Ask three of the people who were actually there what the word grindcore means and you get three answers. Mick Harris, who drummed on both sides of the record that started it, has always said he took grind from the industrial noise bands and applied it to the new hardcore because of the speed. Shane Embury, who joined in 1987, describes the thing itself rather than the label: Celtic Frost and Siege and hardcore and death metal and industrial noise, shoved together. Digby Pearson, who ran the label that put it out, says grind was never about tempo at all and always described the guitars, heavy and downtuned and bleak, grinding.
If the people who invented it cannot agree, the rest of us are allowed a bit of latitude. What follows is not a ruling. It is the set of differences that actually hold up when you put the records side by side, and the smaller set that people argue about and should not.
They have different parents
This is the whole thing in one sentence, and everything else follows from it. Grindcore came out of hardcore punk. Death metal came out of metal.
Grindcore was assembled in Birmingham out of the anarcho punk scene, in squats and rehearsal rooms, by people whose reference points were Discharge and Siege rather than Slayer. Scum was recorded at Rich Bitch Studios in two chunks, side A in August 1986 with Nicholas Bullen, Justin Broadrick and Harris, side B in May 1987 with Lee Dorrian, Bill Steer, Jim Whiteley and Harris again, after a single three hour rehearsal, overnight because the studio was cheaper then. Earache released it on 1 July 1987 in a first pressing of two thousand.
Death metal was assembled in Florida and the Bay Area out of thrash, by people whose reference points were Slayer and Possessed and who wanted, above everything else, to play well. Death cut Scream Bloody Gore at The Music Grinder in Los Angeles in November 1986 with Randy Burns producing, Chuck Schuldiner playing guitar, bass and vocals and Chris Reifert on drums, and Combat put it out on 25 May 1987, five weeks before Earache pressed the other one. The two records arrived within weeks of each other, sounded superficially similar to anybody standing outside the room, and were pointed in opposite directions from the first note.
Seven differences that hold up
| Element | Grindcore | Death metal |
|---|---|---|
| Lineage | Hardcore punk, anarcho scene, squats | Thrash metal, clubs, record shops |
| Song length | Under two minutes, often far under | Three to six minutes |
| Album length | Fifteen to twenty five minutes, many tracks | Thirty five to fifty minutes |
| Riffs | Chords and shapes, changed abruptly | Figures with a beginning and an end |
| Drums | Blast as the default state | Blast as one gear among several |
| Vocals | Shriek and bark, often two people | Growl, usually one |
| Subject | Politics, war, animals, the state | Anatomy, horror, war as spectacle |
Six of those seven are audible in ten seconds. The seventh, the subject matter, needs a lyric sheet, and in both genres the lyric sheet is frequently the last thing anybody reads.
The bit everyone gets wrong
People think the difference is speed. It is not. A good death metal band can play faster than a good grindcore band and frequently does, because the technical standard in death metal has been higher since about 1990 and nobody in that scene has ever pretended otherwise.
The difference is not speed. It is what the band thinks a song is for.
The difference is what a song is for. A death metal song is an object: it has parts, the parts are in an order, the order was decided, and you are meant to admire the construction. A grindcore song is an event: it happens, it is over, and admiring it afterwards is slightly beside the point. That is why grindcore albums have thirty tracks and death metal albums have nine. It is not economy. It is a different idea of what has been made.
The second thing people get wrong is treating this as a ranking. It is two countries sharing a border, a currency and most of an alphabet, having a permanent argument about the flag. Both of them press their own records. Neither of them wants the other's passport.
The politics, which is the real dividing line
Early grindcore was explicitly political, and not in a vague way: anti racist, anti militarist, anti capitalist, feminist, and later, through Carcass and Agathocles, deeply concerned with animals. That inheritance came straight out of the anarcho punk scene along with the venues and the fanzines, and it is why grindcore records so often have a lyric sheet in the first place.
Death metal did not inherit that and never claimed to. Its subject matter was horror, anatomy and war used as material rather than as argument, which is a legitimate artistic position and also a completely different one. Where the two scenes crossed, they usually crossed on a bill rather than on a manifesto.
This matters more than the riffs when you are trying to work out which one a record belongs to, because the musical differences have been eroding since 1990 while this one has not. A band that thinks it is making a statement is a grindcore band even when the guitars say otherwise.
Where the line genuinely blurs
Three places, and being honest about them saves a lot of pointless argument.
- Napalm Death themselves. By 1990 they were recording in Tampa with a death metal producer and sounding like it, and the band has spent the decades since moving back and forth across the border at will.
- Carcass. Started as the most extreme thing on either side of the line and finished with Heartwork in 1993, a melodic record so far from the debut that it needed a different shelf.
- Deathgrind. An entire hybrid category exists precisely because the question has no clean answer, and it is dealt with separately rather than here.
None of this makes the distinction useless. It makes it a distinction rather than a wall, which is the normal condition of every category in music and the reason where this sits in the story takes a whole chapter to lay out rather than a paragraph.
Two maps, drawn differently
The other thing that separates them is where each one actually went, and the shapes are not alike at all.
Grindcore travelled by post and stayed small on purpose. The English end runs from Napalm Death through Carcass, Extreme Noise Terror and Sore Throat; the American end has its own ancestors in Siege and Repulsion, who were doing much of this before anybody had a word for it, and its own second generation in Brutal Truth, Anal Cunt, Agoraphobic Nosebleed and Pig Destroyer. Europe added Agathocles in Belgium, Nasum in Sweden and Rotten Sound in Finland. Then it kept going: Earache signed Wormrot out of Singapore in 2010 and Tubero out of the Philippines in 2019, which is not a route any death metal label was taking at the time.
Death metal did the opposite. It found studios, producers and distribution inside five years, built a professional infrastructure around Tampa and then around Stockholm, and by 1992 was selling records in shops that had never stocked a seven inch in their lives. That is not a criticism of either. It is the difference between a music that wanted an audience and a music that mostly wanted a postal address.
The ten second test
Put a record on and count. If the first track has ended before you finish counting to ninety, and the second one starts without ceremony, it is grindcore. If the first track is still going at two minutes and has changed direction twice in a way that was obviously planned, it is death metal. If it does both, somebody already invented a word for that, and the word is deathgrind.
And if you want the other great border dispute in extreme music, the one where the argument really is about atmosphere rather than about structure, that is death metal vs black metal, which has been running longer and is nowhere near being settled.
