The Best Album From 11 Legendary Metalcore Bands
Our list of the best album from 11 metalcore bands proves just how much diversity exists within the genre.
The metalcore that emerged in the late ’80s and early ’90s was firmly rooted in hardcore punk, categorized by its relentless tempos and neck vein-popping vocals. But as the decade progressed, so did the sound of metalcore.
At the end of 1999, two of the genre’s most important albums — the Dillinger Escape Plan‘s Calculating Infinity and Botch‘s We Are the Romans — arrived in quick succession, helping to pioneer the dizzyingly technical substrain of mathcore and pushing metalcore into bold new territory at the turn of the century.
Metalcore would make plenty more twists and turns throughout the aughts, with bands incorporating Gothenburg-style melodic death metal riffs on one end and bleeding-heart emo vocals on the other. This new variant, coined melodic metalcore, comprised bands such as Killswitch Engage, Trivium and Bullet for My Valentine, whose savvy blend of brutal breakdowns and soaring choruses pushed the genre to new commercial heights.
READ MORE: The 50 Best Metal Albums of the 2000s (2000-2009)
Of course, what goes up must come down. The mid-2000s metalcore boom and the success of concurrent festivals such as Warped Tour and Taste of Chaos led to a feeding frenzy — and with it, several bizarre metalcore subgenres that were virtually unrecognizable from its origins. Unimaginative breakdowns and the proliferation of scenecore, electronicore and the endlessly memeable crabcore all led to the hyper-saturation of the genre and threatened to render it irrelevant, not unlike the hair metal scene 20 years earlier.
Yet even as metalcore went down several baffling paths, some veteran bands reached new creative and commercial peaks. August Burns Red raised the bar for progressive metalcore, while Bring Me the Horizon transcended the genre and became modern rock royalty.
Speaking of transcending the genre: We chose to exclude Avenged Sevenfold from this list because they haven’t made a proper metalcore album in 20 years. But please know that we consider Waking the Fallen a cornerstone of the genre, just like you do.
With that caveat out of the way, read on to see the best album from 11 legendary metalcore bands.
The Best Album From 11 Legendary Metalcore Bands
These metalcore albums all represent something different, showcasing the diversity of the bands in the scene when at their very best.
Gallery Credit: Bryan Rolli
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