grindcore

The tradition & historical record

Grindcore is an extreme fusion genre of heavy metal and hardcore punk that originated in the mid-1980s, drawing inspiration from abrasive-sounding musical styles, such as thrashcore, crust punk, hardcore punk, extreme metal, and industrial. Grindcore is considered a more noise-filled style of hardcore punk while using hardcore's trademark characteristics such as heavily distorted, down-tuned guitars, grinding overdriven bass, high-speed tempo, blast beats, and vocals which consist of growls, shouts and high-pitched shrieks. Early groups such as England's Napalm Death are credited with laying the groundwork for the style. It is most prevalent today in North America and Europe, with popular contributors such as Brutal Truth and Nasum. Lyrical themes range from a primary focus on social and political concerns, to gory subject matter and black humor. A trait of grindcore is the "microsong", far shorter than average for punk or metal. Several bands have produced songs that are only seconds in length. Many bands, such as Agoraphobic Nosebleed, record simple phrases that may be rhythmically sprawled out across an instrumental lasting only a couple of bars in length. A variety of subgenres and microgenres have subsequently emerged, often labeling bands according to traits that deviate from regular grindcore; including goregrind, focused on themes of gore (e.g. mutilation and pathology), and pornogrind, fixated on pornographic lyrical themes.

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Grindcore”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.

grindcore is subgenre of extreme metal, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ¹

The source record links this tradition to 19 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ¹