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mathcore

Mathcore

United States · 1990s
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Description

Mathcore is an extreme offshoot of metalcore and hardcore punk characterized by rapid-fire shifts in meter, tempo, and texture. It emphasizes dissonant, angular riffing; complex, polymetric drum patterns; and whirlwind song structures that often feel deliberately chaotic.

The genre fuses the precision and rhythmic gamesmanship of math rock with the aggression of hardcore and the density of extreme metal. Songs routinely feature sudden stops, blast beats, start–stop riffing, odd time signatures, and atonal or chromatic harmonies, producing a sound that is tense, volatile, and cathartic.

History
Origins (early–mid 1990s)

Mathcore crystallized in the United States during the 1990s as a more rhythmically intricate and dissonant branch of metalcore and hardcore punk. Bands drew from math rock’s odd meters and rhythmic puzzles, grindcore’s extremity, post-hardcore’s structural elasticity, and noise rock’s abrasion.

Breakthrough and codification (late 1990s)

Landmark releases by Botch and Coalesce laid blueprints for dense, angular riffing and unpredictable song forms. The Dillinger Escape Plan’s early EPs and Calculating Infinity (1999) codified the genre’s reputation for virtuosity and volatility, pairing jaw-dropping technicality with ferocious intensity.

Expansion and diversification (2000s)

The 2000s saw a wave of bands push mathcore’s vocabulary: Converge’s metallic hardcore ferocity intersected with avant tendencies; Ion Dissonance and Psyopus explored extreme dissonance and hyper-speed complexity; The Number Twelve Looks Like You and Norma Jean broadened the scene’s visibility. Production moved toward tighter, more precise drum editing and sharper guitar tones to articulate intricate rhythms.

Cross-pollination and modern developments (2010s–present)

Modern acts such as Car Bomb, Rolo Tomassi, Frontierer, and Sectioned integrated elements from djent, ambient, and electronic processing, emphasizing polymetric grooves, pitch-shifted textures, and textural contrast. Mathcore’s influence spread into djent, cybergrind, sasscore, and parts of deathcore, while live performances remained renowned for explosive energy and technical precision.

