A Guide to Five Lesser-Known Metal Subgenres

The great oak tree of heavy metal contains more than meets the eye. Its mighty branches, visible to the average rock fan, consist of thrash, hair, nu, black, ‘core, and death metal—all arguably the genre’s more iconic iterations. But beneath its tremendous trunk are ever-growing roots that stretch endlessly into a vast underground of niche stylistic offshoots. There are literally dozens of subgenres—and many subgenres within those subgenres—throughout the heavy metal lexicon, and it would take a lifetime to become fully versed in all of them. Here we zoom in on five unique and compelling lesser-known metal subgenres that aren’t obvious entry points for the average headbanger, but every fan of aggressive music should be familiar with these sounds.

Old-school prog-metal fans may be unaware of the rich tapestry of djent music that’s emerged within the last decade. Extreme metal maniacs who have the stomach for grindcore may find a worthy sonic challenge in the chaotic network of electrogrind. Nu-metal has been experiencing a cultural resurgence over the last couple years, but the rap-metal hybrid has been quietly surging in the metalcore realm for nearly a decade. Metal and hip-hop haven’t always had the most symbiotic relationship, but this current wave of trap MCs blending devilishly loud bass with screamed flows and guitar-laced beats might be the crossover you never knew you needed. And if you’ve previously written off metal as purely Satanic and/or atheistic, the still-thriving Christian metalcore scene is at the very least a fascinating cultural movement.

Djent

Djent (pronounced like gent," as in "gentlemen") is more a style of metal than it is a standalone subgenre. Decades before there was a colloquial descriptor for it, the Swedish extreme metal scientists Meshuggah were playing a form of down-tuned groove metal that was infected with dizzying polyrhythms and staccato chugs. Their guitarist's palm-muted playstyle had a screwed-tight, mechanized quality to it that he once attempted to verbalize as "dj-dj-dj," which a fan mistook as a non-existent word called "djent," thus birthing a term that overtook metal message boards throughout the 2010s.

Despite the hilariously accidental origins of "djent,"' serious debate remains over what constitutes a djent band. The style of riffage undeniably exists—you know a djent song, or at the very least a song with djent inflections, when you hear it. Strangely enough, it took until the late 2000s for bands to start overtly borrowing from the sound Meshuggah pioneered in the early 90s. By the onset of the 2010s there was a whole wave of groups who were incorporating djent-y riffs into their contemporary sonic contexts. Given the technical prowess of Meshuggah and the sheer musical chops it takes to effectively play djent riffs (as well as the specific guitar tones, which mostly come from seven, eight, or even nine-string axes), the style found a fitting home in the world of progressive metal. Bands like Periphery, Animals as Leaders, and TesseracT took the extreme rhythms of Meshuggah and melded them with clean, atmospheric guitar passages and mind-bending shred parts, creating a tasteful hybrid of virtuosity and blunt heaviness.

At the same time, less technically minded acts like After the Burial and Volumes were using the inherent grooviness of djent rhythms to give their sound a speaker-shattering bounce. Both bands made deathcore fuller and more danceable than it had ever been, lending clever innovation to a style that was previously defined by one-note brutality. As the differing discographies of those six bands suggests, djent is near impossible to pin down or box in, and that's what makes it one of the most exciting metal developments of the 21st century.

Electrogrind

Electrogrind, or cybergrind as it's sometimes called, has been developing for nearly twenty years and remains one of the most chaotic subgenres in heavy music. This digitally minded offshoot of grindcore comes in many different forms, but its defining traits are spastic rhythms, animalistic vocal deliveries, and some sort of electronic musical element that historically came in the form of a drum machine or a kooky analog synth. As electrogrind forged forward alongside the rapidly improving capabilities of digital production, it has expanded to include all sorts of newfangled synthetic sounds.

