Hardcore is a cooking pot that churns at an incredible rate, with new artists constantly floating to the top and becoming submerged again while legacy acts crowd the limited real estate. In a sea of thousands upon thousands of bands, it's easy to miss some truly excellent music that hasn't found the spotlight it should have. Here are 5 of my favorite hardcore records that have been overlooked, ignored, or simply have yet to escape their bubble.
The Wind in the Trees - Architects of Light
Baltimore-based mathgrind trio The Wind in the Trees burst onto the scene in early 2019 with A gift of bricks from the sky, a furious slab of chaotic hardcore that undertook the tall task of standing out in the already crowded (and very strong) Baltimore mathcore scene. Cosigned and produced by Phantomsmasher/Khanate legend James Plotkin, the band immediately took the most direct path to success; that is, being the most mind-meltingly intense band in a 50 mile radius. 2022's Architects of Light is a less overtly grinding record, exchanging some of their debut's furious blasting and metallic edge for an extra layer of dissonant noise rock and screamo riffing, but manages to be just as exhilarating as its predecessor.
Plotkin's production can be at least partially credited for the headrush of Architects, filling out the space left by guitarist Dave Gill's skronky upper-string playing with one of the thickest, nastiest bass tones I've ever heard on a mathcore record. The band's juxtaposition of groovy panic chord vamps and Psyopus-esque spiraling lines is given extra weight by this choice, which improves the overall pacing not only by making this contrast more apparent but opening up possibilities such as the crushing "Serpent Bearer", which plods along for its nearly 3-minute runtime at a midtempo half-time pace without losing even an iota of steam.
The Wind in the Trees's best feature has always been their impossible ability to be both precise and unhinged at the same time; you can very evidently hear the roots planted by Baltimore-DC hardcore megascene bands like Frodus decades ago, which have intermingled with the broader trends in mathcore to create a sound entirely unique to this region, and even unique amongst other bands in their particular scene. Architects of Light wields this weapon cleverly to create one of the most revisitable hardcore records of the last few years.
Pale Ache - Mourning As A Metaphor
Pale Ache has always been something of a weird band to pin down. Emerging out of previous outfit Chamber in 2018, the Halifax, Nova Scotia quintet have lived at a crossroads between contemporary metalcore influences and post-crust intensity since their first album, 2018's I Want to Be Nothing. Their newest record, 2022's Mourning As A Metaphor, does little to make them easier to box in. Their post-crust stylings are augmented with deathcore flourishes and a solid black metal backbone, and yet Mourning clearly doesn't exist in the extreme metal landscape that these influences would imply. At the same time, Pale Ache are unafraid to strategically devolve into chugging downtempo breakdowns or divert into alt-y melodic areas, but sound very little like an actual mainstream metalcore outfit. The friction between these elements is perhaps somewhat responsible for the band's lack of widespread following - too artsy for the Knocked Loose crowd, too contemporary for the Converge crowd - which is a shame, because Mourning is one of the most impressive metalcore records I've heard in years.
Broadly organized as a concept album about grief and the loss of a loved one, Mourning leverages the emotive tendencies of its more underground stylistic roots in a more direct way than I often hear from bands in the style. In moments such as the screamo hill-climb of "I Saw Life" or the Deafheaven-esque indie climax of closer "Your Arms Surround Me Like Broken Glass", this dramaticism plays as either crushingly effective or a little overwrought depending on how amenable you are to this kind of heartstring-tugging; personally, I find these segments unbelievably effective. This is helped by the broader contrast of the incredibly heavy content that makes up the majority of the album. Pale Ache oscillate through chug-forward segments, extreme metal blast-offs, and 00s art-mosh scorchers with just enough regularity to keep the album from ever really feeling dominated by one particular style; impossibly, they also manage to make it feel like they can do any (and all) of these sounds to an elite level of competence. "Hell Follows Your Beating Heart" intermixes black metal trems into curb stomp downtempo grooves as if it were the most natural thing in the world, climaxing with a nasty breakdown at its 2 minute mark that feels like it could tear the entire track apart at the seams. "Greater Failure" lurches chaotically through shards of mathcore leadwork, beatdown riffs, and deathy blast sections before settling into a melodic groove.
These tracks are almost all under 3 minutes, but they're packed with well-developed material. The result is that, despite coming in at only 23 minutes, Mourning As A Metaphor feels like an incredibly meaty work, and the level of polish that went into the songwriting is undeniable. An album this varied shouldn't be so cohesive, but the emotional throughline gives the album a strong thematic base to connect with the listener and guide them through the experience at a calculated breakneck pace.
