Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Whitman filled the better part of a page of Leaves of Grass with a list of parts of the human body, in order, and nobody has ever accused him of bad taste for it. In 1988 three men from Liverpool did the same thing with a pathology dictionary, put a blast beat under it, and got themselves kept out of most record shops in Europe. The difference is the tempo.
Goregrind and pornogrind are the two subgenres that everybody has heard of and almost nobody has actually sat down with, which is a shame, because underneath the sleeve art there is a specific set of musical decisions being taken, and they are more deliberate than the packaging suggests.
Where the sound came from
The founding document is Reek of Putrefaction, recorded by Carcass at Rich Bitch Studios in Birmingham across four days between December 1987 and March 1988, released by Earache on 28 July 1988, and reaching number six on the United Kingdom indie chart. John Peel made it his favourite album of that year, which remains one of the more surprising facts in British broadcasting. Bill Steer has said since that the engineer ruined the record, particularly the drums, because there was no time left to mix it.
He is right, and it did not matter. What the botched mix produced was a texture nobody had heard before: the low end pushed so far down that pressing plants had trouble cutting it, the guitars indistinct, the vocals buried and processed, and the whole thing sounding, in one much repeated description, as though it had been recorded underneath a stack of wet mattresses. Every goregrind band since has treated that accident as a specification.
Two American bands arrived at the same corner from a different street. Repulsion got there first with the speed and the tone. Impetigo, formed in Bloomington, Illinois in 1987, got there with the film collection: Ultimo Mondo Cannibale came out on Wild Rags Records in 1990 and Horror of the Zombies in 1992, and the band more or less invented the practice of opening a song with a clip lifted off a video tape. Razorback Records reissued both albums in 2006 and 2007, and had already put out a tribute album to them in 2003.
The rules, which are stricter than they look
Strip the packaging off and goregrind is a music with a specification, and bands deviate from it about as often as bricklayers deviate from a course.
- Guitars detuned further than death metal. Not for weight, for indistinctness. The riff is a texture, not a line.
- Vocals heavily processed. Pitch shifted downward, sometimes twice, until the human origin of the sound is genuinely in doubt. This is the single most identifying feature of the style.
- The snare tuned high and thin. The scene calls it the biscuit tin, and it exists to cut through everything else the mix is doing wrong.
- Grindcore tempo and grindcore length. Everything is fast and almost everything is short.
- Lyrics out of forensic pathology. Not out of horror films, which is Impetigo's separate innovation, and not out of the news.
That last point is where most people go wrong. Goregrind lyrics are not about violence. They are about what a body does afterwards, in language borrowed from textbooks, which is a different thing and a much drier one. Bureaucracy applied to flesh is closer to it than horror is, and the bands have never pretended otherwise; the entire form runs on the assumption that nobody is taking it literally.
Goregrind songs are assembled the way the sleeves are: cut things out of a book and glue them down out of order.
The artwork, and why it has to be like that
Two conventions run side by side, and the difference between them is the whole argument. The first is the photographic collage, which begins and largely ends with the Carcass debut: real medical images, cut out and layered until the individual source is unreadable. The second, which is what almost everyone has done since, is the drawing. Splatter, cartoon, thick outlines, a colour palette out of a comic, and a level of exaggeration that no autopsy photograph can reach.
The drawing is the important one, because it is doing a job. A photograph asks to be believed. A cartoon announces that it is a cartoon, and the moment a sleeve announces that, the record underneath it is free to be as ridiculous as it likes. Haemorrhage, working in Madrid since 1990 and called Devourment for the first year, have understood this better than anyone: their guitarist Luisma draws almost all of their artwork himself, and the band play in surgical gowns with the singer covered in stage blood. Nobody in that room is claiming to be a threat to anyone.
The labels understood it too, which is why the catalogue survives at all. Earache in Nottingham, Wild Rags in California, Morbid Records in Germany, Razorback in the United States and eventually Relapse, which put out Hospital Carnage in 2011 and We Are the Gore in 2017. None of these were large operations. All of them kept records in print that no chain would stock, which is the same story told everywhere else in this part of the history. The scene still gathers once a year at Obscene Extreme in the Czech Republic, which is as close to an institution as a music this aggressively unprofitable is ever going to get.
Pornogrind, and the more difficult half
Pornogrind is a smaller offshoot that appeared in Germany and the United States in the early nineties, and the honest description is the plain one: it is goregrind with pornography as the subject matter instead of pathology. Gut and Cock and Ball Torture are the two names anybody cites. The sleeves are explicit, which is a large part of why the records were never in shops.
Musically it is the odd one out in this whole area, and in a way nobody expects. Pornogrind is slower. The songs are simpler, closer to rock structures, and built on groove rather than on the blast; Zero Tolerance once described it as the most perverted of the lot with a dollop of filthy groove added, and the second half of that sentence is the useful part. Put a pornogrind record next to a goregrind record and the difference you notice first is not the subject. It is that one of them has a beat you could nod to.
There is a third branch worth naming while we are here, because it turns up in the same conversations. Gorenoise takes goregrind and removes the last remaining instruments, leaving processed vocals and noise, and is where the whole tendency finally arrives at its logical destination and stops.
How the outside world reads it, and why it gets that wrong
In 2019, after a mass shooting in Ohio, it emerged that the man responsible had sung in a pornogrind band, and a run of newspaper articles followed proposing that the lyrics explained the crime. The connection was asserted rather than demonstrated. Several small bands with no connection to any of it deleted their accounts anyway, and the scene said what it has always said, which is that none of this is an endorsement of anything.
That episode is worth recording because it is the only time most people have heard the word, and because it repeats an argument running since 1988 that has never once been settled by evidence. The genre is a joke told in a very loud room. It is possible to find the joke unfunny, and plenty of people do. It is not possible to find it sincere, because nothing about the way these records are made, packaged or performed has ever asked to be taken that way.
If you want in, start with Symphonies of Sickness rather than the debut, because the ideas are the same and the studio was better. Then work sideways into Haemorrhage and Impetigo. If none of it lands, that is a perfectly reasonable outcome, and the tidier neighbours are one click away in what is deathgrind and in grindcore vs death metal, where the arguments are about riffs instead of about taste.