How to make a track in this genre
Core rhythm and meter
•   Start from a hardcore/metalcore backbone, then introduce frequent meter changes (5/8, 7/8, 13/16), polymeters (e.g., guitars in 7 while drums phrase in 4), and metric modulations. •   Use start–stop stabs, sudden tempo drops, and syncopated accents that displace the downbeat. Create tension with bars that truncate or extend expected phrases.
Harmony and riff writing
•   Favor dissonance: tritones, minor seconds, clusters, and chromatic voice-leading. Quartal shapes and wide interval jumps help keep lines angular. •   Combine palm-muted low-string riffs with skittering, tapped or string-skipped figures. Layer contrary-motion guitar lines to heighten chaos while retaining clarity.
Drums and bass
•   Alternate blast beats, skank beats, and half-time breakdowns with off-kilter cymbal patterns. Orchestrate kicks to mirror or contradict guitar groupings. •   Bass should lock to the drums for impact; use overdrive, slight grit, and occasional slides or chords to cut through dense guitars.
Vocals and lyrics
•   Predominantly screamed, barked, or harsh vocals, with occasional spoken or clean passages for contrast. Delivery should match rhythmic hits and abrupt cuts. •   Lyrical themes often grapple with existential anxiety, social fracture, or personal catharsis; dense imagery suits the music’s intensity.
Form and arrangement
•   Eschew verse–chorus. Build through modular sections—riffs as “cells” that can be permuted, truncated, or re-accented. •   Use strategic negative space: sudden silences and dropouts amplify the impact of re-entries and breakdowns.
Sound design and production
•   Tight, articulate tones: high-mid-focused guitars, controlled low end, and fast-transient drum sounds. Gate and edit with care to preserve feel while retaining precision. •   Create tempo maps/clicks for complex transitions; record in sections if needed. Re-amp guitars to balance aggression with note definition.
Practice methodology
•   Compose riffs to a grid, then intentionally offset accents to create polymetric illusions. Notate hits and rests if necessary. •   Rehearse with subdivided clicks (e.g., 16th-note cues) and count-in markers for meter changes. Slow practice of transitions ensures live reliability.
Main artists
Influenced by
Hardcore Punk
Hardcore punk is a faster, louder, and more abrasive offshoot of late-1970s punk rock. Songs are typically short (often under two minutes), propelled by rapid tempos, aggressive down‑stroked guitar riffs, and shouted or barked vocals. The style prioritizes raw energy over technical ornamentation: power‑chord harmony, minimal guitar solos, and tightly locked rhythm sections dominate. Lyrically, hardcore punk is intensely direct—often political, anti‑authoritarian, and socially critical—reflecting a DIY ethic that values independent labels, self‑organized shows, and community‑run spaces. The genre coalesced in U.S. scenes such as Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., New York, and Boston, and soon spread internationally. Its velocity, attitude, and grassroots infrastructure profoundly shaped underground music and paved the way for numerous metal, punk, and alternative subgenres.
Metalcore
Metalcore is a fusion of hardcore punk’s urgency and ethos with heavy metal’s riff language and technicality. It is defined by tightly palm‑muted riffs, rapid double‑kick drumming, and frequent breakdowns—rhythmic, syncopated passages written to accentuate impact and crowd movement. Vocals typically alternate between harsh screams or growls and, in many bands, soaring clean choruses—a contrast that emphasizes both aggression and catharsis. Harmony and melody often borrow from melodic death metal, yielding minor‑key leads, harmonized guitars, and hook‑driven refrains. Modern production favors precise editing, dense guitar layering, and punchy drum sounds that keep complex rhythms clear at high intensity.
Math Rock
Math rock is a subgenre of indie and experimental rock defined by complex, irregular rhythms, sudden dynamic shifts, and angular, interlocking guitar lines. It frequently employs odd and mixed meters (such as 5/4, 7/8, 11/8), polyrhythms, start–stop figures, and intricate syncopation. Guitars often favor clean or lightly overdriven tones, tapping, and harmonically adventurous voicings over traditional power-chord riffing. Vocals, if present, are usually sparse, textural, or rhythmically coordinated with the ensemble rather than the primary focal point. Aesthetically, math rock draws from the precision and structural ambition of progressive rock, the urgency of post-hardcore, and the textural curiosity of indie and noise rock, resulting in music that feels both cerebral and visceral.
Grindcore
Grindcore is an extreme fusion of hardcore punk and metal characterized by blisteringly fast tempos, blast-beat drumming, heavily distorted guitars, and harsh, screamed or growled vocals. Songs are often extremely short—sometimes mere seconds—favoring intensity over conventional structure. The style ranges from politically charged and socially conscious lyrics to grotesque, gore-soaked imagery (especially in substyles like goregrind). Production can be raw and abrasive or tightly modern, but the aesthetic consistently emphasizes sonic extremity, density, and cathartic impact.
Post-Hardcore
Post-hardcore is a branch of hardcore punk that retains the style’s urgency and DIY ethos while expanding its musical vocabulary. Bands push beyond breakneck tempos and simple power-chord progressions into more dynamic song structures, varied rhythms, and a wider emotional range. Guitars often alternate between caustic distortion and clean, chiming textures; vocals can shift from shouted slogans to melodic singing; and arrangements emphasize tension-and-release, odd meters, and dramatic builds. Lyrically, post-hardcore tends to be more introspective and socially conscious than its hardcore roots, touching on personal, political, and philosophical themes.
Noise Rock
