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sasscore

Sasscore

United States · 2000s
IntenseDarkDancingSentimentalEpic

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Description

Sasscore is a flamboyant, high-strung strain of early-to-mid 2000s post-hardcore that fuses mathy, dissonant riffing and screamo vocal intensity with the hip-shaking momentum of dance-punk.

Its calling cards include yelped and shrieked dual vocals, cut-and-thrust start–stop arrangements, spiky clean guitars, jagged syncopation, and a camp, fashion-forward attitude—hence the “sass.” Lyrics often mix bite and satire, tackling sex, power, and social theater with sneering wit and theatrical swagger.

On stage and on record, sasscore prizes sharp contrasts: razor-treble guitar stabs against booming, club-ready drums; sudden tempo lurches beside hooky gang shouts; and a queered, transgressive performance energy that made it as much a scene and attitude as a sound.


Sources: Spotify, Wikipedia, Discogs, Rate Your Music, MusicBrainz, and other online sources

History

Origins (early–mid 2000s)

Sasscore took shape in the United States in the early 2000s, as bands in the post-hardcore and screamo underground began splicing the angular abrasion of noise rock and no wave with dance-punk’s strut and groove. The scene clustered around DIY venues and all-ages spaces on the West Coast and Pacific Northwest (notably Seattle and Southern California), spreading via zines, message boards, and MySpace.

Key early touchpoints included The Blood Brothers’ shrill, theatrical dual-vocal attack and The Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower’s jittery, sax-slashed noir punk—blueprints for the “sass” blend of spiky rhythms, campy provocation, and knife-edged guitars.

Aesthetic and Peak

By the mid-2000s, the term “sasscore” informally marked a pocket of post-hardcore distinguished by flamboyant fashion (white belts, skinny jeans), queer-friendly spaces, and performance that embraced satire and excess. Musically, bands favored treble-forward tones, chromatic churn, fractured song forms, and danceable backbeats. Releases by The Blood Brothers, Heavy Heavy Low Low, The Number Twelve Looks Like You, Some Girls, and An Albatross codified the sound’s tension between chaos and groove.

Diffusion and Fade (late 2000s–early 2010s)

As scenes shifted, many groups dissolved or morphed into adjacent styles (mathcore, experimental post-hardcore, or dance-punk). The sound’s DNA—particularly the mix of mathy riffs, elastic grooves, and theatrical vocals—bled into neighboring lanes, while the term “sasscore” became a retrospective tag for the micro-movement’s aesthetics.

Revival and Legacy (late 2010s–present)

A late-2010s/2020s wave, led prominently by SeeYouSpaceCowboy..., revived and reframed sasscore’s hallmarks for a new generation, sharpening production, integrating modern metalcore breakdowns, and foregrounding openly queer narratives. The style’s legacy can be heard in swancore and other post-hardcore offshoots that balance technical fretwork with hooky, dance-touched momentum and dramatic vocal interplay.

How to make a track in this genre

Rhythm and Groove
•   Start with a dance-punk backbone: brisk tempos (140–180 BPM), tight hi-hats, and a snappy, cracking snare. Use syncopated kick patterns that invite movement. •   Employ frequent stop–starts, metric feints, and quick turnarounds. Short, explosive fills keep energy volatile.
Harmony and Riffing
•   Favor treble-forward, clean-to-slightly-overdriven guitar tones. Build riffs from chromatic fragments, tritones, minor seconds, and angular octave stabs. •   Write in concise, jagged cells rather than long lines; interlock guitar/bass figures for a “push–pull” feel. •   Use tension-and-release: sudden dissonant bursts resolving to a danceable groove.
Vocals and Lyrics
•   Pair contrasting vocalists (yelped/shrieked highs vs. barked/spoken asides). Trade lines rapidly for call-and-response drama. •   Lyrics should be sharp, camp, and satirical—themes of power, sex, fashion, and social theater. Embrace flamboyance and double entendre.
Arrangement and Dynamics
•   Keep songs lean (2–3 minutes) with sectional whiplash: groove → stabby break → explosive shout-along → drop back into the beat. •   Layer gang shouts and claps to emphasize “dance-punk” hits; punctuate with brief noise blasts or sax/synth accents if desired.
Production and Performance
•   Mix for presence and bite: prominent snare, cutting guitar mids, bass with pick attack and light overdrive. •   Stagecraft matters: embrace theatrical delivery, sharp visual styling, and kinetic movement that matches the music’s sass and snap.

