Rockpedia
Rock branch Full entry · 1980

Hardcore punk

Emerged 1980 Origin California / Washington DC Subgenres 13 Vocals Shouted
Heaviness
6
Speed
9
Melody
4

Shouted. Barked or chanted, and you can still make out the words.

In short

Punk accelerated to 200 bpm, songs of one minute and shouted vocals. Without it there is no thrash, no grindcore, no metalcore.

How it sounds

  • Tempos of 180 to 250 bpm with galloping or skank drum patterns.
  • Songs under a minute, with whole albums running twenty minutes.
  • Shouted rather than sung vocals, and direct political or personal lyrics.

Hear what that means

  • Forty-six seconds

    Minor Threat - Complete Discography

    A complete song, with a verse, a chorus and an argument in it, in under a minute. Hardcore's formal innovation is subtraction: everything that could be cut has been, and what is left is delivered at a speed punk did not use.

    Open on YouTube
  • The half-time part

    Black Flag - Damaged

    The moment the tempo drops by half and the room is expected to react. Follow this one device forward and it becomes the breakdown - in beatdown, in metalcore, in deathcore. It starts here.

    Open on YouTube
  • The d-beat

    Discharge - Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing

    One galloping snare-and-kick figure, held without variation for the length of the song. It is named after this band, it has its own genre page in this tree, and it is the single most copied drum pattern in punk.

    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
190-250 bpm
Song length
45 sec-2 min
Tuning
E standard, and often the guitar is the only distorted thing on the record.
Production
Cheap, fast and loud, usually done in a day. The vocal is pushed to the front because the words are the reason the record exists.
Written about
Youth, The police, Straight edge, Betrayal by your own scene

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Barre chords at a tempo where they blur into one tone, broken by a sudden half-time part — the ancestor of every breakdown in metal.
  • Bass Distorted as often as not, and playing the guitar part rather than supporting it. There is no separation of duties here.
  • Drums The d-beat and its relatives: a galloping snare-and-kick figure that can be held at 240 bpm without fills, because fills cost time the song has not got.
  • Vocals Shouted rather than screamed, close to the microphone, with the rest of the room joining in on the line that matters. Gang vocals are the genre's chorus.

What it isn't

That hardcore is a subgenre of punk in the sense that it is punk, only more so. It is closer to a different tradition that happens to share equipment. Punk came out of art schools and the music press and was, among other things, a pose; American hardcore came out of suburbs with no venues and no press at all, and built its own — the labels, the halls, the tour network, the fanzines. That infrastructure is why hardcore's descendants fill so much of this tree while first-wave punk's mostly do not.

Told apart from

  • Punk rock Punk at half this tempo, with a chorus and a tune. If it is over in ninety seconds and had no chorus, it was hardcore.
  • Crust punk Crust is hardcore that absorbed metal's tuning, distortion and despair. Heavier, dirtier, slower in stretches, and far bleaker.
  • Powerviolence Power violence takes hardcore's speed past what a song structure can hold: thirty seconds, whiplash tempo changes, no groove at all.
  • Crossover thrash Crossover is the meeting point, and the tell is the riff. If there are palm-muted metal riffs under the shouting, it has crossed over.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

In the early 1980s, scenes in Los Angeles, Washington DC and Boston accelerated punk to breaking point. Black Flag invented the underground van tour, Minor Threat invented straight edge in a forty-six-second song, and Bad Brains added a speed nobody could match plus reggae between tracks. Every extreme metal genre since owes something to this period.

Descended from

Branches into

On the timeline

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim. These share no ancestor with it at all.