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If you told me five years ago that deathcore was on the cusp of a comeback, I’d have fled to the most remote cave on Earth and stayed there with my fingers in my ears. I remember the dark days: when a bunch of Myspace kids heard Job For A Cowboy’s Doom and said ‘We can do that!’, before churning out ‘songs’ which were overstuffed with breakdowns and pig squeals and had all the character of a paving slab. I’m blown away to report, however, that the deathcore revival has yielded far better music than the original wave which inspired it.
In the 2020s, Lorna Shore, Fit For An Autopsy and even some of the old guard have done what I previously thought impossible: approached deathcore with their own vision and a desire to break boundaries. For pulling their genre out of the quagmire, they deserve to be celebrated. So, here are the coolest new-era deathcore bands – as chosen by me, an ardent deathcore detractor.
A divider for Metal Hammer
Lorna Shore
I respect Lorna Shore for breaking heavy metal down to its individual components and then injecting each one with enough adrenaline to kill an elephant. New Jersey’s maximalists are at the top of the deathcore tower and seem set to reach even greater heights, thanks to their apocalyptic string sections, unrepentant brutality and frontman Will Ramos’ immediate charisma. New album I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me is as darkly melodramatic as its title, and the band are set to play one of their biggest-ever gigs to 10,000 people at London’s Alexandra Palace next year. To my own surprise, I really want to go.
Shadow Of Intent
After Shadow Of Intent released their third album Melancholy in 2019, I saw people applaud them for ‘saving deathcore’, which to me was an honour on par with ‘saving The News Of The World’. However, now that I’m overcoming my musical prejudice, I appreciate the quartet’s hybridity, dealing not just in beefy beatdowns but orchestral, tech-metal and melodeath flair. When a band this extreme dish out guitar lines I can sing along to, as they do on the brand-new Imperium Delirium, I have to be impressed, and it makes sense given how much I’ve enjoyed Chris Wiseman’s chops in his other project Currents. The fact they’re a support act at the above-mentioned Lorna Shore tour makes me even more eager to attend.
Fit For An Autopsy
Gojira are one of my favourite bands, so when someone described Fit For An Autopsy to me as ‘Gojira-core’, I knew I had to give them a go. I enjoyed 2019’s The Sea Of Tragic Beasts even if I didn’t love it – its primary strengths being its pick-scrape riffs, Joe Badolato’s diverse vocals and the cliche-free approach to breakdowns – and each successive album has pulled me in more and more. Last year, The Nothing That Is fully converted me, as the band completed their transformation into the Thy Art Is Murder, Lamb Of God and Gojira hybrid the world never knew it needed. The way Red Horizon used the same lyric as both a mosh call and a chorus line was just… yum.
Brand Of Sacrifice
My enjoyment of Brand Of Sacrifice made sense when I discovered the members formerly played with The Afterimage, who specialised in the kind of uber-complex and bombastic nonsense my ears are usually drawn towards. In their current band, the Canadian bunch don’t retain the overblown melodic vocals of old, although the sense of ambition still shines through. 2021 album Lifeblood was full of techy riffs and glitching freakouts, while the choirs and keyboards oddly grounded everything, keeping the focus on bombast and emotion as opposed to simply showing off. The five-piece’s Purge EP came out in 2023, but another full-length fix of this proggy extremity feels more than overdue.
Whitechapel (post-2019)
It was the glow-up to end all glow-ups. Whitechapel spent the 2000s and 2010s at the forefront of the single-digit-IQ deathcore takeover, before the mould started to break slightly under the groove metal weight of 2016 album Mark Of The Blade. But then, out of nowhere, came The Valley: an evolution at lightspeed that showed new vocal prowess and vulnerability from frontman Phil Bozeman, whose lyrics coalesced into a concept piece about childhood trauma. Meanwhile, his bandmates extended their reach to touch upon prog and the New Wave Of American Heavy Metal. Follow-up Kin felt every bit as brave, and even though this year’s Hymns In Dissonance went back to basics, the way the Knoxvillians reinvented themselves ignited a well-earned career renaissance.
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