Screamo for the Discerning Metalhead

I don't remember when I became a tireless genre defender, a beacon of light, an advocate for truth, justice, and real screamo. I think you buy enough Magic Bullet releases, and suddenly you're arguing with mall citizens that Hawthorne Heights isn't screamo, actually, it's the pop punk victim of an MTV-forwarded fugazi perpetrated by some poor intern who couldn't tag Thursday correctly. However, you can only hand so many pageninetynine CD-Rs to people in A Static Lullaby shirts before realizing that YTA. So, with enough therapy and ego-killing interactions, I eventually chilled, mainly because, yes, I did want to be fun at parties and not die alone.1 Still, despite a nearly decade-long break during the Petethepiratesquid era, my screamo obsession never ceased. I was always ready to talk to someone about Portraits of Past if the opportunity ever arose.2 And while I toiled away in the blurb mines for curiously skramz-adjacent metal bands like Laster and Serpent Column, I kept believing that two of my loves could cross over, and I could play matchmaker. Metalheads should listen to screamo.

In a way, they already are, at least in the falser styles. People say that Deafheaven is primarily inspired by Envy's A Dead Sinking Story, the Japanese screamo band's masterpiece.3 More concrete links abound, too. Sadness's Damián Antón Ojeda moonlights in Life, one of nine bands in Encyclopaedia Metallum with screamo listed in the genre field. Another, Blue Noise, releases material on Zegema Beach Records, one of the homes of the current screamo renaissance. And there are plenty of other bands, particularly of the post-black metal variety, that sure sound like they were weaned on City of Caterpillar or Circle Takes the Square. As Doug Moore has said, a lot of newer black metal is just "snow screamo" at this juncture. It's hard to say screamo isn't a part of modern metal's DNA.

Among the older metalheads, though, those grizzled headbangers who have searched high and low for an original pressing of Into Glory Ride, the style is still primarily used as a pejorative, shorthand for weaklings who lack a metallic edge, a scarlet letter to be pinned upon the chest pieces of white-belted hair swoop adherents. I get it. Look, I, too, had to endure From Autumn to Ashes, and said stuff like, "You mean the Racetraitor guy?" when someone tried to explain the appeal of Fall Out Boy to me. Dark times. I will not be stoked when that stuff inevitably resurfaces, if it hasn't already. As the noted poet laureate B.A. Johnson said, "I remember those skinny jeans the last time around." But I think the typical metalhead animus toward a straw man version of screamo is a case of mistaken identity. Screamo is back. It's just not the screamo that would get buried on a When We Were Young flyer.

No, the screamo that the kids have revived is the real stuff. And all of it is back, terrible song titles and all. The history books have been cracked, studied, and used as a map to pilfer screamo artifacts. Suddenly, bygone bands that were born to break up, those intrepid van inhabitants that toured the nation's basements and ask-a-punk squats, playing to tens of people if there wasn't an exam the next morning, are considered "emoviolence legends" and have thousands of RateYourMusic ratings. This newfound interest in what came before has set the stage for a fresh golden age for screamo, with plenty of up-and-comers bashing out passionate music that makes elder idiots like me feel young again...well, until our knees crack like a 21-gun salute. The crucial thing, though, is that the screamo scene these days isn't made up of elder idiots. I'm in the minority. As an example, a good chunk of the old guard has reformed for tours, and, judging by the demographics, these aren't strictly nostalgia fests. Over the past few years, I've seen Capsule, Clikatat Ikatowi, Jeromes Dream, Orchid, Portraits of Past, Saetia, The Spirit of Versailles, Swing Kids, and more, and there were way more kids in attendance than greybeards. I can tell because they're stage diving. These days, you could give me a whole year to prepare for one stage dive, working out like it's an Olympic event, and I'd still freeze up like an arthritic old dog trying to get off a couch. Not happening. Hell, at this age, I have to page through my calendar for a free day if I even want to think about moving faster than a brisk walk.

