Cara Neir

Gonemage is the solo chiptune/black-metal project of Garry Brents (aka Galimgim), also the sole member of Cara Neir, based in Dallas, Texas. Launched in 2021 as a conceptual spin-off of Cara Neir's pixel-art album Phase Out, Gonemage fuses 8-bit and 16-bit video-game synth textures with blackened death metal and cybergrind, often stacking dozens of guest vocalists into dense, maximalist arrangements.

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HORSE the Band is an American band from Lake Forest, California, whose fusion of 8-bit video-game synth textures with metalcore made them pioneers of "nintendocore" — a term frontman Nathan Winneke coined as a joke that ended up naming the whole style. Their core run of albums The Mechanical Hand (2005, Combat Records), A Natural Death (2007, Koch Records), and Desperate Living (2009) defined the genre's chiptune-meets-heaviness axis. The band has gone to lengths to distance itself from the label, insisting it describes the sound rather than the substance.

Xpelleir is a long-running, deliberately absurdist Birmingham (UK) cybergrind project fusing raw/industrial black metal with vaporwave and Y2K internet-culture aesthetics — programmed blasts, sampled telephone tones, and mock-corporate conceptual staging (its 2022 album Blackmetal.com imagines black metal fandom as a virtual marketplace). Active on and off since 2009 under mainstay Lazer Rot, with a rotating cast of guitarists and vocalists.

The Curse of Xanaduplay in the dock

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Worm Hero is a UK avant-grind outfit from Stoke-on-Trent, formed in 2020, spinning sprawling in-house mythology (personas like Opalescent O'Coinn, Countess Chellibal, and Dildwuar Esquire) across concept releases such as "The Dastardly Dangerous Misadventures of the Maverick Marauders" and "The Scarrakh's Contradiction." Their Bandcamp/RYM tags stack avant-garde metal and grindcore alongside mathcore, nintendocore, powerviolence, and spacegrind, reflecting a genuinely genre-promiscuous, electronics-laced take on extreme metal rather than straight grind. Splits with acts like Lure In and a four-way split ("FUCK YOU LIKE AN OUROBOROS") point to an active underground grind/avant-grind scene presence.

Spires of the Lunar Sphere is a two-piece experimental/avant-garde metal and nintendocore act from Daytona Beach, Florida, formed circa 2015 by Michael Smith and Brandon Jolly, blending chiptune/8-bit synths and programming with mathcore and post-hardcore riffing. Cited influences include Horse the Band, Mr. Bungle, The Number Twelve Looks Like You and Genghis Tron. Releases include the EP "Pangaea Ultima" (2015) and full-length "SIREN" (2017).

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Genghis Tron is an American experimental metal band formed in Poughkeepsie, New York in 2004, originally a trio blending cybergrind/mathcore with electronic and synth-driven textures using a drum machine rather than a live drummer. After releasing Board Up the House (2008) on Relapse Records, they went on indefinite hiatus in 2010. The band reunited and released Dream Weapon in 2021, a more meditative and hypnotic record featuring founding members Hamilton Jordan and Michael Sochynsky alongside new vocalist Tony Wolski and, for the first time, a live drummer, Nick Yacyshyn of Sumac.

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Cursed Mantis is a 2020 collaborative 'synthgrind' concept album pairing Quebec electronic/industrial producer Gloom Influx with Swedish vocalist Alojla and noise/grind vocalist The Toilet. Subtitled 'A Synthgrind Opera in 19 Acts,' it tells an absurdist sci-fi story of cursed, cheese-obsessed alien mantises, swinging between chiptune interludes, synthwave passages, and blast-heavy grindcore.

Szarfaszú Vizelet is a one-man Hungarian 'animegrind/weebgrind' project run by Nekrocunt since 2013, fusing grindcore and goregrind with black metal touches, programmed drums, synthesizer, and sampler. Releases are typically short blasts of noise built around anime in-jokes and parody concepts — tribute EPs to specific anime series, meme track titles, and a self-declared 'nintendocore' streak. It's aggressively niche, more internet-culture gag project than scene band, but the electronic/grind hybrid is real and consistent across a decade of releases.

Psudoku is the one-man 'space grind' project of Norwegian musician Steinar Kittilsen (aka Cpt. Roger, previously recording as Planetarisk Sodomi), built around blast-beat grindcore fused with prog-rock, jazz-fusion, and B-movie sci-fi keyboards. Released across labels including Nerve Altar and Selfmadegod, albums like Space Grind (2011) and Planetarisk Sudoku (2015) have been compared to a parallel-universe grindcore descended from Naked City, Magma, and King Crimson rather than hardcore and thrash.

Liturgy is an American avant-garde black metal band from Brooklyn, founded in 2005 and led by composer-guitarist-vocalist Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix. The project is built around a self-authored 'transcendental black metal' philosophy and ranges from blast-driven maximalist black metal to the glitch/IDM electronics of The Ark Work and the choral, orchestral scope of later records like 93696. Critically prominent, The Ark Work was named the #1 avant-garde album of 2015 by both Spin and Rolling Stone.