Bands Like Lorna Shore, Suicide Silence and Whitechapel

"Far beyond deathcore," Dom Lawson wrote of Pain Remains in his Blabbermouth review in October 2022, and he went on to say that the entire game had just changed. It had not. A record that had really left the genre would leave its listeners nowhere to go next, and the first question anyone asks after a week inside Pain Remains is precisely where to go next.

Built on a breakdown that has torn the plywood out of every stage it has landed on since Psalms in 2015, dressed in an orchestra that Andrew O'Connor scores from the rhythm guitar chair, and fronted since June 2021 by Will Ramos, who drags his voice from a guttural to a shriek inside a single bar, the band whose single "To the Hellfire" climbed to number 4 on Spotify's Viral chart that summer is Lorna Shore. Three parts carry it: the orchestra, the black metal under it and the throat. A listener can follow any one of them out.

A band is like Lorna Shore when it shares one of those parts, and not otherwise. A shared festival bill proves nothing.

Picture the transformer on the pole outside a strip-mall venue on a Friday in August, and a breakdown landing so hard through the cinder block that the can on the pole bursts in a blue flash and every storefront hanging off that line drops dark in the same second: the club, the pizza counter, the tattoo shop, the vape store with its window display dying mid-blink, while across the street the liquor store hangs off a different wire and its sign never so much as flickers. That is the test. A band belongs beside it when it is wired to the same line, the orchestra, the black metal or the throat, and the same test works for the two older names that get asked about in the same breath, Suicide Silence and Whitechapel.

Where the three of them sit among the genre's other bands, from the founders to the second wave, is the wider story. The next record after each of them is a narrower matter, settled one shared part at a time.

Bands like Lorna Shore: the orchestra, the black metal and the throat

Self-released through Blood Blast Distribution on 14 January 2022, orchestrated with Francesco Ferrini of Fleshgod Apocalypse on additional keyboards and orchestrations, and issued again in March 2024 as Elegy: The Soundtrack, an orchestral version with the band taken out entirely, Elegy is the record, and the Connecticut band whose string section can stand up with no guitar in the room is Shadow of Intent. The shared part is the orchestra. Take the guitars away and the songs still play, which is the surest proof that the strings were written as a second band and not as wallpaper.

For the black metal that Distorted Sound heard running through Pain Remains, the Brockton band to hear is Worm Shepherd, and the record is In the Wake ov Sòl, put out by the band itself on Christmas Day 2020 and reissued by Unique Leader on 4 June 2021, a debut its reviewers have filed under blackened death metal, symphonic deathcore and blackened deathcore at once. That pile of labels is the point: the black metal and the orchestra were filed in the same record.

The German band that began as brutal deathcore and turned to symphonic blackened deathcore is Mental Cruelty, and Zwielicht, released on 23 June 2023, with the band signed to Century Media since March 2022 and Lorna Shore signed there since October 2019, is the record to take home. The link is in the credits. Josh Schroeder, who produced Pain Remains, is credited on Zwielicht with keyboards and orchestrations as well as the mixing and mastering, so the orchestra and the tonnage under it were set down by the same hands that set down Pain Remains.

Formed in Las Vegas in 2020 by Ricky Hoover, who had left Suffokate in 2012 and spent the years between cutting hair, signed to Century Media in May 2022 and out with The Burden ov Faith on 24 March 2023, the band that answers the throat question is Ov Sulfur. "Befouler", released a month earlier with Alex Terrible of Slaughter to Prevail as guest, puts a second throat on the same track, and Josh Schroeder, who produced Pain Remains, is credited on the album with the engineering, mixing and mastering. Anyone who came to Lorna Shore for the throat will find the same man at the desk and a salvo of two voices on the track.

Will Ramos himself points the way to Toronto. In 2021 he sang on a re-release of "Lifeblood", the title of the second album that Brand of Sacrifice released on its own that year, a record built, like much of the band's catalogue, on Kentaro Miura's manga Berserk. The shared part there is no metaphor at all. It is the same man, tearing into a song from inside a different band.

The Upland band that carried a keyboard player in its deathcore line-up and hung symphonic parts over the breakdown is Winds of Plague, and Decimate the Weak, its first record for Century Media, released on 5 February 2008 with Matt Feinman on keyboards, is an early stop on the orchestral bloodline. It is the way back, not the way forward: the orchestral idea in an early form, years before the strings moved to the front of the mix.

One exit leads out of the genre on purpose. King, released by Nuclear Blast on 5 February 2016, with Francesco Ferrini credited on piano and orchestrations, is the place for anyone who came for the strings and can live without the drop, and it ties straight back to Elegy through the same orchestrator. Fleshgod Apocalypse fires its orchestra like the finale over a county fairground, every rocket climbing to burst at the top of the sky; a Lorna Shore song launches the same rockets and then drives the stage truck through the fairground fence on the breakdown. The Italians are a symphonic death metal band. Their songs are built for the burst, and the fence stays standing.

Bands like Suicide Silence: the groove and the bounce

Suicide Silence offers two ways out, and they start a decade apart. One is the run of deathcore records from The Cleansing in 2007 to The Black Crown in 2011. The other is the turn of the self-titled album of 24 February 2017, produced by Ross Robinson, which Exclaim! and Blabbermouth both heard leaning on the nineties nu metal of Korn. Most of the bands like Suicide Silence take one turn or the other. A few take both.

