New Directions in Grindcore | Bandcamp Daily
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Grindcore was born from anarcho-punk before it was subsumed into metal and, though this isn’t true across the subgenre, progressive politics are often still very important to some of its biggest practitioners, like Napalm Death. The music itself—a punker-than-punk chaotic din that wowed radio tastemaker John Peel, giving it a flash of mainstream notoriety in the U.K.—was inspired by a wide spectrum of underground sounds, from no wave to thrash to art rock. A number of the scene’s earliest names, no more than kids when they made grindcore’s foundational recordings, quickly branched off into the deepest reaches of electronic music, dub, you name it.
Those listeners who were inspired by these sounds took note, and the 1990s onwards saw grind infusing free jazz (John Zorn’s Naked City and Painkiller ensembles), transformed by drum machines (Agoraphobic Nosebleed and their thousand “cybergrind” imitators), twisted into futurist pop by noiseniks like Melt-Banana, and streamlined into hyper-technical, bullet hell blasts by Discordance Axis (and later Gridlink), to name but a few.
Three decades on from the release of Napalm Death’s landmark albums Scum and From Enslavement to Obliteration, there are plenty of artists—from road-calloused touring units to bedroom producers—taking the basic loud-fast-rules framework of blast beats, noisy riffs, and screamed vocals to exciting new places. Here are nine we love.