Cursed Mantis
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.
SCORE PROFILE
Accent numbers counted towards the index. Hover an axis — or hold it on a phone — for what it means.
WHY THOSE SCORES
- Hardcore 5 — 'Cheesy Curse' morphs into 'rabid grindcore' with 200+ BPM drumming (Everything Is Noise review).
- Technical 5 — Bandcamp describes 'ambitious technical constructions' across a 19-track/act structure with constant movement changes.
- Glitch 6 — Built on Gloom Influx's core style of 'glitchy, heavy, industrial electronic' production (Everything Is Noise review).
- Theatrical 6 — Billed as 'A Synthgrind Opera in 19 Acts,' a full narrative sci-fi concept about cheese-seeking alien mantises (Bandcamp).
- 8-bit 5 — 'Cheesy Curse' opens with a 'chiptune bounce intro' and later tracks include 'symphonic chiptune ballads' (Everything Is Noise review).
MEMBERS
- Gloom Influxcomposition, production, synths
- Alojlavocals
- The Toiletvocals
FURTHER LISTENING
Nearest score profiles in the atlas.
- UnaffiliatedEI 21Tub RingGlitchTheatricalHardcore
Tub Ring is an experimental rock band formed in Chicago in 1992 and built around the enduring core duo of vocalist Kevin Gibson and keyboardist Rob Kleiner. Their frenetic, hairpin genre-swerving sound — colliding punk, new wave, noise, funk and electronics under sci-fi and cosmological lyrics — earned them a reputation as a kind of Midwestern Mr. Bungle, a comparison sealed when Bungle guitarist Trey Spruance produced their 2001 debut Drake Equation. Their concept-driven album titles (Drake Equation, Fermi Paradox, Zoo Hypothesis, The Great Filter) riff on theories about extraterrestrial life.
- Mathcore / DEP-verseEI 21Horse the Band8-bitHardcoreGlitch
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.
- UnaffiliatedEI 15Worm HeroHardcoreTechnicalGlitch
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.
- UnaffiliatedEI 13SectlineforTheatricalHardcoreGlitch
Sectlinefor is an NYC/London duo of Jared (vocals) and Piton (guitar, production, drum machine) making deliberately genre-shredding 'cinematic rock' that collides alternative/psychedelic metal, hardcore-ish punk energy, hip-hop-inflected interludes, and glitchy 80s/90s electronica. Formed in 2015 and solidified as a two-piece by 2018, they're compared to Faith No More, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Deftones, Devin Townsend, and early Ministry; their pandemic-era third album Kissing Strangers During an Outbreak (2021) leans hardest into disturbing, comedic, boundary-smashing songwriting.
- UnaffiliatedEI 13Monastat 7GlitchHardcoreTechnical
Monastat 7 was a Cheyenne, Wyoming grindcore trio whose 1993/94 debut 'Now Available Without A Prescription' — produced by Dan Lilker of Brutal Truth and reissued on Relapse — paired technical cybergrind riffing with heavy sampling, comedy/rap interludes and skits (a track built around a grocery-store clerk's price-check announcement over the PA). The lineup leaned into avant-garde instrumentation for a 1993 grind band, with Henkaboo E. Boltz credited on guitar, programming AND violin alongside Dr. Stat3's bass/keyboards. A 1995 follow-up EP, 'Operatic Genitalia Of 7 Bowel Movements,' continued the project on the same Japanese DIY label, Lost Frog Productions.
- UnaffiliatedEI 17Angelwings MarmaladeGlitchHardcoreTechnical
Angelwings Marmalade is Angel Marcloid's noise/cybergrind outlet — the looser, harsher counterpart to her better-known blackened-new-age project Fire-Toolz. Where Fire-Toolz builds structured genre-collage songs, Angelwings Marmalade leans into harsh noise, musique concrete, noisecore and cybergrind textures, often stitched together from years of accumulated source material and guest vocal/sample contributions. It's one of several aliases (alongside MindSpring Memories, Nonlocal Forecast, Toad Computers) through which Marcloid works out a specific corner of her sound.
- UnaffiliatedEI 19XpelleirGlitchTheatricalHardcore
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.
- ZornEI 11Bologna ViolentaGlitchHardcoreTechnical
Bologna Violenta is the noise/electrogrind project of Treviso violinist and multi-instrumentalist Nicola Manzan, founded in 2005. Early releases built distorted guitar, strings and electronic drums around samples from 1970s Italian poliziottesco cinema; the project expanded into a duo in 2015 with drummer Alessandro Vagnoni and later shifted toward violin-led arrangements on Cortina (2017) and Bancarotta Morale (2020), with 2026's OBLOMOVISMO returning to its cybergrind roots. Manzan has also worked as a sideman for Baustelle and Il Teatro degli Orrori and collaborated with J. Randall of Agoraphobic Nosebleed.
- UnaffiliatedEI 12Spires of the Lunar Sphere8-bitTechnicalHardcore
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).
- UnaffiliatedEI 11MutationGlitchHardcoreTechnical
A UK extreme-metal collaboration led by Wildhearts frontman Ginger Wildheart with Scott Lee Andrews (Exit International) and drummer Denzel, functioning as a revolving-door supergroup anchored by Napalm Death's Shane Embury. The double debut The Frankenstein Effect / Error 500 (2013) folds in Merzbow noise and Mark E. Smith spoken-word, veering from melodic pop-metal hooks into industrial noise-grind chaos. Error 500 was released on Mike Patton's Ipecac Recordings.