Post-hardcore
Sung and screamed. Clean singing and harsh vocals trade off, often chorus against verse.
In short
Hardcore that allows itself dynamics, empty space and irregular structures. Emo, screamo and mathcore all branch off from here.
How it sounds
- Wide dynamics: near-silent passages alternating with explosions.
- Bass with its own voice, often leading, and guitars in unusual tunings.
- Loose structures with sections that never repeat.
Hear what that means
- Dynamics as ethics
A verse carried by bass alone, with the guitars entering as an event. Fugazi could do this because five-dollar shows and no merchandise meant nobody was asking them for a single.
Open on YouTube - Dissonance instead of power chords from 13:03
Two guitars using dissonant intervals and harmonics, in long forms that go somewhere unexpected. Nine minutes with no chorus.
Open on YouTube at 13:03 - Hardcore rebuilt from 20:15
Refused - The Shape of Punk to Come
Electronics, jazz sections and a hardcore band arguing on record about whether hardcore's rules were worth keeping.
Open on YouTube at 20:15
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Every second here is the uploader's own, read from the recording's tracklist.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 120-170 bpm
- Song length
- 3-6 min
- Tuning
- Standard and altered, with the guitars clean far more often than a hardcore band's, and dissonant voicings preferred to power chords.
- Production
- Dynamic and spacious, recorded to keep the quiet parts genuinely quiet. Fugazi's records are mixed so the bass and the space are as prominent as the guitars.
- Written about
- Complicity, Institutions, Self-examination, Language itself
What each part is doing
- Guitar Two parts using dissonant intervals and harmonics rather than power chords, frequently clean, with distortion saved for a section rather than used throughout.
- Bass Melodic and forward, and often the only thing playing during a verse. The genre's whole dynamic range depends on the bass being able to hold a song alone.
- Drums Syncopated and inventive, borrowing from reggae and funk as readily as from hardcore, and comfortable dropping out entirely.
- Vocals Spoken, sung and screamed by turn, frequently traded between two members, and used as texture as much as for content.
What it isn't
That post-hardcore is a stylistic label. For the founding bands it was an ethical position that happened to produce a sound: Fugazi's five-dollar shows, refusal of merchandise and control of their own label were the project, and the musical latitude — quiet passages, dub basslines, songs that go nowhere in particular — followed from having no commercial obligations. The genre is what independence sounds like when it is actually practised.
Told apart from
- Hardcore punk Post-hardcore keeps hardcore's ethics and infrastructure and abandons its musical rules — the tempo, the brevity and the shouting are all now optional.
- Emo Emo is post-hardcore pointed inward. Post-hardcore aims the same intensity outward at institutions; if it is about the singer, it has crossed over.
- Mathcore Mathcore takes post-hardcore's dissonance into rhythmic chaos and constant screaming. Far more violent, far less spacious.
- Noise rock Both use dissonance and altered tunings. Noise rock comes from the art-damaged side of American underground rock; this comes from hardcore's ethics.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
Fugazi built a complete model: five-dollar tickets, no expensive merchandise, no major label, and increasingly complicated music. In Chicago and Texas, other bands took the idea elsewhere. This branch produces emo, screamo and mathcore — roughly half of everything called 'core' today.
Descended from
Branches into
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Funk rock identical ratings · meets it at Rock
- Rap rock 1.4 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
- Stoner rock 1.4 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.