Noise rock is a subgenre of rock that deliberately embraces distortion, feedback, dissonance, and abrasive textures as primary musical materials rather than mere effects. It prioritizes timbre, volume, and sonic density over conventional melody and harmony, often using nonstandard tunings, prepared or detuned guitars, and extended techniques to generate harsh overtones and sheets of sound. Rhythm sections tend to be driving and repetitive, anchoring the chaos with motorik pulses, lurching grooves, or pummeling, minimal patterns. Vocals range from spoken and murmured to shouted and cathartic, with lyrics that skew cryptic, confrontational, or surreal. Aesthetically, noise rock traces a line from punk’s anti-virtuosity and DIY ethos through no wave’s iconoclasm and the avant-garde’s interest in sound-as-sound, yielding music that can be physically intense, psychologically unsettling, and artistically exploratory.
Progressive Metal
Progressive metal is a fusion of the complexity and experimentation of progressive rock with the weight, distortion, and precision of heavy metal. It is characterized by extended song forms, concept-driven albums, virtuosic musicianship, and frequent use of odd time signatures, polymeter, and rapid metric modulation. Harmonically, the style ranges from modal and diatonic riff writing to chromatic and jazz-influenced voicings, often integrating counterpoint between guitars, bass, and keyboards. Sonically it spans from high-gain, tightly palm-muted riffs to clean, atmospheric passages and orchestral/synth textures. Vocals vary from theatrical and soaring to harsh growls depending on the substyle, while lyrics frequently explore abstract narratives, philosophy, science fiction, and personal introspection.
Avant-Prog
Avant-prog (avant-garde progressive rock) is a branch of progressive rock that emphasizes experimentation, dissonance, and structural innovation. It often blends rock instrumentation with chamber-music timbres (strings, woodwinds, brass) and techniques borrowed from 20th‑century classical music, free jazz, and minimalism. Typical traits include irregular and shifting meters, abrupt contrasts, complex counterpoint, atonal or modal harmony, extended techniques, and through-composed forms that minimize or abandon verse/chorus structures. The mood ranges from stark and austere to playfully surreal, with a frequent penchant for theatricality and sound collage. The movement’s ethos—crystallized by the late‑1970s Rock in Opposition (RIO) collective—was as much cultural as musical, favoring artistic independence, DIY production, and an oppositional stance toward commercial music industry norms.
Technical Death Metal
Technical death metal (often shortened to tech-death) is a virtuosic, hyper-detailed branch of death metal characterized by complex song structures, rapid-fire tempo changes, and high-performance musicianship. It fuses the extremity and heaviness of death metal with the rhythmic sophistication of progressive metal and the harmonic vocabulary of jazz fusion. Signature elements include odd and shifting time signatures, polyrhythms, dissonant and chromatic harmony, through-composed or non-repeating structures, and intricate contrapuntal interplay between guitars and bass (often fretless). Drumming emphasizes precision blast beats, rapid double-kick patterns, metric modulation, and constant subdivision changes. Vocals are primarily deep growls or harsh screams, while lyrics frequently explore science, philosophy, metaphysics, and cosmology alongside the genre’s traditional dark themes. Production tends to favor clarity and separation to make dense arrangements intelligible, with tight, gated guitars, articulate bass presence, and drum sounds that capture transient detail. The result is aggressive, cerebral, and often breathtakingly technical music that rewards close listening.
Technical Thrash Metal
Technical thrash metal is a highly intricate, precision-focused branch of thrash metal that emphasizes complex songwriting, demanding musicianship, and advanced rhythmic and harmonic ideas. It retains the speed and aggression of classic thrash, but layers in odd time signatures, frequent tempo shifts, syncopated riffing, contrapuntal guitar parts, and harmonically adventurous chord progressions. Bass and drums are foregrounded with independent, virtuosic lines, and guitar work often features rapid alternate picking, string-skipping, sweeping, and chromatic runs. Lyrically, the style favors cerebral or conceptual themes—technology, dystopia, science fiction, social critique—delivered with clear, assertive vocals ranging from gritty shouts to cleaner, piercing tones.
Jazz Fusion
Jazz fusion (often simply called "fusion") blends the improvisational language and harmonic richness of jazz with the amplified instruments, grooves, and song forms of rock, funk, and R&B. It typically features electric guitars, electric bass or fretless bass, Rhodes electric piano, clavinet, analog and digital synthesizers, and a drum kit playing backbeat- and syncopation-heavy patterns. Hallmarks include extended chords and modal harmony, complex and shifting meters, brisk unison lines, virtuosic improvisation, and a production aesthetic that embraces effects processing and studio craft. The style ranges from fiery, aggressive workouts to polished, atmospheric textures, often within the same piece. Emerging in the late 1960s and flourishing through the 1970s, jazz fusion became a bridge between jazz audiences and rock/funk listeners, shaping later styles such as jazz-funk, smooth jazz, nu jazz, and parts of progressive and technical rock/metal.
Brutal Prog
Brutal prog (short for "brutal progressive") is a hyper-aggressive, tightly wound offshoot of progressive rock that fuses the complexity of prog with the abrasion of no wave, the intensity of grindcore, and the freedom of avant-jazz. Its hallmarks include relentless rhythmic churn, sudden metric lurches, whiplash stop–start arrangements, and dense, through-composed structures that minimize repetition. Harmony tends toward dissonance and chromatic clusters, while melodies often appear as angular, high-velocity unisons and hocketed lines between guitar, bass, and drums (and at times saxophone or keys). Vocals, if present at all, are sparse and used for color rather than hooks. The overall effect is maximalist, precise, and confrontational: music that feels meticulously engineered yet volatile, demanding virtuosic control and ensemble cohesion.
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