A "groovy, mid-tempo style known for its exaggerated bouncy rhythm and common pornographic themes” is RateYourMusic’s general description for pornogrind. An offshoot of goregrind, pornogrind is not much more than what you just read. As a microgenre, it takes the already off-putting genre of goregrind (death metal-meets-grindcore-meets-preversion), and further integrates intense sexual and violent themes, a majority of the time both.
I grew up with virtually zero internet supervision: on the off-chance one device was taken away, I’d resort to YouTube'ing music on any other means possible: even my Nintendo 3DS. I remember when even that was confiscated after rather suggestive rap music videos littered my search history. My time as a late teenager in the metal field—predominantly as a reviewer—has certainly built my character and provided me with some outstanding campfire tales, as I’ve seen things most anyone would never want or need to, ever. This ranges from adult content of various extremities to, to a significantly lesser extent, gore. Faintly, I recall stumbling across famous clips of violent movies, coincidentally right before bedtime. This bleeds into my experiences with pornogrind, or whenever I’m shipped a promo of a grind record, as it always results in temporary prayer to whoever’s in charge that the gore–no matter how explicit it may be–is illustrated. That gore I can tolerate, because at least it’s not genuine.
Most metalheads have unfortunately stumbled across Mayhem’s infamous live album cover depicting the vivid aftermath of lead vocalist Dead’s suicide. Hell, I’ve seen it plastered on black Gildan t-shirts on TikTok. Images like these will always irk me harder than any, say, Cannibal Corpse cover, because at least theirs is illustrated. Yes, I’m not thrilled about seeing dead fetuses strung up by meat hooks or corpses mid-fellatio, but I reiterate, at least it’s illustrated. My appreciation may even flourish if it's allegorical, artistically evocative, or inventive in a way of an original presentation of the macabre. This is exactly why progressive metal is my rendezvous genre, as colorful, modern demonstrations (see Voyager - Colour in the Sun or ERRA - Silence Outlives the Earth) are, besides philosophical or literary subjects, the norm.
I can waste hours leafing through progressive metal album covers without fear of scarring myself, and this practice is directly rooted in my time with progressive rock, a genre that took my younger teen years in a chokehold. Fantastical, sprawling landscapes, all hand-drawn by talented virtuosos . Alas, relating to the topical genres, goregrind is brimming with bare-bones, graphic photography, often medical (band names most likely named after whatever operation is depicted), and other gory shit, but pornogrind is where the boundaries once thought to be immovable hit the unstoppable object. In preparation for this issue, I want to elucidate that I do not solely devote my time to sifting through these albums and their covers, nor if I were to, would I relish it. My prefrontal cortex has already molded through phases unknown, and I'm sure in no time it will again.
Pornogrind’s birth began with Gut, a Germanic group that blended death metal with grindcore-length bouts of brutality and incredibly reprobate ideas. Their 1991 demo tape, Drowning in Female Excrements, is credited as the first pornogrind release, and their first longplay, Odour of Torture, picturing a woman using her breast as a pin cushion (yeowch!), is the premier pornogrind album, signed to a one-man label named Regurgitated Semen Records (a one-man label still active, currently supporting five bands). No, I haven’t listened to it, and I most likely never will. Thirty-nine tracks, forty-four minutes: time I’ll dedicate to other metal projects not concerning “Triple Penetration” or “The Taboo Room.” Their ski mask-clad appearance acted as a foundation for the physical aesthetics of the acts taking part in pornogrind, and it’s not surprising that patrons often shield their faces–their digital footprint can always be traced. Since Gut’s heyday, RateYourMusic has catalogued 803 pornogrind releases, Gut being the mainstay for the next two chronologically. The highest-rated album on RateYourMusic for the genre is our good friend Gut’s 2020 LP Disciples of Smut, receiving a 3.42/5 from 262 ratings. Another well-renowned website, AOTY (Album of the Year), ranks the same: Disciples of Smut, with a 75/100 from twenty-five ratings. I can see why this record is comparably prevalent: the artwork, considering the genre, is rather tame; a black-and-white, crust-punk-ish display with a decrease but not abstinence, in pornographic visuals. The record’s material is also supposedly watered down by standard death and black metal influences, rendering it accessible to the broader metal community.
Sadly, my morbid curiosity and thirst for knowledge took the best of me, and I ultimately caved and glanced at the top ten records of the genre. Thankfully, it’s fairly safe to do, and there are a couple of positive visual surprises. The second “greatest” pornogrind record is from Czechia’s Carnal Diafragma, unorthodoxly titled Space Symphony Around Us. The cover? Asteroids crossing a reddish planetary body. One of the songs is “The Art of Nature.” Carnal Diafragma clearly defies the conventional visual standards of their style, but after a quick audio sample, their music sounds exactly like any other pornoband. Another interesting item is Plasma, which takes the bronze medal. They present a vintage comic-book style interpretation of The Tarantula’s movie poster for their 2007 release Creeping! Crushing! Crawling!. The juxtaposition of graphic novel styling with music that is both graphic and novel is an interesting observation, but nonetheless unsurprising. Moving onwards, the seventh spot goes to Rompeprop from the Netherlands with another colorful comic book impression with Gargle Cummics. The most eminent band on the list is Gutalax, which gained immense social media traction for the singer's screechy vocals and (I cannot believe I’m saying this) comparably safe-for-work, scat-themed music videos. Europe dominates in this field per metal standards: The Nordics propagate the darkest and bleakest of black metal, central Europe brings the best out of power metal, and the entirety of the North birthed the lucious melodies of symphonic metal. It seems it also produces, like any other continent, a fair share of utter garbage.