The band that has carried the metalcore, deathcore and nu metal labels side by side since its Victory Records debut, Goodbye to the Gallows in 2007, is Emmure. Speaker of the Dead, released on 15 February 2011 and produced by Joey Sturgis, is the record, and "Solar Flare Homicide" is the song to start with. The shared part is the nu metal label, worn on a deathcore record.

The Slovenian band that kept crossing the same border is Within Destruction. Lotus, released by Ultra Heavy Records on 30 September 2022, took the band from electronics and trap beats to full clean vocals, and Animetal on Sumerian in April 2025 is the one Distorted Sound heard carrying a huge nu metal bounce on top. Each crossing is a record to compare with the one Suicide Silence made.

For the bounce on its own, the band to hear is Paleface Swiss, formed in Zurich in 2017, filed by its critics under beatdown hardcore, deathcore and nu metal, and open about drawing on Slipknot and Korn, and Cursed, released through Blood Blast Distribution on 3 January 2025, is the record. It is no copy of anything Suicide Silence made. It hangs off the same 2017 wire.

A band is like Lorna Shore when it shares one of those parts, and not otherwise.

The last pick on this side points backwards, to the source. Korn, the debut released on 11 October 1994 and recorded at Indigo Ranch in Malibu with Ross Robinson, the same producer Suicide Silence hired twenty-three years later, is the record the reviewers of the 2017 album kept measuring it against. It is not deathcore, and it does not pretend to be. It is the creed the 2017 record was preaching.

Bands like Whitechapel: three guitars, one low throat and the death metal underneath

Whitechapel's parts are easier to count. Three guitarists have stood in the front line since 2007, Ben Savage, Alex Wade and Zach Householder, with Phil Bozeman's low voice in the middle of them, and from Mark of the Blade in 2016 Bozeman has sung clean as well. A band like Whitechapel shares the guitar arithmetic, the throat, or the death metal underneath both.

Formed in Jersey City in 2008, run from behind the desk by Will Putney, a practitioner on both sides of the studio glass, who produced Oh What the Future Holds as well as playing guitar on it, and lined up with Putney, Pat Sheridan and Tim Howley on guitar since 2013, the band that shares Whitechapel's arithmetic of three guitars on one riff is Fit for an Autopsy, and Oh What the Future Holds, released by Nuclear Blast on 14 January 2022, is the record. Three guitars on one riff work like three snowplows running abreast down an empty interstate at four in the morning, blades down, throwing a single wave of slush over the guardrail and burying every car parked on the shoulder. No single plow could throw that wave. The width is the weapon.

Released by Artery Recordings on 16 February 2010, produced by Tim Lambesis and heard by AllMusic as highly technical deathcore, the Salt Lake City debut cut with three guitarists, Michael Stafford, Jake Harmond and Dan Jones, was Desolation of Eden, by Chelsea Grin. There is a second wire into the same band. Tom Barber, who sang on Lorna Shore's first two albums and left in April 2018, has fronted Chelsea Grin since that year, so the band answers to a Lorna Shore listener for its singer and to a Whitechapel listener for its guitars.

Shadow of Intent comes back into the picture under Whitechapel's name for a different reason from the orchestra. On Elegy, Phil Bozeman sings as a guest on "Where Millions Have Come to Die", and the two bands toured the United States together, with Cannibal Corpse and Revocation, in early 2022. The shared part on that track is the throat itself. It is the shortest way from Knoxville to Connecticut.

For the listener who comes to Whitechapel for the riff rather than the drop, the Blacktown band that put intensity ahead of the breakdown count is Thy Art Is Murder, and the record is Hate, released by Halfcut in October 2012, in at number 35 on the Australian chart and reissued by Nuclear Blast in April 2013. AllMusic heard a band more interested in pushing the limits of intensity than in seeing how many breakdowns would fit into a song. It sits on the Whitechapel side of the line, not the Suicide Silence one.

The way out runs through the same label. Whitechapel's records are on Metal Blade, and so is Sun Eater, released on 11 November 2014, the album on which Job for a Cowboy cut the last of its deathcore roots and settled into progressive and technical death metal. For anyone following the death metal that runs under Whitechapel's riffs, it is the exit, a death metal record made by a band that started out in the same deathcore years as Whitechapel.

Where to go next, one record each

Set side by side, the three starting points barely overlap. Lorna Shore leads into orchestras and black metal, Suicide Silence into nu metal, and Whitechapel into guitar weight and death metal, and only one band is listed under two of those starting points.

Shadow of Intent is that band, reached from Lorna Shore through its orchestra and from Whitechapel through Bozeman's guest turn. Chelsea Grin sits with Whitechapel for its guitars, although Tom Barber at its microphone gives a Lorna Shore listener a reason of a different kind. Every other band is listed under one starting point only.

Name the part, then find the record that carries it. That works one rung down as well, among the underground deathcore bands that have one EP and no press yet, where the only evidence is the record itself.

Sources and notes

• Blabbermouth: Lorna Shore, Pain Remains (Dom Lawson)
• Distorted Sound: Lorna Shore, Pain Remains
• Encyclopaedia Metallum: Shadow of Intent, Elegy
• Encyclopaedia Metallum: Mental Cruelty, Zwielicht
• Encyclopaedia Metallum: Winds of Plague, Decimate the Weak
• Exclaim!: Suicide Silence, Suicide Silence
• Blabbermouth: Suicide Silence, Suicide Silence
• Distorted Sound: Within Destruction, Animetal
• Metal Blade: Job for a Cowboy, Sun Eater