Anyway, all of this is to say that the kids are right: I think now is the perfect time for you to try on some screamo. And I am here to help. What follows is a list of classic and contemporary bangers that I think would be palatable to metalheads, accompanied by dodgy remembrances from someone who was, during the late second and early third waves, on the message boards, bought the vinyl, and went to shows at such august locations as the back room of a penny arcade and an abandoned Chinese buffet. I'm going to skip some of the obvious entries because, really, do you need another person telling you to listen to A Dead Sinking Story?4 You can explore some of those newly inducted Hall of Famers in the appendix below and hyperlinks throughout. I'm also going to include some edge cases in this list that were considered part of the wider scene when I was cutting my teeth. Speaking of edge cases, I need to get this out of the way: You will find that most bands hated being called screamo. Skramz is even worse. Emoviolence is the worst. As a CYA measure, let me acknowledge that most of these bands are hardcore, all of them are punk, and slicing the meat more finely is a stupid pursuit...that I will definitely be undertaking as a generally stupid person. So, to that end, please note that this list isn't intended to be a debate or a comprehensive list. It is not the story of screamo. It's not a definition of screamo. It's my pitch to share one of the most essential styles of my life with those who like it heavy, fast, and chaotic. Onward.

For my sanity, we're going to split this feature into two parts: old and new. Old is up first.

We begin with an edge case. I think most who remember and love the German band would prefer to categorize it as "metallic hardcore," or some other related descriptor that orbits Integrity. And I tend to believe Acme and Sweden's Breach laid the foundation for much of the Euro metalcore that followed. So, yeah: metalcore. Settled. But, when I was on the come up, To Reduce the Choir to One Soloist, a collection of 7"es and odds and ends from the band's catalog, was part of the screamo curriculum, thus I had no qualms letting it rub digital covers with, like, Yage when I briefly thought it was a good idea to sort my MP3s by country. (Finding a physical copy these days is possible if you want to shell out some serious dinero on Discogs. Otherwise, you can download a copy semi-legally on the Internet Archive.) Anyway, I'm reasonably confident that the one-minute forty-eight-second "Bastardiser" is so heavy that Knut was compelled to title an album after it. That brief breakdown at 0:41 is absurd, a planet-munching chug with a groove coda that delights in the sound of neck bones snapping. Acme kept it low profile on purpose, preferring the music to speak for itself, so biographical details are scarce, but members were also in Systral and Mörser, both far grindier affairs.

Bless Three One G for keeping this stuff in print. Friends, I present to you the first of many career-collecting discographies, the format of choice for screamo bands that didn't leave much behind. Angel Hair wasn't that far removed from its Gravity Records labelmates in bands like San Diego's Antioch Arrow, Cupertino's Mohinder, and Baltimore's Universal Order of Armageddon. (The latter has one of the great quotes about this era: "Our live shows are like turning on a vacuum cleaner for like ten minutes.") However, the Coloradans, and later San Diegans, always sounded weirder to me, playing up this askew sense of havoc, this desire to push their sound toward ever more demented dimensions. The standout on this discography is Angel Hair's 1995 release, Insect Mortality, which kicks off with "Witch Hunt Scene from Star Trek," one of the great ragers of the time, and the track that convinced a young me to revisit the roots of screamo. Listening to it now, I'm still surprised by how well it holds together despite its frenzied, full-speed approach. Screamo is never a genre known for its tightness, always bursting at the seams and often having that emotion and energy spill over. Stay within the lines it does not. Part of Angel Hair's power is how it corrals the chaos. The other part of its power is, well, its power.

