Fawn Limbs

Car Bomb is an American mathcore band from Rockville Centre, Long Island, New York, formed in 2000 from the merger of two local groups, Neck and Spooge. The quartet is known for a harsh, glitch-heavy and disorienting take on metal built on stop-on-a-dime tempo shifts and discordant riffing. After a 2007 Relapse Records debut, the band self-released the albums Meta (2016) and Mordial (2019), with Meta produced by Gojira frontman Joe Duplantier.

Dissect Yourselfplay in the dock

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Frontierer are a transatlantic project — Pedram Valiani writing in Edinburgh, Chad Kapper screaming in the USA — who built mathcore out of material the genre normally keeps at the door. The riffs are Dillinger-shaped and the meters never settle, but the tone is the point: whammy-pedal sirens, digitally mangled guitars, and interludes of what Heavy Blog Is Heavy called 'filthy glitch-ridden drum and bass' and 'twisted and glitchy electronica'. The same review names them 'a furious nexus point between mathcore, noise, sludge and glitch electronica', which is about as close to a genre as they get. Where their peers use electronics as an intro or an outro, Frontierer run the guitars themselves through the broken-machine treatment until riff and glitch stop being separable — the band's own phrase for it is 'Transatlantic Noise Terror'.

Meshuggah is a Swedish extreme metal band formed in Umeå in 1987, celebrated for the polymetric and polyrhythmic architecture of their music — thundering, downtuned guitar riffs written in shifting odd groupings over a steady 4/4 pulse. Fusing thrash, death, and groove metal with a cerebral jazz-fusion sensibility, they inadvertently launched the subgenre now known as djent and became one of the most technically influential acts in modern heavy music. Guitarist Fredrik Thordendal's Allan Holdsworth-inspired soloing and drummer Tomas Haake's mechanical precision are cornerstones of the sound.

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Phantomsmasher is a glitch-grind / digital-hardcore project led by guitarist James Plotkin, previously known as Atomsmasher, that fuses grindcore with electronic noise and cut-up programming. The trio of Plotkin (guitar, bass, electronics), vocalist DJ Speedranch, and drummer Dave Witte released their self-titled album on Mike Patton's Ipecac Recordings on August 19, 2002. Plotkin is a prolific experimentalist also known for OLD, Khanate, Khlyst, Jodis, and Scorn.

OLD (an acronym for Old Lady Drivers) was a New Jersey band formed in 1986 by James Plotkin and Alan Dubin out of the remains of Plotkin's grindcore act Regurgitation, releasing its self-titled debut of tongue-in-cheek grindcore on Earache Records in 1988. Across subsequent records the group shed its grind roots for avant-garde and industrial metal on Lo Flux Tube (1991) before shifting almost entirely into techno, industrial and electronica on its final album Formula (1995), by which point OLD had contracted to a Plotkin/Dubin duo. This dramatic grind-to-electronic transformation makes OLD an era-split candidate in the atlas. After OLD dissolved, Plotkin and Dubin went on to form the experimental doom band Khanate.

Vomitatrix is a Jupiter, Florida-based noisecore/acid-grind project whose self-titled debut (July 2022) was recorded in Austin, TX and mixed by drummer Weasel Walter. The band bills itself as building on the legacy of Morbid Florist, delivering ten tracks of abrasive, dada-tinged grindcore. The lineup pairs Weasel Walter (also founder/leader of The Flying Luttenbachers) with bassist Tim Dahl (Child Abuse, Lydia Lunch Retrovirus), guitarist Rick Eye, and vocalist Gyna Bootleg.

XHOHX are a duo who describe their own music, in their own words, as "Chaotic and Organic No Wave, Poly-rhythmic and Atonal Music" — which is both accurate and about as much help as it sounds. Ramon Ribas Coca plays guitar and programs the drums, Oregolakatzor plays bass, and the result is heavy avant-rock built out of angular, disharmonic riffing that never repeats a bar it could complicate instead. Reviewers reach for Ruins, the Flying Luttenbachers and Univers Zero, and hear an industrial edge that comes from the rhythmic construction rather than from any electronics — the programmed drums are deliberately played straight, close enough to a human kit that the review noting them also notes you cannot really tell. Growled shouts surface between the instrumental passages. Two albums in eleven years, then a 2013 split with Ahleuchatistas recorded either side of the Atlantic, and not much since.

Zeni Geva are a Japanese noise-rock band formed in Tokyo in 1987 by guitarist-vocalist KK Null (Kazuyuki Kishino), built on brutal, minimalist, detuned riff-machines and Null's harsh electronics. Steve Albini produced their 1991 album Total Castration and performed on the 1993 live document All Right You Little Bastards, and Jello Biafra released them on Alternative Tentacles; their 2001 album 10,000 Light Years appeared on Neurosis's Neurot Recordings. The long-running trio settled around Null, Ruins drummer Tatsuya Yoshida, and (for over two decades) guitarist Mitsuru Tabata.

Full of Hell are an American grindcore/powerviolence band from Ocean City, Maryland and central Pennsylvania (formed 2009) whose relentless fast-attack extremity is laced with harsh noise, power electronics and free-skronk saxophone. Vocalist Dylan Walker's electronics push the band well beyond grind, a tendency made explicit through collaborations with Merzbow, The Body, Primitive Man and shoegazers Nothing. They fold sludge and death-metal weight into a prolific, boundary-pushing discography.

Gigantic Brain is a Virginia-based cybergrind project started by John Brown in the early 2000s as one-man, drum-machine-powered electronic grindcore, later expanded into a duo with producer/multi-instrumentalist Mastin Simmons in 2012. Wikipedia credits it as 'one of the original pioneers of the cybergrind subgenre,' with a catalog running from chaotic, densely layered electronic grind (The Invasion Discography, 2004) toward the industrial/doom/ambient-leaning textures of the 2016 self-titled album. Released mostly through Razorback Records and Grindcore Karaoke, with absurdist lyrical themes layered over extremely dense production.