Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1990

War metal / bestial

Emerged 1990 Origin Canada / Australia Subgenres — Vocals Growled or shrieked
Heaviness
10
Speed
10
Melody
1

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

In short

Black and death metal reduced to noise, speed and bullet belts. The least legible branch of metal there is.

How it sounds

  • Deliberately illegible production, everything saturated and compressed.
  • Extreme tempos, chaotic drumming, riffs that are barely distinguishable.
  • Fully distorted vocals, usually through effects.

Hear what that means

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
200-300 bpm
Song length
2-4 min
Tuning
Tuned as low as the strings tolerate and not maintained. Pitch is not a parameter this genre is controlling.
Production
Deliberately unlistenable by conventional standards: everything clipping, no separation, and the whole record mixed as a single mass of noise.
Written about
Blasphemy, War, Annihilation, Nothing recoverable, frequently

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Tremolo picking and chromatic riffing recorded so distortedly that riffs are unrecoverable — the guitar contributes texture and volume rather than notes.
  • Bass Distorted into the same mass, adding weight to a recording that has no low end left to speak of.
  • Drums Blast beats played fast and loose, frequently the only element with any definition, and often the only way to tell where you are in a song.
  • Vocals Growled and shouted through distortion, buried, and functionally another layer of noise.

What it isn't

That there is nothing being played. There is — the drumming in particular is fast and specific — and the recording is deliberately destroying it, which is a stylistic decision rather than an accident. Whether a genre that spends its production budget on making the playing inaudible is worth your time is a fair question, and the scene's answer is that the effect is the point.

Told apart from

  • Raw black metal Raw black metal is thin, cold and atmospheric. War metal is thick, violent and built on a death metal rhythm section.
  • Blackened death metal Both hybridise the two extreme branches. Blackened death is precise and expensively produced; war metal is the opposite of both.
  • Grindcore Shares the speed and the chaos, with none of grindcore's brevity or politics.
  • Brutal death metal Both are extremely violent. Brutal death metal is precise and groove-aware; war metal refuses structure entirely.

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

History

Blasphemy, from Vancouver, founded a style in 1990 that breaks entirely with the idea of legible composition. The genre is small, with a heavily codified military and ritual aesthetic — bullet belts, corpse paint, stage names. In terms of sonic intelligibility, it is the far end of the tree.

Descended from

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

  • Deathgrind 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
  • Goregrind 1.0 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.