Dateline: 2024. A few days after Capsule got all of its gear stolen, including the guitars that are on this album, I saw the band live. I was the only one at the show who wasn't playing that night. Rough. The comeback trail is cruel for some. Then again, it always felt like Capsule had tough luck. True, the Florida band made big enough waves that it later headlined a fest when it first reformed. My recollection, though is that, among my screamo crew, Blue never really caught on, and its follow-up, 2011's No Ghost, fared even worse. (Even today, the RYM ratings lag far behind other rediscovers that have reformed.) I don't get it because "Cobalt Connection" is a stone-cold classic, a two-minute scorcher that keeps its foot on the gas while navigating all sorts of tricky time signatures. So, yeah, perhaps Blue was too mathy for those allergic to TI-86es, often utilizing a precision that wasn't exactly screamo's stock and trade. Maybe it was too heavy; "Determinal" is an imploding-building rumbler, a Richard Donner action slomo in song form, the kind of concrete-boots march that powerviolence bands usually close their albums with. To wit, thanks to its heftiness, Blue is often categorized as sludge even though the trio injects its music with all kinds of screamo hallmarks, not to mention Capsule counting Tunes for Bears to Dance To as one of its ancestors. Whatever the case, Blue smokes. It's the last screamo album I truly loved until La Luna brought me back into the fold.

There's a whole subsection of screamo that a person of a certain vintage would describe as "Witching Hour," referring to the Indianapolis label that released material by Orchid, Racebannon, Ursap Synapse, To Dream of Autumn, Jeromes Dream, and my beloved Neil Perry. (Helpfully, I am covering none of those.) I'm not entirely sure why it stuck around as a descriptor, because other labels, particularly Level Plane, had a lot of those bands on their rosters as well.5 Whatever the case, Witching Hour came to define a kind of grindy screamo that had this wind-tunnel quality to riffs. Florida's Combatwoundedveteran was never on Witching Hour, but it had a similar approach: playing fast, nearly out of control, and with a guitar tone that sounded like a jet was trying to land in your ear. The difference was that the band was unrelentingly grindy, as evidenced by the fact that Assück's Steve Heritage was on the boards for this session. Hell, the structure of "Assassination Attempt Part 2" almost sounds like powerviolence if it weren't for the caustic, non-Spazz screams and the riffs that skid to a stop like an 18-wheeler trying to go from 60mph to 0 before becoming the main character in a Trolley Problem. As I alluded to in the intro, Combatwoundedveteran is strangely popular now, something I still have a hard time squaring when it comes to bands I could've seen at a house show.

I debated adding this to the list because I feel that Funeral Diner is such a well-known quantity. Perhaps one could quibble with that. Funeral Diner has 13,000 monthly listeners on Spotify while Orchid has nearly 40,000.6 But the band from Half Moon Bay, California, felt like such a big deal when I was getting into screamo, expanding on the Portraits of Past quiet/loud model, linking together moments of serenity with suddenly exploding raucous ragers. (Portraits of Past's drummer, Matthew Bajda, also drummed for Funeral Diner, so it makes sense.) The five-piece's final album, The Underdark, takes that to the extreme, stretching these songs to their dynamic breaking point. It was also when other genres began to take notice. While perhaps not invoked as often as A Dead Sinking Story, its longform structures had to have rubbed off on post-black metal, especially those bands that straddle the screamo/black metal divide, such as To Be Gentle. It also helped that the songs were more deliberate, often settling into a mid-paced unraveling that wouldn't be that far off from the morose tempo of DSBM. Metal? As close as this list is probably going to get. Evidence: Take the nearly nine-minute "It Is Good That We Never Met," a comparative crawler that even integrates lead keyboards in a way that might even be familiar to fans of early Amorphis. While my favorite Funeral Diner release remains the more chaotically inclined ...Is Dead, a collection of split contributions burned onto a CD-R for a Euro tour, a release strategy which speaks to the band's staunchly DIY punk ethos, The Underdark is the starting point for metalheads looking to get their foothold on the otherwise sheer face of this side of screamo.

I said this wasn't going to be a history lesson, but I had to dedicate some inches to Heroin, arguably the first band to do it, or at least one of the first to capture it on tape, releasing All About Heroin in 1991. This Southern Lord-curated discography gets rolling with 1993's Heroin, the San Diego band's swansong. What's still startling to me is that it's all there: the frantic pace, slashing guitars, and desperate vocals. It's the blueprint, the recipe for screamo success. The quartet's emocore roots are evident — slow down "Moving Parts" and it's almost like a Rites of Spring song — but you can sense the driving tension of a band moving into new territory while establishing its voice. Still goes, too. There's a reason "Meaning Less" sounds fresh: high energy never ages. Ironically, then, Heroin didn't last long — about four years all told — but its influence still inspires more than 30 years later.

