Rockpedia
Rock branch Full entry · 1987

Powerviolence

Emerged 1987 Origin California, USA Subgenres — Vocals Growled or shrieked
Heaviness
8
Speed
10
Melody
2

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

In short

Hardcore taken to the limit: abrupt tempo shifts, twenty-second songs, blast beats cut with parts as slow as tar.

How it sounds

  • Abrupt switches between blast beats and slow passages, with no transition.
  • Songs of ten to forty seconds, albums with twenty-five tracks.
  • Deliberately ugly sound, with distorted vocals and clipping bass.

Hear what that means

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 2 of 3 are cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
60-320 bpm
Song length
18 sec-1.5 min
Tuning
Whatever is to hand, tuned low and loosely. Precision is not the value being pursued.
Production
Deliberately awful, frequently recorded on a boombox. The lo-fi is confrontational rather than economic — several of these bands could have afforded better and refused.
Written about
Contempt, Anti-machismo, Anti-scene politics, Jokes, frequently very dark ones

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Two speeds and no transition: full blast, and a sudden lurch to a crawl. The whiplash between them is the genre's entire structural vocabulary.
  • Bass Distorted past pitch and often the loudest thing on the recording, which is a hardcore inheritance taken to an extreme.
  • Drums Blast beats alternating with half-time crawls, changing without warning. The genre asks a drummer to be a switch rather than a pulse.
  • Vocals Shrieked and growled, frequently by two people, with lyrics that are as often absurd as they are angry.

What it isn't

That the joke means it is not serious. The humour is a position: these bands were reacting against hardcore's self-importance and metal's posturing, and absurdity was the tool. The music underneath is genuinely extreme and technically demanding in the specific way that stopping and starting at these tempos is, which is why it stayed influential long after the jokes stopped being funny.

Told apart from

  • Grindcore Grindcore doubles hardcore's speed and keeps a groove. Power violence removes the groove and adds sudden tempo collapses — it is much less musical, deliberately.
  • Hardcore punk Power violence is hardcore taken past the point where song structure survives, by people arguing with hardcore's own conventions.
  • Mincecore Mincecore is the neighbouring genre with the same brevity and a more explicitly political and comic bent.
  • Crust punk Crust is slower, metallic and sincere. Power violence is faster, uglier and frequently sarcastic.

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

History

In California at the end of the 1980s, Infest and Man Is the Bastard pushed hardcore into a zone where structure disappears entirely. The Slap-a-Ham label gathered the scene, and Spazz became its emblem. The genre directly shaped modern grindcore and the most extreme end of current hardcore.

Descended from

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

  • Cybergrind 1.0 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
  • Goregrind 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. These share no ancestor with it at all.