The roots of the genre date back to the late 90s and early 2000s when bands like Massachusetts's Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Australia's The Berzerker, and New York's Genghis Tron began noticing that grindcore was a lot more malleable than just guitar/drums/bass. Agoraphobic Nosebleed made a simple composite of dizzying grindcore with industrial drum machines, while The Berzerker took more of a burly death metal approach to that fusion and Genghis Tron gave it a complex makeover by adding colorful keys and more elaborate drumming patterns for a near-symphonic take on the idiom.

Electrogrind got even wilder as the 21st century bore on. The Virginia duo Gigantic Brain added all sorts of freaky post-metal textures into their Frankenstein's monster of manic grind riffs and bug-screech yelps. They sound as if a grindcore band like Pig Destroyer was abducted by aliens and rewired into cyborg world-conquerors.

France's Whourkr, the now-defunct project that included Gautier Serre (aka Igorrr), made Gigantic Brain's approach sound even weirder by adding all sorts of choppy edits in post-production to create a really "made" style of music, offering a clever contrast to the as-is recording style of traditional grindcore. On Whourkr's Concrete the cyber elements are fused seamlessly with the analog sounds, rather than sounding like they're waging a fierce battle against one another.

Electrogrind exploded in a million directions throughout the 2010s, but the Pittsburgh crushers Machine Girl might be the most essential torchbearers for the latest generation. The duo take cybergrind to its most extreme endpoint, throwing breakcore, drum and bass, punk, and even ambient passages into the mix to create one of the most dynamically ranging electrogrind sounds yet. Their off-the-wall energy and complex computer compositions offer a bright future for the endless possibilities of cybergrind in the world of advanced digital audio production.

Nu-Metalcore

Although nu-metal has experienced something of a cultural reappraisal throughout the last couple years of late-'90s nostalgia, the rap-metal hybrid has been riding a comeback wave within the metal community for over a decade. As metalcore was reaching its commercial peak in the late 2000s and early 2010s, bands from all over the spectrum began realizing that the chuggy, breakdown-heavy music they were playing was particularly conducive to the bouncy grooves and aggressive lyrical flows of nu-metal. Suddenly, nu-metalcore was everywhere.

The most obvious harbinger for this trend was the New York-based deathcore brutalists Emmure. Their frontman/primary songwriter Frankie Palmeri split his vocal delivery down the line between rap grunts and bellowing screams, which gave their mosh-ridden tracks a Limp Bizkit-style of playful thuggery. Around the same time, Long Island's Stray from the Path were cranking out politically minded hardcore ragers that channeled the proto-nu-metal stylings of Rage Against the Machine, showing that nu-metalcore could be as socially conscious as it could be joyously ignorant.

2013 is when other bands really started to catch on. Columbus, Ohio's My Ticket Home added DJ scratches and Corey Taylor-indebted barks for a Slipknot-ish take on nu-metalcore. That same year, the Illinois unit Sworn In included manic, Korn-style rapping on their abrasive debut album The Death Card, which quickly inspired a whole wave of imitators in the years that followed. Later in the decade, Darke Complex from Houston, Texas, added straight-up rapping into their metallic mix, foreshadowing the trap-metal explosion that would define the end of the 2010s. And in the adjacent world of hardcore, Boston's Vein perfected a discombobulated, wiry form of Slipknot worship on their pit-starting 2018 debut Errorzone, christening nu-metal for a scene that was at first apprehensive to embrace it. In 2021, nu-metalcore has essentially become a part of metalcore's greater fabric, which is something that no one would have predicted in the era when Atreyu and Killswitch Engage were the genre's reigning champs.

Trap Metal

Although the simpler story is that hip-hop usurped rock music's mainstream attention throughout the last decade, the more accurate (and interesting) historical read is how the two genres began to inventively cross-pollinate rather than compete. The emo-rap of Lil Peep, Lil Uzi Vert, and Juice WRLD is probably the most obvious and prominent example, but the widespread fusion of rap and metal music is just as essential. In the wake of the bass-blasting, mid-2010s Florida trap scene that spurred controversial MC's like XXXTentacion, Lil Pump, and Kodak Black—while other figures like Denzel Curry and the New Orleans duo $uicideboy$ found success blending punk energy with rap instrumentals—it became obvious that there was a massive audience for heavy and aggressive hip-hop.