Honeywell's lone LP, Industry, reminds me of another '93 album: Rorschach's Protestant. Both are screaming and searing in that pre-codified kind of way, blazing a new trail by making blazing music. And both are so confident, as if the music they're making has always existed and they're the chosen medium worthy of channeling it. Where the two depart is, goddamn, Honeywell is noisy, erecting an almost harsh noise wall of feedback and distortion atop chaotic emo. Even the relatively more sedate (lol) "Everything's Like Circles" is like Julia collaborating with Masonna. Listen to those feedback howls; it's like someone torturing a sentient amplifier to give up the whereabouts of a missing noise gate. "Glass Catheter Christ" is the album's high point, tearing the listener to ribbons with a tempest of emotional torment that eventually gives way to an eye of the storm where the band meditates on two notes while foreboding red-cloud ambiance whirls around in the background. Rules. For whatever reason, Honeywell never got its due, despite even cutting a split with Reach Out, one of the great minuscule-discography what-ifs of emo/screamo.7 Ah, well. Here they are now.

Germany's June Paik answered a fundamental question: What if Orchid songs were really, really long? "How long are they?" you scream along with the studio audience. "Grobes rund" clocks in at nine minutes. June Paik achieved those elongated runtimes by using post-rock like a Big Mac does buns, sandwiching these focused detonations of impassioned ass kicking between long stretches of pensive quietude. Post-rock and screamo both use feelings as an instrument, so it's not surprising that the two have been crossbred more times than golden doodles.8 12", the quintet's sole 12", is not unlike Envy or new-school practitioners such as Habak in that way. But I always found June Paik to be so much rawer, a hardcore band pushing itself to see if it can craft epics without them collapsing in on themselves.

You weren't getting out of here without me writing about Jokes. Unlike the preceding entries that have a metal-adjacent atmospheric or go-fast philosophy, the reason why Jokes will appeal to metalheads is because of the riffs. God, the riffs. So many riffs. More riffs than I have regrets. And those riffs are constantly changing, mutating, and growing. They're probed from different angles, like how a memory keeps getting updated in your mind. And when Kidcrash engages in that extremely screamo act of dueling arpeggios, the lines entwine and anchor themselves to your memory. Plus, jeez, the flow of this album is effortless. Of course, Jokes's flow would be nothing without the efforts of the rhythm section that puts in work. The bass slips and slides across sections, the drums run through a riot of patterns. Both add just enough contrast to maintain your attention. All of that combines to form this intricately detailed rise and fall that has such a dramaturgical feel to it. The best thing on here is "Ron Ghousley's Fucked Up Dream (Ron to the Hills, Ron for Your Life)."9 That's the perfect synthesis of Portraits of Past's urgency meeting the slowly mounting passion of Daïtro head-on. Highly recommended to metalheads who favor Elder. Jokes is something of an outlier in the Kidcrash discography. Before, it's more of an emo band in the mold of, like, Further Seems Forever. After, it nestles up closer to math rock.10 For one album, Kidcrash nailed it. On a shortlist of albums I want to hear on my deathbed.

Majority Rule always felt tougher and meaner than most bands. Even its most melodic moments flexed muscle. For instance, the middle of "The Sin in Grey" or the opening of "At 3 AM" could be a more heart-on-its-sleeve Botch, particularly that thick, buzzing bassline. Still, Majority Rule's calling card was its crunch, like getting scrunched between two garbage trucks stuck in reverse. There's a reason it held its own with splitmates pageninetynine, one of the more excruciatingly deafening bands of the decade. Interviews With David Frost, the Washington, DC, trio's debut LP, is packed with tracks that pummel. The two-minute inferno "Burial Suit" is like a more effective Zao, while "Progress of Elimination" is from the Turmoil school of leaving bruises. But while I'm using these other bands as comparisons in this blurb, I must stress that Majority Rule was its own thing, finding a unique way to balance its ferocity with the kind of emotive, soul-stirring quality that does right by its city's legacy. If someone thinks screamo is for weaklings, play them this record.

