Rockpedia
Rock branch Full entry · 1993

Mathcore

Emerged 1993 Origin USA Subgenres — Vocals Growled or shrieked
Heaviness
8
Speed
9
Melody
3

Growled or shrieked. Unintelligible without a lyric sheet. The thing most newcomers bounce off.

In short

Metalcore with its wiring torn out: meter changes every few seconds, dissonance and chaos controlled to the millimetre.

How it sounds

  • Meter changes every few seconds, executed at maximum speed.
  • Dissonant chords and minor-second intervals used as primary material.
  • Jazz-level drum technique applied at grindcore intensity.

Hear what that means

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 2 of 3 are cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
140-260 bpm
Song length
1.5-4 min
Tuning
Drop tunings and dissonant voicings, changing between sections. The tuning matters less than the intervals, which are chosen to be unresolvable.
Production
Loud, dry and brutally edited, with every instrument separated so the chaos remains legible. Making this comprehensible is a much harder production job than making it sound violent.
Written about
Panic, Alienation, Language breaking down, Violence, abstractly

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Riffs in constantly shifting metres played at hardcore speed, with dissonant intervals and no repetition to hold on to. Dillinger Escape Plan's parts are written out and drilled.
  • Bass Doubling parts that are extremely hard to double, and frequently the only thing keeping the harmony locatable.
  • Drums The genre's defining chair: metre changes every bar or two at 240 bpm, executed exactly, with the pulse deliberately obscured and then confirmed.
  • Vocals Screamed continuously, phrased against the riff rather than with it, adding a further rhythmic layer rather than a melodic one.

What it isn't

That it is chaos. It is composed to the bar and rehearsed to exhaustion: these parts are written down, and the apparent randomness is the result of metres changing faster than a listener can track rather than of anybody improvising. The best of it confirms the pulse just often enough that a listener stays oriented, which is a control problem rather than an abandonment of control.

Told apart from

  • Math rock Same arithmetic, opposite temperature. Math rock is clean, dry and patient; mathcore plays the same rhythmic ideas at hardcore speed with screaming.
  • Post-hardcore Mathcore is post-hardcore's dissonance pushed into rhythmic chaos and constant violence. Post-hardcore keeps space and dynamics.
  • Technical death metal Both are extremely technical and fast. Technical death metal is harmonically restless with growls; mathcore is rhythmically restless with screams, and comes from hardcore.
  • Grindcore Grindcore is faster and simpler — brevity is its device. Mathcore songs are longer and their difficulty is structural rather than a matter of speed.

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

History

Converge and Botch began taking metalcore apart in the mid-1990s; The Dillinger Escape Plan pushed it to a level barely playable live. The 1999 album Calculating Infinity remains the genre's absolute benchmark. It is the most technical genre born out of hardcore, and the most exhausting to hear end to end.

Descended from

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.