So that was lovely, but the real reason why you haven’t heard of this microgenre up until now is that it’s actively fading away. The only time it really reached actual reporting was after the 2019 Dayton shooting, in which the culprit was the lead singer of a short-lived collective called Menstrual Munchies. The headline is only somewhat sensationalist, giving the audience, who probably don't listen to metal at all, a vivid taste of what pornogrind is truly about. One of the bandmates took the initiative and took all the recordings of the band, claiming that "whereas I saw it as a joke...he didn't," and further commenting that he "doesn't want to be associated with [the band]." The article also supplies an efficient abstract on the genre, covering much of the material I came across. This incident actually provoked Rolling Stone, the world's most pedestrian music magazine, to remark on the style, referencing Gut, Slipknot (yes, members of Slipknot momentarily played in a little collective titled Anal Blast/Anal of Blast), before turning the topic to gun control.
Still, the fade is only a positive. By succinct, self-censored scanning, it takes no decrypter to conclude that pornogrind is misogynistic as hell. A majority of the imagery and lyrical topics are insanely degrading towards women. While the devil's advocates will browbeat me about how “shock value is shock value,” I peck right back and ask them where their morals stand. The sheer amount of unexplainable online animosity directed towards women in general should be distasteful for any metalhead. Gratefully, online music databases show quite a minute amount of 2026 pornogrind releases, a considerable cut displaying anime girls in downright despicable situations or genuinely incomprehensible visual nonsense. A majority of these recordings appear to be low quality and not worth anyone’s time. It seems that each year, the pace of production of p-grind is deteriorating, and this is partially due to influential critics reciprocating my qualms by labeling the genre as “juvenile” and “straight from the toilet.” Even Metallum, the internet's largest metal music repository, doesn't officially recognize p-grind as a genre, instead filing any affiliated group under goregrind with pornographic lyricism. Metallum, admittedly, is infamous for its questionable rules of acceptance and ability to determine if a band is actually metal (for example, Rush is accepted, yet Between the Buried and Me isn't, on account of not being "metal enough"). Still, any website ready to ignore p-grind is a smidge more credible in my view.
So, I've concluded the point of why p-grind isn't an appealing genre, but why has there been such a stark decline in activity? The most reasonable explanation is the convolutedness of the microgenre's concept. I love labeling music as much as the next nerd, but as I established earlier, p-grind retains little sonic originality compared to its stylistic parent. To my trained ear, the two genres sound exceptionally identical to the point where if you played two songs (this trial would only take a minute or two, thanks to the brevity of the material), I would have a rough time discerning the two. Why would band A want to distance itself from band B if both A and B are so similar? If A is goregrind with porn-themed writing, which is already a common choice in the genre, yet doesn't explicitly label itself as the likes of B, which labels itself as strict p-grind, then who, when it comes to pure material, cares? It's a matter of labeling, and if we keep to this trend of creating new styles, the soon-to-be micromicrogenres will only pertain to one or two groups. Shit, frognoise is a thing, and it's nothing more than heavy grind with amphibian content. If I go listen to, say, TrollfesT's "Dance like a Pink Flamingo," am I listening to folk metal, or flamingo metal? It's almost natural selection nowadays, when p-grind molds back into goregrind. The band with the third-highest-rated p-grind record, Jig-Ai, slowly morphed back into regular grind after their 2006 self-titled effort. Many bands follow this pipeline, so does this signal that every p-grind band will eventually technically cease?
Another culprit towards the category's decline is the blatant laziness radiating from the partakers. Take Girlcock, a Quebecois p-grind project that operates under AI-generated album covers, or Pepeka Massacre, a Brazilian entity that thrives on laughably awful NSFW cartoons, exemplifying the low effort that these artists put forth. I'm yet to hear something convincing come from the genre, because the riff-forward nature and terseness of pace limit the amount of genuine distinctness a p-grind record can produce. Surely I'm not claiming some of the instrumentalists that thrive under p-grind aren't talented, but a lot of them are clearly using this genre to effortlessly MIDI their way into the metal sphere. GarageBand is an app pre-installed on most iPhones, toyed with momentarily by most new phone users, then discarded moments later to free space. Making p-grind is shockingly easy to do on this app, and little knowledge in production is needed for one to churn out record after record on an app like this and flood online databases, inflating the album count. This doesn't actually happen, of course, as, by assumption and pattern recognition, people lazy enough to make their music this way aren't exuding much effort to log in their presence on music databases.
Let us all rejoice this year that pornogrind is slowly fading into obscurity. I’ve seen enough literal and metaphorical alien things shoved into other things for the rest of my life, thank you.