Gonemage

Cara Neir is a Texas-based experimental duo of vocalist Chris Francis and multi-instrumentalist Garry Brents, active from 2008 to 2024, that evolved from punk-inflected black metal through post-black, deathgrind and crust before landing on a signature chiptune-laced sound. Their 2021 concept album Phase Out imagines the band abducted into a 16-bit JRPG world, built on emulated Super Nintendo reverb, glitch-edited black metal and hardcore, and drew acclaim as one of the more distinctive nintendocore/"pixelcore"-adjacent records of the decade. The band released splits with Venowl, Flesh Born, Ramlord and Caïna over its run; Brents also runs a sprawling network of other projects including Gonemage and Homeskin.

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).

Berzerker Cloudplay 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.

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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Red Ankh is the one-man digital/chiptune metal project of singer-songwriter and producer Shyft, running since 2004 (Denver, Colorado, formerly Minneapolis). Shyft builds each record from vocals, vocal synthesis, chiptune and physical-modeling synths, and sample libraries, cycling through black, death, power, symphonic, thrash, and folk metal alongside chiptune, gabber, gothic, industrial, dance, and trance elements -- a self-described 'industrial folk prog metal core' aimed at 'breaking down genre boundaries.' Early records (Blue, later remastered as Blue Two) were largely instrumental chiptune-metal before later albums like Red (2024) expanded the vocal and stylistic range.

Orionplay in the dock

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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.

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.

XYAX is a Québec (Alma) duo project of Dave Tremblay (composition, instrumentation, lyrics, visual art) and Ben Norton (co-composition, vocals, production/mixing), self-billed as '22nd-century electronic un-metal un-music.' Their 2014 EP 'Ode to the Universe (in Three Parts)' is built entirely from MIDI and samples rather than live instrumentation, incorporating spoken vocal samples from Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan and Hank Green, and was also issued in an alternate 8-bit version.

Braneworldplay in the dock

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Sleep Paralysis is a 2025 avant-garde black metal project from San Diego by Stephen Knapp, also known for the dissonant black metal band Cerulean, released via I, Voidhanger Records. The self-titled debut is a concept album about fever dreams, anxiety and sleep paralysis, blending dissonant black metal with jazz, classical, chiptune and vaporwave elements across 11 tracks. The project's only credited guest is Lorenzo Kemp, who contributes a guitar solo on one track.