Best playlists

The Sound of Sasscore
The Sound of Sasscore
Every Noise at Once
Sasscore
Sasscore
Chosic
Sasscore Mix
Sasscore Mix
Spotify
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Main artists

Related labels

Pure Noise Records
Pure Noise Records
Grind Select
Grind Select
Chillwavve Records
Chillwavve Records
Dark Trail Records
Dark Trail Records
Paper Wings Records
Paper Wings Records

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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.
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.
Screamo
Screamo is an emotionally charged offshoot of emo and hardcore punk characterized by cathartic, screamed vocals, dynamic extremes, and a blend of melody with discordance. Songs often move rapidly between fragile, clean passages and explosive, chaotic climaxes, emphasizing tension-and-release. Guitars favor octave runs, tremolo-picked melodies, and dissonant chord voicings, while drums switch from driving d-beats to blast beats and spacious half-time drops. Lyrics are typically confessional, poetic, and socially aware, delivered with a visceral intensity that foregrounds vulnerability and urgency. Early recordings embraced raw, DIY production and intimate, basement-show energy; later waves incorporated post-rock atmospherics and more expansive songwriting.
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.
Dance-Punk
Dance-punk is a fusion of punk’s abrasive energy and attitude with the groove-forward rhythms of funk and disco. It favors tight, four-on-the-floor drum patterns, rubbery and syncopated bass lines, choppy, scratchy rhythm guitars, and percussion accents like cowbell and handclaps. Vocals are often shouted, talk-sung, or delivered with sardonic cool, and lyrics tend to be ironic, urban, and socially observant. A first wave emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s alongside post-punk and no wave scenes (especially in New York and the UK), while a high-profile revival in the early 2000s (centered around DFA Records) brought analog synths, minimalist production, and indie-club sensibilities back to the fore.
No Wave
No wave is a late-1970s New York City underground movement that rejected the orthodoxies of punk, rock, and pop in favor of abrasive sonics, anti-virtuosic playing, and an art-forward, confrontational attitude. Its sound ranges from skronky, free-jazz-influenced sax blasts and scraping, detuned guitars to rigid, mechanical rhythms and stark, minimal song structures. Lyrics are often spoken, shouted, or declaimed in a deadpan or feral style, addressing urban anxiety, alienation, and cultural decay. More than a fixed style, no wave was a short, intense rupture: a scene of musicians and artists who intentionally dismantled conventional harmony, groove, and song form to foreground texture, noise, and performance as critique.
Art Punk
Art punk is a strand of punk that embraces avant-garde methods, conceptual framing, and experimental songcraft while retaining punk’s immediacy and economy. It favors angular guitars, nonstandard song structures, and an art-school sensibility that treats the band as both a musical and visual project. Drawing on proto‑punk, art rock, and the downtown gallery/club scenes, art punk often features dissonance, spoken or affectless vocals, minimal or motorik grooves, and lyrics that are ironic, cerebral, or politically critical. The result is music that is fierce yet meticulously designed, marrying punk energy to avant-garde curiosity.
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.
Post-Punk
Post-punk is a broadly experimental strain of rock that emerged in the late 1970s as artists sought to push beyond the speed, simplicity, and orthodoxy of first-wave punk. It typically features angular, bass-forward grooves; jagged or minimal guitar lines; stark, spacious production; and an openness to dub, funk, electronic, and avant-garde ideas. Lyrics often examine alienation, urban decay, politics, and the inner life with artful or abstract delivery. A studio-as-instrument approach, emphasis on rhythm section interplay, and an appetite for non-rock textures (tape effects, drum machines, found sound, synths) distinguish the style. The result can be danceable yet tense, cerebral yet visceral, and emotionally restrained yet intensely expressive.
Experimental Rock
Experimental rock is a broad, exploratory branch of rock music that prioritizes innovation over convention. It stretches rock’s core instrumentation and song forms through unusual timbres, extended techniques, nonstandard tunings, chance procedures, and studio-as-instrument production. Drawing on avant-garde composition, free jazz, minimalism, and electronic/tape music, experimental rock often rejects verse–chorus structures in favor of drones, suites, collage, and improvisation. It embraces dissonance and noise as expressive tools, employs odd or fluid meters, and incorporates non-rock instruments, found sounds, and unconventional recording methods. The result is a lineage of music that treats rock not as a fixed style but as a laboratory for new sound worlds.
Queercore