An edge case, but a less controversial one, mainly because I don't know how one could listen to "Karysun" and not think that's a screamo song. Emotions! Many emotions! The more objective, bird's eye view of One Eye God Prophecy's place in history is that these five Ontarians followed in the crusty, grindy, hardcorey footsteps of Union of Uranus. That was no secret. If Discogs bios are to be believed, "They scribbled flyers and posters which advertised that One Eyed God Prophecy had ex-members from Union of Uranus — a publicity stunt that was used to attract more people to their shows." Hell of a power move. Who is going to fact-check you in 1996? Not that One Eyed God Prophecy even needed to fake it 'til it made it that hard. Uranus's Yannick Lorrain signed the band to The Great American Steak Religion after hearing it practice.11 Anyway, One Eyed God Prophecy is a screamo derecho, a barn-flattening gust of Discharge-y distortion. The drums pound like falling boulders, the screams rasp like a fork stuck in a garbage disposal. And yet, it makes time to check in with its feelings, stepping on the distortion pedal to let comparatively clean tones help herd those emotions.

Some of the political music created during the height of George W. Bush's presidency now sounds quaint. It's not the music's fault. It's hard to be prophetic when the world is now moving a million miles per second. Take hardcore. In 2002, The Suicide File released "Ashcroft," a then-blistering attack on the prevailing "you're either for us or against us" mentality pervading American politics. "And when I peer through/ Through the red. Through the white/ And through the blue/ I can see people like you/ Using tragedy to to advance your own narrow moral crusade." That felt anthemically incisive in the moment. But now that everyone says the quiet part loud in an atrocity-rich present, it just doesn't...hit the same. The song still smokes. But it feels like screaming along to, like, "This Land Is Your Land" or something. I have no doubt that the lyrics from Raise the Bullshit Flag, the Indiana band's sole full-length, suffer the same fate. But, goddamn, does its righteous indignation ever feel timeless. There's a reason I spent all of fall 2006 listening to it and Napalm Death's Smear Campaign; ideologically, they're two peas in a pod, as far as I'm concerned. Considering it's a young person's game, screamo never shied away from the political.12 It is a genre to vent about whatever ails you. Still, few have ever sounded as fed up with their surroundings as Phoenix Bodies. The two-vocalist, no-bassist quintet doesn't so much drip venom from its fangs as it sprays it out of a fire hose. The titular opener kicks off a seeing-red monologue that sets the stage for a speedy flattener that sounds like a grindcore band commandeering Converge. That ripper all but hints at the Phoenix Bodies live experience, a chaotic event best encapsulated by the bloody pic on the band's Discogs page. For some reason, these dudes never caught on like they should've. At least you can still buy the original run of wax for $15.

Ah, This Is Medicine — as close as a screamo band can get to grind. Like fellow Floridian Combatwoundedveteran, Reversal of Man's lone long-player was produced by Assück's Steve Heritage, who also gave the quintet a guitar tone that might well be a legion of shop fans bent on overthrowing humanity.13 Reversal of Man makes its most lasting impression, though, with its songwriting. The band took the Wire approach of tossing out anything it didn't need, including repetition, if it was getting in the way of reaching its end goal. A lot of This Is Medicine sounds like someone took One Eyed God Prophecy, erased most of it, and smashed together whatever was left that had the highest payload. Take "Conjecture," probably my favorite ripper of the bunch. Similar to Discordance Axis's "Typeface," Reversal of Man drops one of the album's best riffs in at 0:21, a riff that would usually signal a breakdown, and after six seconds of holding your breath waiting for the ensuing onslaught, NOPE, the band moves on to something else without paying it off. That lack of resolution causes so much tension, making the ensuing ruckus all the more impactful. Rules.

