On 27 September 2023, at the first show of a European tour in Oberhausen, a singer from Knoxville, Tennessee, walked out in front of Thy Art Is Murder. Recruited from a Brisbane band he had fronted since 2019, already heard on the band's new record before anyone had been told his name, and carrying the low growl that the Blacktown five had been hammering into club floors since 2009, the singer who took the microphone that night was Tyler Miller, and the band he had left behind was Aversions Crown. One scene had swallowed half of another. Nobody in it was surprised.
That is the shape of Australian deathcore, and it is why its bands read more like a roster than a ranking. Spread across a continent where the drive between two capital cities can take two days, the bands of the Australian wave kept handing each other singers, bassists, producers and support slots, and the same few labels kept picking them up, so that a band from Melbourne, a band from Perth and a band from Brisbane often turn out to share a guitarist, a studio or a European tour. The account of where the scenes grew puts Australia on the map through one band from Blacktown. The rest of the evidence is in the records of the bands around it.
After the last flight of the night the oversize baggage belt at a domestic terminal runs like this: flight cases come down the steel chute one after another and slam onto the plates, a Perth band's guitar case wedged against a Sydney band's amplifier head, latches torn off, corners caved in, and the belt drags the whole pile round together so that whoever is waiting at the far end picks up whatever arrives, a bassist one year, a singer the next, a producer's hard drive the year after that. Inside every case is the same low-tuned breakdown. Packed by one band, unpacked by another.
Before Blacktown: The Red Shore and the Melbourne technical bands
Some of the earliest Australian deathcore records came out of Victoria, and they came out technical. The Red Shore formed in Geelong in 2004, issued the Salvaging Whats Left EP in 2006 and is filed by Metal Archives under technical deathcore. In Melbourne, Hiroshima Will Burn left a single full-length, To the Weight of All Things, in 2009.
The Red Shore was on the Christmas Carnage tour with All Shall Perish when its minibus left the Pacific Highway near Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, at about 7am on 19 December 2007, the morning after a show in Brisbane. The singer, Damien Morris, and the band's driver and merchandiser, Andy Milner, died.
The band was partway through recording its first album at the time. Unconsecrated came out in November 2008, with Siege of Amida carrying it in Europe, and the band kept the three songs Morris had finished; Jamie Hope, who had played bass, sang the rest. Guest vocals came from Eddie Hermida, Karl Schubach of Misery Signals and Brandan Schieppati of Bleeding Through. Two more records followed, Lost Verses, a set of older songs re-recorded, in 2009 and The Avarice of Man in 2010, before the band stopped in 2011, and Metal Archives lists it active again since 2019.
The Red Shore matters as an Australian band whose records stood in the same racks as the Americans': Rise Records took a deluxe Unconsecrated to the United States, Canada and Japan in 2009.
Thy Art Is Murder, the band the wave formed around
Every other Australian name is measured against one band, and the measurement is the national chart. Assembled in 2006 by teenagers in Sydney's far west, fronted from 2009 by a growler who had sung metalcore in Vegas in Ruins, produced on Hate and Holy War by Will Putney in New Jersey, the band that kept hammering a style built for basements onto the ARIA albums chart for over a decade was Thy Art Is Murder. Five chart entries, from Hate in 2012 to Godlike in 2023. No other Australian deathcore band has placed an album on that chart higher than number 13.
| Year | Band | Album | Peak |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | Make Them Suffer | Neverbloom | 56 |
| 2012 | Thy Art Is Murder | Hate | 35 |
| 2015 | Make Them Suffer | Old Souls | 30 |
| 2015 | Thy Art Is Murder | Holy War | 7 |
| 2017 | Justice for the Damned | Dragged Through the Dirt | 37 |
| 2017 | Thy Art Is Murder | Dear Desolation | 5 |
| 2019 | Thy Art Is Murder | Human Target | 11 |
| 2020 | Justice for the Damned | Pain Is Power | 18 |
| 2023 | Thy Art Is Murder | Godlike | 31 |
| 2025 | Justice for the Damned | Stay Relentless | 13 |
The band's singers changed more than its chart habits did, and the succession at its microphone is a matter of record. CJ McMahon announced on 21 December 2015 that he was leaving, citing his family and the cost of touring, and Nick Arthur of Molotov Solution filled in on the road. McMahon came back on 14 January 2017, at the Unify Gathering festival in Victoria, and sang on Dear Desolation and Human Target.
Godlike was released through the band's own label, Human Warfare, on 22 September 2023. The same day the band said McMahon was no longer a member and did not feature on the record, days after it had condemned his anti-trans comments on social media, and his vocals had been replaced on the album by a new singer. That singer was Tyler Miller, who walked out with the band in Oberhausen on 27 September and was confirmed within the week. On 29 July 2026 the band played Rockstadt Extreme Festival in Romania with Jerry Grimefeld, formerly of Honest Crooks and Vengeance, on vocals, and Lambgoat reported on 8 August 2026 that the band had revealed him as its new frontman after Miller's departure. When Impericon covered the change, neither the band nor Miller had published a statement on the split.