FRAUD - Forms Unknown
FRAUD (or is it FRAVD? GRINDFRAUD?) is, at least nominally, something of a spinoff project of Black Crown Initiate, anchored by former drummer (and current Thy Art Is Murder drummer) Jesse Beahler and joined by a rotating cast of mostly-East Coast musicians including BCI lead vocalist James Dorton and The Red Chord vocalist Mike "Gunface" McKenzie. You'd think such an involved project coming out right as Black Crown Initiate was first blowing up would warrant some hype, but the low-key independent release of their sole album Forms Unknown (followed by a reissue on Grindcore Karaoke just three months later) allowed one of 2013's best grind records to fall by the wayside. FRAUD leverages a level of technicality somewhat rare to deathgrind records that don't sound anything like Cattle Decapitation. I have a complicated relationship with tech death, particularly in the 2000s and 2010s, but those like me who hunger for proper riffs mixed into their sweeps and techwank will find the 10 tracks FRAUD serves up very satisfying.
It's nice to hear a deathgrind record that doesn't seem at least a little bit embarrassed of its grind elements; so often this style can feel like the musicians are apologizing for diluting the "true" death metal riffing, and the grind feels hidden and minimized in turn. While it is by no means the most caveman punk record to spawn out of grind in the last 10-15 years, Forms Unknown does embrace a go-go-go attitude and ultra-high energy level that I appreciate; at times, it even trespasses on a Discordance Axis-esque skronkgrind sound that complements the more straightahead tech elements very nicely. If I had to describe the ethos of the record simply, it would be "no nonsense." Forms moves fast, too fast to not have fun, and its dedication to not sacrificing laser-focused precision in its pursuit of relentless energy is admirable in how well-balanced it is.
All Out War - Celestial Rot
If any band should not be on a list like this, it's probably All Out War. One of the most influential bands of the early 90s New York metalcore scene, AOW pushed boundaries of heaviness within hardcore with their work between 1992 and 2003. Many bands from this period enjoy a legendary status and are venerated as some of the best that early metalcore has to offer, still drawing impressive live crowds even in middle age; All Out War is no strong outlier in this regard. Many of these bands also still put out records, though they're typically disregarded as inessential by all but the most dedicated fans.
The problem comes when a band like All Out War defies this tradition by releasing their best music 30 years into their career and radically evolving in the process, leading to a record like Celestial Rot which should be hailed as one of the finest recent examples of its kind and yet is overlooked as just another skippable legacy record. Any doubts about All Out War's ability to throw down with the best of them should be annihilated pretty much instantly by the crushing death metal wall of opener "Snake Legion", which leverages old-school harmony and simplistic trem riffs to devastating effectiveness. Celestial Rot is not a complex record; it rejects the chaotic structure and rampant technicality of newer death metal/hardcore hybrids as unnecessary, and it's hard to argue it isn't right to do so. The 26 minutes of fury that follow are positively exhilarating: all the best parts of the moshy 90s sound driven to incredible depths of heaviness by riffing that remembers that extreme metal wasn't any less heavy back when a lot of it was dead simple.
I love a lot of music with a lot of bullshit. I am a known enjoyer of deathcore's early MySpace era, when bands were still strongly rooted in the death metal tradition and felt like they were trying to up the ante with every single tempo change and crazy riff. I believe that Celestial Rot is the kind of album that could only be written by a band that has been around long enough to hold the wisdom that comes with predating both the technical arms race of the 2000s and the textural caveman chug-chug arms race of the 2010s. At the same time, it shouldn't be possible for a metalcore band this late into their career to feel this fresh and energized. The lineup on Celestial Rot is fundamentally almost identical to the one on For Those Who Were Crucified, the band's 1998 classic and most beloved output; the only difference is the exchanging of guitarist Jim Antonelli for Andrew Pietroluongo, who joined the band on their 2003 followup Condemned To Suffer. That means the shortest tenured band member had been with them for 20 full years by the time this album dropped, and its older members presumably are or soon will be pushing age 50. Metal is a genre that can be shockingly kind to its legacy acts, but bands just don't really do this. Even comebacks as conservative as Judas Priest's Firepower or Carcass's Surgical Steel, records that are fundamentally retreading past ground for these bands, can become shockingly acclaimed just by virtue of being well-constructed late career works; Celestial Rot is not only every bit as well written as any of these, but pushes the band forward in a new direction I find even more exciting than their classic material.