Rap and metal had been fraternizing with one another for decades, but the deep bass and short, bursting flows of trap were a natural fit for chuggy guitars and the piercing screams of heavy metal. Dozens of notable trap-metal futurists have emerged within the last few years; three of the most essential acts are Ghostemane, City Morgue, and Rico Nasty. Ghostemane's earlier material is more akin to the pounding Florida trap that found a home on SoundCloud, but his music has always had a gothic flair that recently has been fleshed out with more elaborate nu-metal and industrial elements.

City Morgue, the New York rap duo of ZillaKami and SosMula, take a much more intense approach with their blistering demon-core. They earned notoriety a couple years back for infamous music videos featuring all sorts of illegal mayhem on the streets of NYC, and they've managed to keep that dangerous energy up even as their profile has grown. Rico Nasty has gone in a different route with her music. She blended half a dozen styles of rap on her 2020 opus Nightmare Vacation, but the Maryland MC is best known for her skull-crushing crossbreeds of punk, trap, and metal. Similar to City Morgue, her songs have all the swagger of trap with all the maniacal anger of heavy metal, reflected in a soundscape split evenly between 808 bass and jagged guitars.

Other notable forces in trap-metal are the Corey Taylor-backed duo Ho9909 (pronounced "horror"), who splice their varied rap stylings with straight-up hardcore and metal parts. The UK MC Scarlxrd sounds like a more vocally dexterous version of Ghostemane, melding screamed ad-libs and nu-metal instrumentals with acrobatic flows. On his latest single "Fuck It All," New York's Cameron Azi found a way to drill the dense bass of NY into his ragged scream-raps, proving that the genre has serious legs as hip-hop's sound continues to evolve.

Christian Metalcore

Although the vast majority of metal bands throughout the genre's 40-plus-year history have taken an atheistic and/or agnostic stance on organized religion and spirituality, the genre is still relatively moored to the satanic connotations it acquired in the 1980s. Part of that is warranted considering the sheer number of black and death metal bands who still wave the Beelzebub flag in the present, and many of metal's more fantastical lyrical subjects involve creatures and ghouls who inherently defy the holy texts of the Abrahamic religions.

However, an often-overlooked segment of the metal history songbook is the curious explosion of openly Christian metalcore bands that detonated in the middle of the aughts. As hardcore expanded outward throughout the 90s and formed a strong alliance with metal, that crossover extended beyond the sonic and into the cultural. As it turns out, the underground tribalism of the hardcore community (one that bred "straight-edge," a pledge of abstinence from drug and alcohol use, as well as militant veganism) lent itself to a more contemporary approach to organized religion, where themes like community and faith could easily translate into musical spaces in which a strong sense of unity and devotion already existed.

Soon enough, countless bands in the American underground were fearlessly incorporating biblical sentiments into their screamy breakdown fests, and many of those bands found audiences that extended far beyond the faithful few. Underoath, August Burns Red, and The Devil Wears Prada are three of the most quintessential metalcore bands of the 21st century, each of whom began as unabashed Chrisitan acts. The absence of real sonic signifiers for Christian metalcore bands allowed them to blend in seamlessly with fellow metalcore groups whose songs had vastly different subject matter.

That said, there was (and still is, for the ones that still exist) enough of an identity among those groups for there to be labels like Solid State Records and touring packages like the Scream the Prayer Tour specifically dedicated toward holy headbangers. Outside of the aforementioned acts, some of the other most talented bands in this pool are The Chariot, Demon Hunter, and Silent Planet, who each put their own unique spin on one of the most fascinating cultural phenomena in heavy metal history.