Someone is going to yell at me if I omit French screamo, and because Anomie, Daïtro, and Mihai Edrisch aren't heavy enough, here's early Sed Non Satiata.14 This wave of French screamo is known for these hypnotic build-ups, utilizing a persistent mid-pace tempo that steadily rolls in like a tide. Even Le Ciel De Notre Enfance's more frenetic moments, such as the punkier "Spirit fuel," have this wave-like undulation to them, eventually lulling you into a trance. That said, this album's best moment is "En attendant l'aube," a seven-minute instrumental that's as good as anything more guitar-focused post-rock bands such as The Jezebel Spirit or The Cancer Conspiracy pulled off.15 What followed in the Sed Non Satiata discography was…less good. Also, not sure if the band is still rocking — bands in this vein tend to get sucked into the radio silent zone known as graduate school. But the quartet16 can hang its hat on this one.

[Wylclef Jean voice] Shikari, Shikari. Powerful. This Dutch four-piece's energy could keep an entire suburb lit. Shikari's whole thing was something like, What if we play screamo like it's fastcore? Parts of these songs are absolutely flying, a fleetness that the rest of the style rarely matches. Still, there are enough slowdowns to sink your teeth into, particularly of the core variety; it's no accident that Shikari recorded a cover of Unbroken's "Fall On Proverb." "Post Student Syndrome," the opener of 2000's Robot Wars, is both sides of the band in action, trading between blasts that could've killed a Bllleeeeaaauuurrrrgghhh! compilation and core chugs that should star in an Aversionline post. While I prefer its two just-the-band outings, Shikari, like a lot of political punkers, did most of its damage via splits, finally hanging it up after an ass-kicker with the like-minded Louis Cyphre.17

Textbook Traitors, a band I always thought was closer in spirit to something like Dragbody because it employed an almost mathcore approach to escalating extremity. Similar to Love Lost but Not Forgotten, this Milwaukee sextet dealt in maximizing dynamics, turning up the dials of chaotic ear-shredders and brooding bridges; the band had no middle. By this point in the list, you know the whole screamo dealio, and Textbook Traitors doesn't really deviate from that, but it intensifies all of that to the nth degree. I remember reading a review saying You Pull The Strings That Make Us Dance was nothing but panic chords.18 Checks out. Few openers are as fiery as "Fine Day To Die," and getting flayed by that piercing squall from the jump is one hell of an introduction. It's not going to convert a Bathory fan, but it's plenty brutal for some.

To This Bearer of Truth captures everything by the Canadian band, a whopping nine tracks, including its most crucial document, 1995's Disaster By Design, which is the rare 2x7".19 Union of Uranus is another edge case, albeit one I think is absurdly influential. "Panacea" alone has more descendants than a serial sperm bank depositor. Kind of like Heroin, you can hear so much of the future of screamo in these crusty hardcore tracks; the blistering vocals, gale-force guitar tone, and crashing drums. The riffs are ruthless but are often tinged with an underlying reflectiveness. And when the band takes time heating up the intensity of the more contemplative sections, the resulting boiling-over effect is so cathartic. Of course, Disaster By Design is more than just important: it's good. It whips, in fact. That indefatigable whipping-tude means Disaster by Design has legs, helping it still walk these lands for 30 years. It's no fossil. And I think most new screamo has a little bit of Uranus in them.

One of the many bands Will Killingsworth appeared in after Orchid20 and before mixing every record ever released. Probably heresy, but I much prefer Ampere to Orchid mainly because of its punkiness and the fact that these songs sound like Funeral Diner miniatures. Still waiting on Clean Plate Records to mail me Like Shadows. Probably should give up on that one.

Seemed like the future at the time. All over the place in a good way, like the MP3 collections of terminally logged-in Soulseek users. Charred black like pageninetynine, expansive like City of Caterpillar, but its own thing. 21 years later, there's zilch like 2004's As the Roots Undo, and the closest thing to it is, like, Ephel Duath crashing into Unexpect or something.

