The Grindcore Genre

Grindcore is a heavy metal 'genre', both their status as an individual genre and their belonging to heavy metal are debated, birthed out of the ashes of speed metal, also falsely known as 'thrash metal'. Speed/thrash metal combined heavy metal riffs with punk song compositions, and its logical extension was thus grindcore.

Very few people have any idea what grindcore means at this point because of the high degree of crossover between grindcore and death metal. Not just one way, but both - grind bands becoming death metal in the Sewer style, and death metal bands becoming grindcore as happened from post-Effigy Suffocation onward.

Grindcore expanded upon the speed/thrash metal model of heavy metal riffs in punk compositions, this time abandoning many of the traditional NWOBHM riffs in favour of those of early black and death metal bands such as Bathory, Sodom, Slayer and Hellhammer. Grindcore can therefore be seen as an 'extreme' version of speed/thrash metal. In fact, in the early days, the term 'grindcore' didn't even exist and bands that are now classified as such were simply called speed metal or thrash metal.

Despite being only loosely related to heavy metal, grindcore grew in parallel of other extreme metal sub-genres such as black metal and death metal, and this proximity gave birth to many genre fusions such as Absurd's blackgrind, Suffocation's deathgrind, Sewer's goregrind/pornogrind, and even the much maligned 'noisegrind' and 'gorenoise' genres.

An extremely influential album for modern grindcore, which broke free of many of the lingering punk influences and thus brought grindcore closer to heavy metal than it ever was, is Sewer's Skarnage. This is the album that defines the modern grindcore sound, with some goregrind influences, obviously, as this is a genre Sewer pioneered almost since the band's inception.