Djent
Sung and screamed. Clean singing and harsh vocals trade off, often chorus against verse.
In short
The name imitates the sound: seven- or eight-string guitars, heavily compressed palm mutes and polyrhythms. Meshuggah built the vocabulary; a generation of forum users named it.
How it sounds
- Seven- or eight-string guitars, tuned very low, with heavily compressed palm mutes.
- Polyrhythm: the riff repeats on a cycle that does not line up with the drum meter.
- Precise digital production with a deliberately sterile tone and no reverb.
Hear what that means
- The riff against the bar
Count four with the cymbals and try to keep the guitar in it. You cannot: the riff is grouped in an odd number of beats and the drums are not, so the two drift apart and lock back together several bars later. Everything filed under this name is a version of that trick.
Open on YouTube - The clean chorus the parents did not have
Meshuggah never sang. The second generation put a wide, multi-tracked melody on top of the same rhythmic idea, which is what turned a technique into a scene with an audience.
Open on YouTube - With the vocal removed entirely
Animals as Leaders - The Joy of Motion
An eight-string instrumental trio, which makes this the cleanest look at the mechanism: nothing is competing with the guitars, so the polyrhythm and the silences between the impacts are all there is to hear.
Open on YouTube
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Each opens at the start of the recording.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 90-160 bpm
- Song length
- 4-7 min
- Tuning
- Seven and eight strings, the lowest tuned to F sharp or E — below a bass guitar's bottom string. The extra range exists to serve one note.
- Production
- Digitally exact. Quantised playing, amp modelling rather than a miked cabinet, and a very short low end so that the silences inside a riff are as clean as the notes.
- Written about
- Consciousness and the self, Cosmology, Abstraction — where its parents were literal
What each part is doing
- Guitar Palm-muted single notes on the lowest string, grouped in fives and sevens so the riff and the bar drift apart and then resolve together. The name is onomatopoeia for exactly this sound.
- Bass Often the only instrument playing something continuous, because the guitars are mostly silence with impacts in it.
- Drums Holding a straight, countable 4/4 underneath a riff that is not in 4/4. The tension between the two is the genre — take the drums away and the riff stops making sense.
- Vocals Traded between a wide-interval clean melody, often multi-tracked, and a shout. The clean sections are where the melody lives, since the riff has given up on carrying one.
What it isn't
That it is a genre at all, in the sense the rest of this tree uses the word. "Djent" started as onomatopoeia — Meshuggah's guitarist describing the noise of a palm-muted low-string chug — and it names a sound, not a scene, a place or a lineage. It is kept here because a reader who hears the sound needs somewhere to look it up, but the honest description is a technique that spread across progressive metal after 2007, and most of the bands filed under it have rejected the label.
Told apart from
- Progressive metal Djent is a guitar tone and one rhythmic idea, not a whole philosophy. Prog metal will change instrument, key and mood; djent stays on the low string and changes the arithmetic.
- Mathcore Also in odd time and also violent, but mathcore is chaotic on purpose and played by hand at the edge of collapse. Djent is machined, and meant to sound it.
- Progressive metalcore Progressive metalcore uses these riffs inside metalcore's structure — verse, clean chorus, breakdown. Djent proper is often structureless by comparison, cycling patterns rather than building sections.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
Meshuggah built the vocabulary between 1995 and 2002 without ever naming it. The word 'djent' appeared on a guitar forum, as onomatopoeia for the sound of the riff. Periphery and Animals as Leaders turned a forum phenomenon into a genre with its own scene, born almost entirely online.
Descended from
On the timeline
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Groove metal identical ratings · meets it at Heavy metal
- Cyber metal 1.4 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
- New nu metal 1.4 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.