Spires of the Lunar Sphere

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.

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.

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Hypomanic Daydream is the Chicago solo project of Manic Dream Girl, fusing dissonant avant-garde death metal with dizzying, 16-bit-RPG-battle-theme synth lines, jazz inflections and Rock-in-Opposition unpredictability. Launched in 2022 explicitly inspired by Homeskin's genre-blending, it has moved from raw EPs through a split with Homeskin to 2025's full-length The Yearning, and more recently into an industrial/electronic-leaning 'Hype-O' offshoot. Critics note it 'doesn't really sound like anyone else' in extreme metal, for better and worse.

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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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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.

Solo avant-garde metal/jazz-fusion project of Raphaël Beaudouin, a musician based in Bois-Guillaume near Rouen, France, who writes, performs, and records every instrument himself — electro-acoustic guitar, clarinet, bass, drums, keyboard — layered with 8-bit sounds and glitch electronics. His 20-track album Pahilcé Koot (self-released, March 2020) is a rapid-fire run of short, absurdly titled vignettes, with Beaudouin citing Pryapisme, Igorrr, Mr. Bungle, Pin-Up Went Down, CHON, and Gentle Giant as touchstones.

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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.

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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.

Containor is a Queens, New York experimental/noise trio pairing death-metal extremity with electronics: John Longstreth (Origin) on drums, warr guitar, practice pad and guitar trigger, John DeBlase on synth/computer/casio, and Colin Marston (Krallice, Gorguts, Dysrhythmia) on synth drums, metronome, fake bass, keys, casio, plus editing/mixing/mastering. Released the 'ASSHOLE' EP (2018) and 'DISEASE CUBE: REMOTELY CONTROLLED' (2021), both leaning into blast-driven, electronically mangled noise rather than straight metal songcraft.