Skip to main content
Heavy Metal Thunder Melodic Metalcore

Genres Heavy Metal Metalcore Melodic Metalcore

Melodic Metalcore

Metalcore with Gothenburg’s harmonised leads and a clean-sung chorus against the screaming. Built, unapologetically, to be enormous.

Active years
1999 – present
Origin
USA (Massachusetts) / UK
Family
Metalcore
Bands here
13

Start here

Four records in order of how easy they are to get into — which is not the same as best first.

  1. Alive or Just Breathing Killswitch Engage, 2002 The landmark

    The record that set the template for a decade — Gothenburg riffs, hardcore breakdowns and a sung chorus, arranged so the chorus is the point. Howard Jones replaced Jesse Leach shortly after; this is Leach's, and it is the better record for it.

    Listen to Alive or Just Breathing

  2. Horizons Parkway Drive, 2007

    The Australian record that showed the genre could still write a hook after everyone had stopped expecting it to.

    Listen to Horizons

  3. Ascendancy Trivium, 2005

    The one with the guitar playing. Matt Heafy was nineteen and had listened to more Metallica than Converge, which is why this sits closer to thrash than anything else here.

    Listen to Ascendancy

  4. Holy Hell Architects, 2018

    Written after their guitarist and principal songwriter died of cancer at twenty-eight, and it is about that. The most emotionally serious record the genre has produced.

    Listen to Holy Hell

What it sounds like

Gothenburg guitar harmonies welded to a hardcore breakdown, with a sung chorus on top. Two guitars play the melodic twin leads that Swedish melodic death metal invented; the vocals alternate between a scream in the verse and full clean singing in the chorus; and the breakdown arrives where it always does. Production is very loud and very compressed. Compared with metalcore proper it is far more melodic and much more radio-shaped — the clean chorus is not an occasional contrast here but the structural centre of every song. That made it enormously successful and made it the sound a great many people mean when they say they grew out of metalcore.

  • Heaviness 4 out of 5
  • Speed 4 out of 5
  • Aggression 4 out of 5
  • Technicality 3 out of 5
  • Darkness 3 out of 5
  • Melody 5 out of 5

Where the name came from

Descriptive. The sound came from New England hardcore bands importing At the Gates and In Flames riffing wholesale; Killswitch Engage's Alive or Just Breathing (2002) is the usual dividing line between metalcore and its melodic offshoot.

The bands

Hear these first

  • Killswitch Engage USA
  • Trivium USA
  • Parkway Drive Australia
  • Architects UK
  • As I Lay Dying USA

And 8 more

  • Bullet for My Valentine UK
  • Bring Me the Horizon UK
  • While She Sleeps UK
  • Miss May I USA
  • We Came as Romans USA
  • Wage War USA
  • Atreyu USA
  • Bleeding Through USA

If you liked this

Closest in sound outside this family, leaning towards the similar or the gentler rather than straight into the deep end.