When screamo went full Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I kid...but am I kidding? The post-rock stuff reminds me a lot of Mono. The screamo stuff recalls Indian Summer. Kind of a fascinating 'members of' history, too. A lot of pageninetynine connections, yes, but drummer Ryan Parrish was also playing in Darkest Hour, and Jeff Kane and Kevin Longendyke would end up in Malady, a band responsible for one of the best rock records of the 2000s.

I lived and breathed screamo from 2002 through 2007, and I never heard of this Spanish band until much later. RYM gets a lot of flak for being, well, RYM, but occasionally it unearths some nuggets that previously evaded everyone else's panning efforts. Anyway, Corea is a name now, mainly on the back of 2004's Los Peores 7 Peores Km De Mi Vida, a fascinatingly experimental set that uses legit noise alongside the post-rock.

What's left to say? When you want to scream your guts out over beautiful, and beautifully dramatic, music.

The prog one. Gospel never did much for me at the time (and, truth be told, doesn't do much for me now, either), but its 2005 album The Moon Is a Dead World is hard to ignore. Basically, the screamo album for Opeth nerds.

Hassan i Sabbah was another band that found a much bigger audience after it was long gone. Notable for having Mike Justian (The Red Chord, Backstabbers Incorporated, uh, Unearth, and...Madball?) on drums. More merciless than a lot of screamo of the era. Actually, a great rec for metalheads. It's down here mostly because I never loved it.

Just making sure you're still reading. This band? Not big. Not at all. Not even a little bit. But I wanted to sneak an obscurity in here. In a way, this blog is an exercise in Remembering Some Bands, and next to no one remembers New York's I, Robot, and that's a shame. Not that that is super surprising. Like a lot of screamo bands, I, Robot wasn't with us for very long: about two years, which produced one demo, one 7", and one split that was released after the quintet, well, split. I don't think Et Cetera is that different from stuff that would find acclaim a few years later, like The Little Explorer.

Along with Orchid, the kings of what would be tagged emoviolence. (Of course, the two are on a split that's considered the Holy Grail by younger fans.) Frenzied and furious, yes. Tinnitus-inducingly noisy, yes. But, man, Jeromes Dream could riff. When that riff kicks in on "A Second Grade Art Project," that's that good stuff. Also, a rare comeback success story. 2023's The Gray In Between is as good as anything from the band's original run.

Again, it's wild what is now popular. Some of the shrillest vocals this side of The Spirit of Versailles. I don't know if the emo parts will land for metalheads, but the loud stuff is pure pandemonium.

You know, not sure there's anything here for metalheads either, but I love this band and this is my blog. Neil Perry really figured something out on the first seven songs of Lineage Situation.21 Unfortunately, those were the quartet's last. "Nine Minutes of Non-Fiction" is worth an entry into screamo Valhalla alone, but this whole discography rips, particularly the split with A Days Refrain. Members would go on to Welcome the Plague Year, which rips, but was more on the Funeral Diner spectrum.22 Drummer Justin Graves played on A Life Once Lost's A Great Artist, and I adore that album. It should be reappraised. Justice for A Great Artist.

Orchid was the screamo band a lot of metalheads knew because they released a split with a little-known grinder named Pig Destroyer. Probably *the* screamo band according to most people, a well-deserved title. Always catchier than its compatriots, despite living up to the title of its first 12": Chaos Is Me.

Hard to choose between Document #5 and #8. The former wins because "My Application To Heaven" always reminded me of Converge, although the more likely influences are Rorschach and Deadguy. Anyway, if you catch them these days, you'll see eight members on stage. The ol' three guitar, two bass, two singer configuration. That's not a band, that's a riot.

In case you missed it, you can find my Q2 metal picks here:

You can find my non-metal picks here (includes an Ozzy obit):

And you can read about some shows I went to, including Portraits of Past, here:

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