the songs that kept their place were the ones that got to the drop before a visitor reached for the back button.
With a first EP pressed as an Enhanced CD by Third Degree, a label from its own home town, out on 30 September 2005 and carrying four studio songs, one live track and a QuickTime video of that live track for anyone with a computer, the Riverside band that put its profile page into plastic was Suicide Silence. A year to the day later, In at the Deep End reissued it in Britain.
Then the stage. An opening band on a five-band bill in a VFW hall rarely got more than half an hour, and the format was cut to the shape of that slot: a kitchen timer wound to twenty minutes and gaffer-taped to the monitor desk by a stage manager pushing five bands through one night, six songs each racing to its breakdown before the dial had turned a notch, the last drop hammering the desk until the timer shook loose of its tape, hit the floor among the cables and rang there, under the low string, where nobody in the room heard the time run out.
Doom runs twenty-three minutes. The New Reign runs twenty-one and a half. An opening set and an EP were the same object.
The merch table finished the case, and it made the EP the most immediate format the scene had. A disc that short could be pressed cheaply enough to sit beside the shirts at a price a kid with door money left over would pay, and every copy that went home in a back pocket was a page view that did not need a computer, played in a car on the drive back and lent to whoever sat in the passenger seat.
An opening set and an EP were the same object.
| Band | EP | Released | Label | What it held | The album after it |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bring Me the Horizon | This Is What the Edge of Your Seat Was Made For | September 2004 | Thirty Days of Night | 18:27, a first run of 1,000 copies | Count Your Blessings, 2006 |
| Suicide Silence | Suicide Silence | September 2005 | Third Degree | Four studio songs, one live, 16:14 | The Cleansing, 2007 |
| Job for a Cowboy | Doom | December 2005 | Self-pressed, then King of the Monsters | Six tracks, about 23 minutes | Genesis, 2007 |
| Carnifex | Carnifex | May 2006 | Enclave | Five songs, 19:08 | Dead in My Arms, 2007 |
| Born of Osiris | The New Reign | October 2007 | Sumerian | Eight songs, 21:31 | A Higher Place, 2009 |
| Chelsea Grin | Chelsea Grin | July 2008 | Download first, CD on Statik Factory | Five songs, 14:03 | Desolation of Eden, 2010 |
| Thy Art Is Murder | Infinite Death | August 2008 | Skull and Bones | Five songs, under 18 minutes | The Adversary, 2010 |
The EP as the audition
An album asked a label to believe in a band. An EP only asked it to listen, and a label could hear what a band was before spending anything on what it might become. Doom did its auditioning in public: on a profile page that piled up millions of views, and by June 2006 Metal Blade had signed the band and put the EP back in the shops with a bonus track.
Cut twice inside ten months, once in May 2006 on the self-titled disc and again before the end of that year on Love Lies in Ashes, which Acropolisrpm released on 13 March 2007, the San Diego band that treated the EP as a rehearsal for the contract was Carnifex, and in March 2007 This City Is Burning signed it and sent it in to make Dead in My Arms. Between the two discs two members had walked out in September 2006. The second EP was the new line-up's tryout as much as the band's.
The EP was also a draft nobody had to finish. "My Heart in Atrophy" on the 2006 disc shares its title with a song on Dead in My Arms and nothing else: two different songs, one name, the first one scrapped for parts.
Recording Infinite Death with Brendan van Ryn on vocals and lyrics, and putting it out in August 2008 through Skull and Bones on CD, the Western Sydney band that then posted the whole EP on its MySpace page was Thy Art Is Murder. A first pressing from a label in Brisbane only went as far as the post. The page went as far as a click.
"Infinite Death", the title song, closes the EP, the last of five tracks that all sit between three and four minutes, which is the whole design of the format in one tracklist: no intro piece, no long closer, nothing a stranger would have to wait through. Under eighteen minutes end to end, the disc was an opening set pressed to plastic, short enough for a stranger to take whole before the next band finished loading in.
Credited entirely to the drummer Cameron Losch and released by Sumerian on 2 October 2007, The New Reign was an audition of a stranger kind, an EP issued by a label that had already signed the band, a first record that functioned as the label's sample of its own house sound. What that house became is the subject of Sumerian Records and the sound of late-2000s deathcore, and Born of Osiris waited until 2009 to follow it with an album.
