Metalcore vs Crossover Thrash

Two genres separated by twenty years that are doing the same trade in the same direction, and the differences between them are mostly a matter of what each generation of hardcore bands happened to be listening to.

The same trade, twice

Crossover, roughly 1984 to 1990: hardcore bands adopt metal guitar technique. The metal available to borrow from is thrash, so the riffs are downpicked, the tempos are fast, and the songs are short.

Metalcore, roughly 1995 onwards: hardcore bands adopt metal guitar technique. The metal available to borrow from is now melodic death metal and groove, so the riffs are downtuned, the tempos are mid paced, and the songs have choruses.

The mechanism is identical. What changed is the source material.

The technical differences

Tuning. Crossover is in standard tuning or close to it; metalcore is downtuned, frequently a long way.

Melody. Crossover has almost none; metalcore has a sung chorus, which is the single most identifiable feature of the genre and which comes from Swedish melodic death metal rather than from anything American.

Song length. Crossover songs are ninety seconds; metalcore songs are three and a half minutes and structured around the chorus.

And the breakdown. Both have one, and they do different jobs: a crossover mosh part is a section of an ongoing song, while a metalcore breakdown is frequently the destination the whole song has been building towards.

The bands in between

The line is not clean and the interesting cases sit on it.

Integrity and the 1990s metallic hardcore bands are between the two. Earth Crisis are metalcore before the word meant what it means now. Converge belong to neither category and inherited from both. And the current wave of hardcore bands with thrash riffs, of whom there are a great many, has effectively made the first trade a third time.

Which is better

A pointless question with an interesting version underneath it, which is what each trade cost.

Crossover gained weight and lost some of hardcore's nerve. Metalcore gained melody and a mass audience, and lost the thing that made hardcore hardcore, which is the sense that anybody in the room could be in the band. A genre with a sung chorus and a downtuned seven string has a technical entry requirement that a genre with three chords and forty second songs does not.

That is a real trade rather than a decline, and it is the same trade the metal side made in 1988 when technicality arrived.

What both prove

That the boundary between hardcore and metal is permanently unstable, and that every generation renegotiates it with whatever materials are lying around.

It happened in 1985, it happened again in 1998, and it is happening now in a hardcore scene full of bands playing riffs that would have been at home on Bonded by Blood. The two audiences have been the same people since about 1984 and the argument about what to call them has never once been settled.

The war those audiences were supposedly fighting before any of this is covered in Punks vs Metalheads, and the wider account is in Crossover: Where Thrash Met Hardcore.

Why the arguments get heated

Because both genres are accused of the same thing by the same people, twenty years apart, in almost the same words.

Crossover was told it had watered down hardcore by adding metal. Metalcore was told it had watered down hardcore by adding melody. In both cases the objection came from an older audience who had been there first, and in both cases the accused bands went on to reach considerably more people than the accusers ever did.

The pattern is old enough to be predictable. A scene that defines itself by what it refuses will always regard the next trade as a betrayal, and the next trade is what keeps the music alive.

What to listen to from each

For crossover: Nuclear Assault's Game Over, D.R.I.'s Dealing with It! and Cro-Mags' The Age of Quarrel. Three records, about ninety minutes, and the whole first trade is in them.

For metalcore: the argument is more contested and the honest answer is that the genre's best records are early. Converge, Botch and the late 1990s wave are more interesting than the commercial peak that followed, and a listener coming from thrash will find considerably more to hold onto there.

And for the current version of the first trade, the hardcore bands playing thrash riffs right now are producing the most direct descendant of everything in this article.

The third trade

It is happening now, and anybody who has been to a hardcore show in the last five years has seen it.

A substantial number of current hardcore bands are playing downpicked thrash riffs at thrash tempos, with the visual language and the touring model of hardcore. They are doing exactly what D.R.I. did in 1986, from the same side of the exchange, with the intervening forty years of both genres available to borrow from.

Power Trip were the band who made that legible to people outside the scene, and what has followed is a wave of groups for whom the distinction between hardcore and thrash is not merely unimportant but unintelligible. That is probably the correct end point for an argument that was never really about music.

What both genres owe hardcore

The same two things, and it is worth naming them because the metal side of each trade usually takes the credit.

The first is the beat. Everything rhythmic in both genres descends from the hardcore skank beat, which no metal band invented and which every band in both categories is still using.

The second is brevity, or at least the memory of it. Hardcore established that a song stops when it has finished, and even metalcore, which is the least brief thing in this article, is considerably tighter than the progressive metal it might otherwise have become.

Sources and notes

Years and labels refer to original pressings. The period boundaries given are approximate and the genres overlap considerably.