Queercore is a punk-derived music and cultural movement that centers LGBTQ+ experiences, politics, and pleasure. Emerging in the mid-1980s as a reaction against both homophobia in punk scenes and assimilationist tendencies in mainstream gay culture, it embraces a DIY ethos across music, zines, film, and community organizing. Musically, queercore spans from blistering hardcore punk and noisy art-punk to hooky pop‑punk and left‑field indie, with distorted guitars, driving bass, and often shouted or chant-like vocals. Lyrics are frank, confrontational, and frequently witty—tackling sexuality, gender variance, queer desire, anti-fascism, and everyday survival—with a mix of anger, humor, and camp. Beyond sound, queercore is a scene-building practice: small labels, hand-made zines, all-ages shows, and mutual-aid minded organizing that prioritize safe(r) spaces, consent culture, and queer joy.
Scottish Country Dance Music
Scottish country dance music is the lively, highly structured dance-band tradition that accompanies Scottish country dancing. It centers on tune types such as reels (2/2), jigs (6/8), strathspeys (4/4 with the distinctive “Scotch snap”), and hornpipes (4/4 with a gentle swing). The core sound is led by fiddles and/or accordion, supported by piano (vamping left hand and chordal right hand), with occasional guitar, bass, and light drums. Tempi and phrasing are optimized for dancers, typically in 8-bar phrases forming 32-, 40-, or 48-bar tunes repeated to fit dance sets (e.g., 8×32 bars). The style emphasizes lift, rhythmic clarity, and clean articulation so dancers can feel each step. Modern bands inherit a long tradition that blends older Scottish and English country-dance idioms with Baroque-era harmonic sensibilities and, later, the tight ensemble approach of 20th‑century British dance bands.
Mathcore
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.
Emoviolence
Emoviolence is a ferocious fusion of 1990s screamo and powerviolence/grindcore. It combines the emotional intensity and lyrical vulnerability of early screamo (“skramz”) with the speed, brevity, and abrasion of powerviolence. Songs are often extremely short (20–90 seconds), marked by sudden starts and stops, dissonant chord clusters, blast beats, and high‑pitched, desperate screams. The style is deeply rooted in DIY punk ethics: raw, lo‑fi recordings; basement shows; hand‑assembled 7"s and tapes; and zine culture. The guitar tone skews thin and treble‑forward, the production favors live immediacy over polish, and lyrics often blend confessional fragments with political urgency.
Florida Fast Music
Florida fast music is a regional scene descriptor for an especially fast, chaotic strain of DIY hardcore that flourished in Florida—primarily Tampa, Gainesville, and Miami—in the mid-to-late 1990s. It merges the blast-beat urgency of grindcore and powerviolence with the emotional volatility and cathartic vocal delivery of early screamo and emoviolence. Hallmarks include ultra-short songs, rapid tempo shifts, noisy guitar textures, and whiplash dynamics that jump from blast-speed passages to sudden, lurching slowdowns. The scene grew out of punk’s DIY infrastructure—house shows, split 7-inches, tape-trading, and zines—and prized intensity, community, and raw documentation over polish.
Has influenced
Swancore
Swancore is a bright, technical offshoot of post-hardcore marked by intricate, funk-tinged guitar work, elastic grooves, and the interplay of soaring clean vocals with harsher screams. Named after guitarist Will Swan (Dance Gavin Dance), the style emphasizes tight, syncopated riffing, frequent tapping, and jazz-fusion flourishes wrapped in catchy, pop-forward hooks. Arrangements pivot rapidly between aggressive bursts and sleek melodic passages. The harmony often ventures beyond basic triads to include extensions, mode mixture, and chromatic voice-leading, while drums favor ghost-note heavy, linear patterns and occasional odd-meter turns. Despite the complexity, Swancore typically retains an upbeat, glossy production aesthetic that highlights clarity, agility, and rhythmic snap.
Electronicore
Electronicore is a fusion of post-hardcore/metalcore and electronic dance music. It blends down-tuned, chugging guitars, double-kick breakdowns, and screamed/clean call-and-response vocals with club-ready synths, sidechained pads, risers, and drop-centric song structures. Typical tracks juxtapose verses rooted in metalcore energy with EDM-style builds and explosive drops that can reference trance, electro house, or dubstep. Production is as central as performance: sequenced arpeggios, supersaws, wobble/growl basses, and glitch edits are arranged alongside live drums or tight sample-reinforced kits. Lyrically, electronicore keeps the emotive intensity of post-hardcore—introspection, catharsis, and youth-culture themes—while adopting EDM’s hook-forward choruses and festival scale.
Crunk
Crunk is a high-energy substyle of Southern hip hop built for clubs, arenas, and call-and-response crowd participation. It emphasizes booming 808 kick drums, aggressive snare/clap backbeats, and simple, chant-like hooks delivered by a lead rapper and a hypeman or group vocals. The production is stark and percussive: sub-bass 808s, handclaps, clattering hi-hats, and brash synth stabs or brass hits carry most of the weight, with very little harmonic movement. Tempos typically sit around 70–80 BPM in half-time (or 140–160 BPM double-time), creating a stomping, anthemic feel. Lyrically, crunk focuses on amping the crowd—party commands, fight music, and swagger—more than narrative storytelling. The word “crunk,” a Southern slang blend of “crazy” and “drunk,” reflects its rowdy, cathartic intent.
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