Is Job for a Cowboy deathcore?
The question has a mechanical answer, and it splits at a date. Doom is built from the parts the genre is built from: songs of four to five minutes that drive toward a half-time drop, a low growl, and the pig squeal that Jonny Davy used on that record and dropped for Genesis. Every half-time drop on it lands like a loaded barbell dumped from lockout onto the plywood platform in somebody's garage, the plates jumping off the boards and the concrete underneath taking what the plywood could not.
"Knee Deep", the fourth of the six tracks at four and a half minutes, found a second life by a route no label could have planned, a fan's video edit rather than a radio play. Cosmo Lee's review at AllMusic called the EP competent and built on sounds rather than songs. The sounds were the point. They were exactly the parts other bands could lift.
Then the band took the parts off. Genesis, released by Metal Blade on 15 May 2007, is the record on which Job for a Cowboy changed its style to death metal, a scorched earth rewrite of its own sound in which the breakdown, the core half of the word, was cut back hard from there on. The squeal went with it. What remained was a death metal band that had started somewhere else.
So why not have the die hards have something to get excited about to get their hands on?
Jonny Davy, interviewed by Mike Meyer, Phoenix New Times, 7 June 2011
The clearest proof is another EP. Recorded with Jason Suecof at AudioHammer in Sanford, Florida, and issued on 7 June 2011 as a mail-order disc limited to 2,500 physical copies, Gloom is technical death metal from end to end, and it turned the format of 2005 inside out: Doom had been a cheap record built to reach everyone, Gloom a scarce one built for the people who already owned everything else. Davy explained the limit by the volume of illegal downloading. Same length, opposite job.
"Beyond the Chemical Doorway", the song Metal Blade put out with an official video ahead of Moon Healer in 2024, belongs to the progressive death metal the band began on Sun Eater in 2014, a long way from the sound of Doom. So the answer to whether Job for a Cowboy is deathcore is that Doom is, and the band, since the spring of 2007, is not.
Draft first, album second: the songs that came back
An EP was a draft the scene was allowed to sell, and the clearest evidence is how many of its songs were recorded a second time. Putting out five songs as a download on 27 July 2008 and only later as a CD through Statik Factory, with "Recreant" added, the Salt Lake City quintet that had a record out before it had a contract was Chelsea Grin, and "Cheyne Stokes" and "Recreant" were both re-recorded for Desolation of Eden in February 2010, by a band that had added a third guitarist in between.
Other bands did the same arithmetic. Winds of Plague had put out A Cold Day in Hell in 2005 and re-recorded several of its songs for Decimate the Weak in 2008, and Suicide Silence re-recorded "Ending Is the Beginning", the opening song of the 2005 disc, for You Can't Stop Me in 2014. The early version was never thrown away. It was rebuilt.
Some bands rebuilt the whole thing. On 24 February 2017 Sumerian released The Eternal Reign, a complete re-recording of The New Reign for its tenth anniversary, with one song, "Glorious Day", that had been meant for the 2007 disc and left off. Chelsea Grin reissued its own EP in January 2015 as a signed digipak limited to 1,000 copies. The audition had become an heirloom.
The British side of the story went the other way and took longer. Released on 25 September 2004 by Thirty Days of Night in a first run of 1,000 copies, then by Visible Noise in Britain in January 2005 and by Earache in the United States in September 2007, This Is What the Edge of Your Seat Was Made For by Bring Me the Horizon stayed in print across three labels and three years while the band itself was already moving on to Count Your Blessings and away from the sound.
The format outlived the page that made it necessary. MySpace lost twelve years of the music uploaded to it and the four slots stopped mattering, and in 2021 Lorna Shore put "To the Hellfire" out on ...And I Return to Nothingness, an EP of three songs released on 13 August that year, the record behind the clip that carried the second wave. The Glendale war party of 2005 had worked out what a band needed to be heard. Sixteen years later the answer still came in under half an hour.
Played back in order, the records of those four years make a single case. A band in this music was judged on its first twenty minutes, by a page, a promoter, a label and a kid at a folding table, and the bands that understood that early were the ones still recording when the albums came. The chroniclers of the genre usually start with the albums. The genre started with the hardcore seven inch rebuilt for the CD age, a disc that was short on purpose and sold from the floor.
