Goregrind
Growled or shrieked. Unintelligible without a lyric sheet. The thing most newcomers bounce off.
In short
Grindcore with pitch-shifted vocals and lyrics from a pathology textbook. Carcass wrote the rules on their first two albums.
How it sounds
- Vocals run through a pitch shifter into an underwater sound.
- Simple riffs, extreme tempos and deliberately filthy production.
- Lyrics and cover art drawn from medical and pathological imagery.
Hear what that means
- A medical dictionary as a lyric sheet
Carcass - Reek of Putrefaction
The words function as sound and as a wall against casual listeners rather than as content. The band later called the whole approach a joke that got away from them.
Open on YouTube - Where it became listenable from 4:10
Carcass - Symphonies of Sickness
The same material recorded so you can hear it, which the founding record deliberately was not.
Open on YouTube at 4:10 - Pitch-shifted below human from 32:04
Regurgitate - Effortless Regurgitation
Vocals dropped electronically or produced by inhaling - deliberately inhuman, and the genre's most identifiable feature.
Open on YouTube at 32:04
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
- 200-300 bpm
- Song length
- 30 sec-2 min
- Tuning
- Tuned as low as the strings allow and frequently not intonated at all. Pitch is not among the things this genre is trying to control.
- Production
- Deliberately vile: bass-heavy, distorted, and frequently recorded so badly that individual instruments are unidentifiable. On the founding record this was budget; afterwards it was doctrine.
- Written about
- Anatomy and pathology, Medical terminology, used as poetry, Decay, Deliberate disgust
What each part is doing
- Guitar Down-tuned tremolo and chugging with no melodic content, buried in the mix so it reads as a texture rather than as riffs.
- Bass The loudest thing on many of these records, distorted into a formless roar.
- Drums Blast beats, frequently sloppy on the earlier records and mechanically precise on the later ones. Both approaches are defended within the scene.
- Vocals Pitch-shifted downward electronically, or produced by inhaling — deliberately inhuman, and the genre's most identifiable feature.
What it isn't
That the lyrics are meant to be read. Carcass's early records use medical dictionaries as source material, and the words function as sound and as a wall against casual listeners rather than as content. The band's guitarist later described the whole approach as a joke that got away from them, and the genre it spawned took it entirely seriously.
Told apart from
- Grindcore Grindcore is political and comparatively musical. Goregrind keeps the form and swaps the politics for pathology, and pitch-shifts the vocals.
- Brutal death metal Brutal death metal shares the gutturals and the subject matter with far more structure, groove and technical precision.
- Deathgrind Deathgrind is the musically ambitious hybrid. Goregrind deliberately is not.
- Mincecore Mincecore is the neighbouring genre with the same brevity, a comic bent and explicit politics.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
Carcass wrote their first two albums almost entirely out of anatomical terms taken from a medical dictionary. The genre then spread mainly through Japan and Europe, with hundreds of short-lived bands and split releases. Shock is part of the formula here, and self-mockery is common.
Descended from
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- War metal / bestial 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
- Powerviolence 1.4 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.