Progressive metalcore
Sung and screamed. Clean singing and harsh vocals trade off, often chorus against verse.
In short
Metalcore with eight-string guitars, ambient passages and structures borrowed from djent.
How it sounds
- Seven- and eight-string guitars with polyrhythms taken from djent.
- Ambient passages and electronic textures between the heavy sections.
- Very clean production with wide dynamics and vocals across many registers.
Hear what that means
- What is underneath the guitars from 4:05
Architects - Lost Forever // Lost Together
Ambient pads and reverb tails borrowed from post-rock, which change what the heavy sections mean when they arrive.
Open on YouTube at 4:05 - Odd metre under a real chorus from 4:02
Polyrhythm that still lands as a chorus - the genre's hardest arrangement problem.
Open on YouTube at 4:02 - Clean vocals as texture
Layered and processed far more ambitiously than metalcore's, treated as another instrument rather than as the hook.
Open on YouTube
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
- 130-190 bpm
- Song length
- 4-7 min
- Tuning
- Seven- and eight-strings in drop tunings, with djent's low-string vocabulary and metalcore's chord voicings used in the same song.
- Production
- Enormous and digitally exact, with ambient layers under everything. This is metalcore produced like a post-rock record, and the reverb is as important as the guitars.
- Written about
- Grief, Faith and doubt, Ecology, Mental health
What each part is doing
- Guitar Djent's palm-muted polyrhythm alternating with wide, ambient clean passages and harmonised leads. Three modes rather than metalcore's two.
- Bass Doubling for weight in the heavy sections and stepping out melodically in the ambient ones, which metalcore rarely gives it room to do.
- Drums Odd metres and polyrhythm under a chorus that still lands as a chorus, which is the genre's hardest arrangement problem.
- Vocals Screamed verses and sung choruses in metalcore's manner, with the clean vocals produced far more ambitiously — layered, processed and treated as texture.
- Atmospherics Synthesiser pads and reverb tails under everything, borrowed from post-rock, and the single clearest difference from the parent genre.
What it isn't
That it is metalcore with a longer runtime. The addition that matters is atmospheric rather than structural: these records are produced with pads, reverb and space borrowed from post-rock, and that changes what the heavy sections mean when they arrive. Architects and Northlane sound as they do because of what is underneath the guitars rather than what the guitars are playing.
Told apart from
- Metalcore Progressive metalcore keeps the screamed verse and sung chorus and adds odd metres, extended forms and ambient production.
- Djent The guitar vocabulary is djent's. The song structures are metalcore's, which djent proper mostly does without.
- Melodic metalcore The commercial wing of the same parent, with radio choruses instead of structural ambition.
- Post-metal / atmospheric sludge Both use ambient layers and long builds. Post-metal comes from sludge and has no clean choruses.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
After 2010, metalcore absorbed the lessons of djent and post-rock. Architects, following the death of their guitarist Tom Searle, took the genre somewhere far more emotional and became European headliners. Erra and Northlane pushed the technical side further.
Descended from
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Pagan / Viking black metal 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
- Viking metal 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
- US power metal 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.