164 – What Even Is Metalcore?

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Heavy Pod Is Heavy Cast!Regular co-host Cody and I get together to discuss Metallica playing St. Anger stuff live, and then go into an extended conversation about metalcore. Its history, the subgenres, its evolution, and what our favorite bands in the genre are. Mentioning a few artists for SEO purposes: Shadows Fall, Killswitch Engage, Trivium, August Burns Red, Underoath, Lamb of God, Converge. Then we discuss Avengers Endgame with full spoilers, and this video about it. Enjoy!

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Half-Life: Trivium

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Trivium are a band in a unique position. They exploded onto the scene very early on, accruing a lot of fans and haters simultaneously. After putting out an album that helped define a generation, they stepped back from the spotlight a bit, but their most interesting material actually came out…

Dark Hound – Dawning

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What goes around, comes around. What’s old is new again. People say this shit all the time because it holds so true. We’ve seen it with just about every style of music, and metal has gotten some real good out of it (see: re-thrash, “occult” metal). While I don’t know exactly what constitutes a genre “revival,” I do know is that if my limited awareness tells me anything about a recent “nu-metal revival,” it’s safe to assume that a “NWOAHM revival” is just around the corner… or emerging. If we are in fact uber-predictable creatures of habit, Nashville’s Dark Hound might be a harbinger of the return of trucker hats, studded belts, and Jagerbombs.

Hypergiant – Father Sky

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The early 2000s brought us a wealth of riff-worshipping, bone-quaking goodness  – what has essentially become the foundation of many current doom, stoner, and sludge metal acts. Bands like Mastodon, High on Fire, and Baroness expanded upon the standard set by metal’s forefathers with more progressive tendencies, expansive arrangements, fiercer presentation, technically demanding performances, and (presumably) better strains of grass. At the same time (and likely benefitting from the same improved… *ahem* genetics), there was also a bubble of traditionalists like The Sword, Wolfmother, and Saviours who made the case that a more conventional approach was worth revisiting, reinvigorating classic sounds for a new generation of headbangers. It’s from this very specific nexus that Australia’s Hypergiant explode, harkening back to familiar territories on both sides of this early-00s coin.

Djent Was A Genre Full Of Great Debuts And Little Else

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Djent had an explosive entrance into the world of heavy music, around the start of the decade. It was a truly exciting occurrence, with first-wave acts like Periphery, Animals As Leaders and Cloudkicker filtering the technically-driven progressive sound of acts like Meshuggah, Sikth, and those of the budding “Sumeriancore” movement, into something  altogether more accessible, while still retaining much of their forebears’ technical and progressive edge. Yet, like most new sub-genres, djent quickly devolved into pastiche and gave way to over saturation—perhaps a little bit quicker than most. Djent, it seems, has had a propperly ballistic trajectory, and—in 2017—as its momentum trails off, it’s hard to get excited about this once-promising phenomenon.