Brisbane, Perth and Melbourne: the Australian deathcore bands that followed
The Brisbane band that has lent Thy Art Is Murder both a bass player and a singer sits first in the wave behind it. Formed in 2009, self-releasing Servitude in December 2011, opening the Hate Across Australia tour for Thy Art Is Murder in 2013 and signed worldwide by Nuclear Blast in August 2014, the three-guitar outfit that wrote about alien invasion over riffs built for speed was Aversions Crown, and one of its guitarists in the early years, Kevin Butler, has played bass in Thy Art Is Murder since 2015.
Its own microphone changed hands three times. Colin Jeffs left in January 2015 and Mark Poida replaced him, Poida left early in 2019 and Miller came in from Knoxville's The Guild, and in 2023 Miller left for Blacktown. Xenocide, released on 20 January 2017 and trailed by the video for "Prismatic Abyss" nine days earlier, is the record to start with: reviewers heard fast, technical playing under a science fiction story, with breakdowns that, to one of them, cut across the momentum. Three guitars locked on one riff land like three loaded road cases shoved off a truck's tail lift together: one crash, the concrete chipped, nobody able to say which case hit first.
Packed by one band, unpacked by another.
The west coast sent a band that left the genre after proving it could be done from there. Formed in Perth in 2008, signed to Roadrunner in February 2012 and released on Neverbloom that May with a keyboard player in the line-up, the band that put a keyboard in an Australian deathcore line-up is Make Them Suffer. It moved toward metalcore on the records after it, and the debut is unarguably the reason to know it. The band marked the record's tenth anniversary by reissuing it remastered on 8 March 2023 and touring Australia on it in May and June with Fit for an Autopsy and Ocean Sleeper.
Melbourne's answer in the 2010s took the darker road. Formed in 2010, releasing its first EP, Tides of Damnation, through RTD Records and Siege of Amida in 2011, and signed in 2014 to Siege of Amida and Century Media, the same Siege of Amida that had carried Unconsecrated six years earlier, the Melbourne band whose technical deathcore took on a black and death metal colour that reviewers compared to Behemoth's was Boris the Blade, and The Human Hive, released in May 2014, was produced by Roman Koester, The Red Shore's old guitarist.
The title track went out as a video through Century Media, which by then partnered with Siege of Amida, and the reviews of the record it came from kept returning to the same two things, the machine-gun drumming and the weight of the breakdowns. Warpath followed on 27 January 2017 and the Infernum EP in 2018, and Metal Archives records the band's last show on 5 May 2019. Nine years, two albums, an EP at either end.
The far north supplied the wave's most persistent touring band. Formed in Cairns in 2009, later based in Brisbane, and booked under Aversions Crown across Europe early in 2016 with Rings of Saturn beside it, A Night in Texas counts for the road miles more than for any single record. It released Digital Apocalypse on 2 August 2024.
Sydney's second front and the Melbourne newcomers
The Australian deathcore that reaches the chart now is coming out of Sydney with a hardcore accent. Formed in 2011, signed to Greyscale Records, relocated to New Jersey in 2019 to make Pain Is Power with Will Putney and rewarded with a number 18 entry after its release on 12 June 2020, the Sydney deathcore band on the Greyscale roster is Justice for the Damned, and Stay Relentless, released on 15 August 2025, went higher still, to number 13.
"The House You Built Is Burning", the first single from Pain Is Power, came with an official video on the label's own channel in 2020, and the chart figures tell the rest of the story: number 37 for Dragged Through the Dirt in 2017, number 18 for Pain Is Power and number 13 for Stay Relentless, each higher than the last. Follow the cash tin at the merch table across those three records: a breakdown lands, the crowd surges at the shirts, and the tin that clicked shut at 37 needs a knee on the lid at 18 and bursts its hinges at 13, coins skidding off the trestle and under the barrier. Nobody banks that fast.
Sydney's other long-runner uses the music as a placard. Formed in 2010, fronted since 2014 by Dane Evans, who came over from To Engineer an Exorcist, and announced on 18 February 2021 as a Unique Leader band with Epilogue following on 16 April, the band whose lyrics turn on veganism, animal cruelty and environmental damage is To the Grave, and record titles such as Global Warning and Everyone's a Murderer wear the campaign on the spine. Few bands in the genre tie their lyric sheet to a cause in public, and this one has kept doing it across the albums from Global Warning in 2019 to Everyone's a Murderer in 2024.
Melbourne's newest contender came in through the same two labels as the bands before it. Formed in 2022 around the singer Alex Hill, released through Nuclear Blast and Greyscale on HissThroughRottenTeeth on 21 April 2023 and again on random.access.misery on 29 August 2025, the Melbourne outfit that Nuclear Blast bills as blackened nu-metal is Mélancolia. Two albums in three years, both on Nuclear Blast and Greyscale. The foundry is still running.
The Australian bands are less a ranking than a chain of handovers. A guitarist from Victoria produced a Melbourne debut on the label his old band had used, Aversions Crown's early guitarist and later its singer ended up in Blacktown, and Thy Art Is Murder's own lead guitarist sat behind the desk for Aversions Crown's Tyrant. The rest of the world's scenes keep their own rosters, and the next country along the map is Germany, where the German deathcore bands grew up around a merch company and two of the largest labels in metal rather than around a single band.
Australia did the opposite. It had one band at the top, and that band's support slots, bass chair, microphone and production desk became the scene's training ground, so that the Australian deathcore bands are, for the most part, the people who passed through Thy Art Is Murder's orbit and the ones it drew in from outside.