Shikari / Louise Cyphre - Shikari / Louise Cyphre
Splits get a bad rep sometimes, especially when they involve beloved bands. Dutch chaotic screamo-ers Shikari are by no means an A-List screamo band, but they do have a fairly dedicated following amongst fans of early 2000s European screamo for stellar disks such as 2000's Robot Wars 10" and 2002's self-titled 7". Louise Cyphre, on the other hand, are a relatively overlooked German outfit best known for a 2005 split with legendary Italian band La Quiete, one where they are predictably sidelined (though honestly I don't think the CD is one of the more flattering portraits of either band). In fact, Louise Cyphre didn't really have great luck with splits in general - I don't find any of their three splits between 2002 and May 2005 to be particularly exciting. Shikari was also, for the most part, better on their own, pulling out solid splits with Phoenix Bodies and Seein' Red but never really approaching the heights of their two solo EPs. Perhaps it was a sense of disappointment with their collective luck putting out splits with other bands that drove them to eachother, putting out one last album length (well, by screamo standards) split 9" as a collective sendoff to both bands' careers. You'd be forgiven for expecting a disaster, but you'd be dead wrong.
Shikari / Louise Cyphre might be the best thing either band ever put out. It's certainly the highlight of Louise Cyphre's discography by a country mile, and just might be my favorite screamo record of all time on top of that. It paints two distinct portraits: one of a band going back into the studio for one last hurrah, exercising their classic sound and demonstrating their consistency in doing so, and one of a band that was just figuring out what they wanted to bring to the genre at the very last minute it was possible to do so. Shikari takes the first half with a quartet of tracks that demonstrate their standard approach, a sort of slightly metalcore'd take on Orchid's Dance Tonight! sound with a bit more melody and less rhythmic complexity. The same ultradramaticism that makes Orchid's music so intoxicating runs strong through Shikari's songwriting, and while it can be easy to see them as a derivative, their sound is strong enough and just separate enough to work on its own, something that makes them very popular amongst discerning screamo fans who appreciate the hallmarks of this era. I actually used to find their half of this split a little underwhelming, though I'm not sure I could identify any particular reasons beyond it maybe being a little less dissonant than their previous output. Regardless, even if this marks some of their most straightforward material, it's a damn solid demonstration of the euro style.
But where Shikari were simply serving up more meat and potatoes, Louise Cyphre did something truly remarkable with their side. After a full discography of being somewhat aimless and indistinct, their 6 tracks on here are some of the most electric screamo I've ever heard. What I find remarkable is that, despite being a distinctly "skronky" band and typifying the "chaotic" part of the chaotic screamo stylistic category to a pretty significant degree, their sound remains consistently so damn melodic, even at its most complex and untethered. At times, their mathy outbursts even resemble some of the more "indie" math rock that was gaining popularity across the Atlantic around the same time. "rendezvous with tommy gun" could pass as a fucked up take on a late 2000s Dance Gavin Dance song if it wasn't so dense, and that sense of intentionality manages to elevate the intensity of all these songs to near unreachable levels. The result is a sound that is truly one of a kind, epitomizing multiple different approaches to post-hardcore simultaneously in a way that feels more important than any of them could be on their own.
I really do wonder what drove them to switch up their sound like this; whatever it was, it seems to have clicked immediately and finally allowed the band to unleash the potential they had struggled to show prior. The 8 or so minutes of material on their side of this 9" are just damn near immaculate, clearly whittled down to only the most meaningful notes, and yet I can't help but wish there was more - I want them to have stuck around, I want them to have recorded again, I want them to have put out an album in this sound and started a revolution in the genre. But Shikari / Louise Cyphre is a funeral, an epitaph to two bands that, like many in the genre, burned brightly and quickly exhausted their fuel. I don't know if they truly planned for this to be both bands' last record, though with Shikari disbanding a couple months prior to its release it's not hard to imagine the writing was on the wall. Louise Cyphre persisted a couple of years but never recorded or released again, and their incredible contribution to one of the best splits in screamo history remains a "what could have been" rather than a true foreshadowing of where they would go. But both bands brought it all to this record, and it deserves to be remembered as a stellar demonstration of why people find this era of screamo so exciting. Whether it was refining prior concepts or forging bold new directions, the creativity and energy that permeated the scene was and still is intoxicating to behold.