Music
Why are more pop artists finding inspiration in metal?
Ten years ago, Myspace bands like Brokencyde and Attack Attack! were giving metal a glossy touch-up. Now it's the other way round thanks to Full Tac, 100 gecs, Grimes, Billie Eilish and more.
“We’re just going to piss a lot of metal fans off. That’s the goal…”
That’s producer/singer Jared Soule (aka Full Tac) talking about the response to Where’s My Juul??, the silly, electroclash-indebted track he made with his girlfriend Kat Zhang (aka Lil Mariko) that dropped in December. Speaking menacingly over a brooding trap bass, Lil Mariko interrogates someone about the location of her misplaced vape, her voice getting louder and more aggressive as her agitation balloons. Eventually, she rips into a throat-shredding scream, displaying an unexpected metal prowess that commenters have praised and lampooned in equal measure.
The minute-and-a-half-long song is reminiscent of The Chainsmokers’ 2013 hit #SELFIE, but its centrepiece is undoubtedly Mariko’s scream, which recalls a totally different scene of music altogether: the glossy pop- and electronica-infused metalcore of the mid-to-late-00s. A sneering middle finger to metal purists everywhere, it's distinctly reminiscent of what artists like Brokencyde, Breathe Carolina and Attack Attack! were doing just over a decade ago. A scene of US and UK bands who blew up on Myspace and took over the Warped Tour.
Full Tac and Lil Mariko are by no means the only modern pop acts channeling this sound again. For artists like 100 gecs, Poppy, Jazmin Bean, Black Dresses and even Grimes, borrowing elements – either subtly or overtly – from that once-derided era of music has become not just trendy, but critically approved.
At the peak of that Myspace era, a whole generation of artists were mixing electro-pop with metal in new and, erm, interesting ways. Pop and dance music were largely considered antithetical to everything metal stood for, and mashing the three together was akin to cultural blasphemy. However, that new generation of teens and early 20-somethings weren’t interested in pleasing purists. Instead, they were set free by a fresh, genre-slaying way of consuming music and the advent of home-recording technology like GarageBand.
Products like that made it easier than ever to not just produce synth-based music and douse other instruments in various effects, but also to experiment with new sounds and instrumental combinations. If an amateur producer wanted to try a metalcore scream over a homemade dance beat, why not? They could even upload it to Myspace and get thousands, if not millions, of plays. That’s how the Colorado duo Breathe Carolina started out in 2007, and by 2009 they were putting out a high-charting album on a notable label. Similarly, if a metalcore band wanted to splice trance beats into their bridges and sing in auto-tune during towering metal-pop hooks, they could.
Enter Shikari
© Enter Shikari
At this scene’s height there were effectively two thriving lanes of pop-metal. In one, artists like Breathe Carolina and Brokencyde were blending dance-pop du jour with splashes of metalcore screams and chugging guitars. In the other lane, bands like Attack Attack!, I See Stars, Enter Shikari and Asking Alexandria were brazenly stuffing their hulking metalcore songs with gooey pop hooks, neon synths, and ravey effects. By 2011, most of those acts (and their many copycats) either broke up or pivoted to new sounds; and by 2013, the dance-pop-metalcore idiom was played out. Against all odds, though, it’s creeping back in thanks to a host of experimental pop acts.
The 2019 debut from the cacophonous duo 100 gecs – cheekily titled 1000 gecs – garnered rave reviews everywhere. And, as many critics have mentioned at length, the appeal of 1000 gecs isn’t that its myriad sonic elements are new, but that its inorganic composite of bargain-bin genres is deliriously innovative. Dubstep, pop-punk, ska, metal and auto-tuned pop are all referenced in just 23 minutes.
One half of the duo, Laura Les, has said that the brutal breakdown at the end of 800db Cloud was inspired by Buffalo, NY, death-metal band Cannibal Corpse, but Les’s pig-squeal delivery and the way the duo’s metal tendencies emerge from a glitchy pop song has more in common with Breathe Carolina or I See Stars. Her 100 gecs band-mate Dylan Brady admitted as much in the same interview. When we spoke to them, they underlined their appreciation for that era of loony pop-metal.
100 gecs
© 100 gecs
“I love auto-tune and guitars,” says Brady, who apparently met Attack Attack! at the Warped Tour back in the day.
“They could go really hard and be beautiful and emotional at the same time,” Les adds. “They were probably coming from a similar place [as us]. Trainwreck music brain.”
The new album from shapeshifting Los Angeles pop artist Poppy is even more steeped in a style previously thought lost. The songs on I Disagree are comprised of full-band metal instrumentals that give way to crystalline pop hooks that sound like early Grimes. A band like Babymetal has been placing giddy J-pop vocals on top of speed- and death-metal riffs for the last five years, and Poppy’s style is similar. But the way she jerks the wheel between cloud-busting pop and metal annihilation is more akin to the Myspace era. She’s even signed to Sumerian Records, the label that first launched I See Stars and Asking Alexandria.
“I like Norma Jean and Marilyn Manson,” Poppy told Loudwire in a recent interview. The former is a more traditional metalcore band from the mid-00s that were absolutely pivotal to the sound of the Myspace era.
Grimes at Made in America
© Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images Entertainment
Even the returning Grimes – arguably one of the biggest influences on both 100 gecs and Poppy – has merged her dystopian cyber-pop with metal on recent singles. We Appreciate Power, from early 2019, features sludgy, Slipknot-like riffs beneath her eerily beautiful pop vocals. Right now, her sound is more akin to late-90s nu-metal than the metalcore of Myspace. But she did feature on a 2019 song by the English band Bring Me The Horizon, one of the biggest Myspace metalcore bands in the world before they swivelled towards synthy alt-rock.
Toronto’s Black Dresses would probably be less eager to identify with the groups they share a sound with. The up-and-coming noise-pop duo, who emerged from the same Soundcloud dimension as 100 gecs, make a dark, abrasive form of industrial pop. Their latest record LOVE AND AFFECTION FOR STUPID LITTLE BITCHES is musically rooted in heavy experimental music, but the sassy, vocal-fried sing-rap style they employ isn’t far, form-wise, from what groups like Brokencyde were doing in 2009. The key difference is that Black Dresses’ music is an intense reflection on trauma and depression, while Brokencyde’s bastardisation of crunk party anthems and elementary metalcore was more nihilistic.
More artists are joining the party, too. Jazmin Bean is a London makeup-artist-cum-Instagram-personality-cum-musician who poses in terrifying and extraordinarily elaborate costumes (like a cross between a demon and an anime character) and records songs with a similarly unsettling vibe: nursery-rhyme pop bangers cut with chugging metal riffs. Their RIYL tab on her Spotify profile is full of fledgling artists with the same horror-pop aesthetic. They don’t all sound like Myspace metal exactly, but they are in thrall to the Hot Topic goth chic that was adjacent to that scene.
Charli XCX
© Brent Stirton / Red Bull Content Pool
Billie Eilish’s creepy costumes and disturbing music videos offer a slightly more accessible version of that look. She hasn’t yet dabbled with full-on metalcore, but her subjects and Sunn O)))-like sub-frequency bass are heavy and dark for her tier of pop stardom. Charli XCX is drawn to this aesthetic, too, employing heavy industrial elements on her recent albums (100 gecs’s Brady produced a track on her 2019 album, Charli) and appearing alongside Rico Nasty on a remix of 100 gecs' ringtone.
Given that underground trends change the musical direction of the Top 40, will this sound become even more prevalent in 2020? It's already 100 per cent meme-able, which means it's halfway there.
