Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1990

Deathgrind

Emerged 1990 Origin USA / United Kingdom Subgenres — Vocals Growled or shrieked
Heaviness
10
Speed
10
Melody
2

Growled or shrieked. Unintelligible without a lyric sheet. The thing most newcomers bounce off.

In short

Death metal compressed to the length and speed of grindcore. No intro, no outro.

How it sounds

  • Near-continuous blast beats, with songs between thirty seconds and two minutes.
  • Compressed death metal riffs with no development.
  • Vocals alternating between very low growls and very high screams.

Hear what that means

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Every second here is the uploader's own, read from the recording's tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
220-320 bpm
Song length
1-3 min
Tuning
B or lower, on strings loose enough that the riffs read as noise with a pitch centre rather than as chords.
Production
Compressed to a solid block, with triggered drums to keep the kick audible. Modern deathgrind is extremely well produced, which is a departure from grindcore's founding aesthetic.
Written about
Body horror, Ecological collapse, Misanthropy, Politics, on the older records

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Death metal riffs at grindcore's tempo, with tremolo and chromatic runs, and a sudden groove section as the only relief.
  • Bass Distorted and inseparable from the guitars, contributing mass rather than line.
  • Drums Blast beats sustained far longer than grindcore's brevity used to require, with hyper-fast double kick underneath. The endurance demand is the genre's real technical bar.
  • Vocals Two registers, low guttural and high shriek, frequently from one vocalist alternating within a phrase.

What it isn't

That it is a marketing hyphen. It describes a real and datable event: Napalm Death's second phase, when a grindcore band hired American death metal producers and started writing structured songs, which annoyed a great many people at the time. The hybrid stuck because both parents wanted the same tempo and disagreed about everything else.

Told apart from

  • Grindcore Grindcore is shorter, punkier and more chaotic. Deathgrind brings death metal's riffing, structure and production, and the songs get longer.
  • Brutal death metal Brutal death metal is slower, groovier and built around the slam. Deathgrind keeps grindcore's speed and refuses the groove.
  • Goregrind Goregrind shares the tempo and the subject matter with far less musical ambition and pitch-shifted vocals.
  • Technical death metal Both are extremely fast and technically demanding. Technical death metal is harmonically restless; this is relentless.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

Napalm Death, having invented grindcore, swerved toward death metal in the early 1990s and created the hybrid. Pig Destroyer and Cattle Decapitation took the formula further, the latter with lyrics about ecology and meat consumption. It is the densest information-per-second in the whole tree.

Descended from

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.