CYBERGRIND!
An article on a niche micro-genre that is also an interview with Uboa
I wrote this article last year, at the end of summer. I was really, really happy with it. I managed to interview Xandra Metcalfe, which was a fucking dream. It looked like one of the most solid pieces of music criticism I’ve written thus far. Everything looked swell.
Until it wasn’t.
The article rotted for months in editing purgatory for reasons beyond my control. I started to doubt it would ever see the light of day. Until today.
So here we are, brute forcing it out of its slumber. Unearthing it from the archives. If it shows the marks of time’s wear and tear it’s because quite a bit of time has passed. I think it’s still pretty neat, but you’ll see for yourself. Let’s talk about our favourite micro-genre: cybergrind.
CYBERGRIND!
I’m fourteen and my hair falls down to my shoulders. I’m wielding a bass. My brother holds his drumsticks up crossed in the air – an X right in front of the band logo we’ve spray-painted on the basement’s wall (D**** L***, which I’m censoring now both for its unabashed corniness and in the off-chance our godawful Myspace page is still up). He’s young and his hands are fucking urchinular, but he is a menace. He wants to be Dave Lombardo so, so bad. We’re actually both sporting a Slayer tee – mine is Hell Awaits, his is South of Heaven. We’ve yet to find a guitarist; for now, we’re just a drum and bass sort of heavy metal ensemble. It’ll happen two months or so afterwards: a friend of ours who obsesses over noodly solos, as you often do when you’re young and a metalhead.
After three months and a gig in a high school gym we’ll split up for good. Turns out the vibe can go sour real quick. But for now we’re blissfully unaware and motivated to rock beyond belief.
My brother goes onetwoonetwothreefour. There’s an egg of anxiety stuck sideways in my throat every time he says that. After all, it’s not like we have any idea of what we’re doing. It’s just one of the mannerisms we have picked up from the people who play play music. It’s like an acquired façade, trickled down from our elders, and I know deep down that it could crack at any given moment.
None of us has to specify what we’re about to play: we only have one song in our repertoire, and we shred it over and over and over and over again. Black metal by Venom. The main bass riff is easy enough – easy enough for an unmusician like me, that is. It goes something like
E ||--------------------------------|-------------------------------|
B ||--------------------------------|-------------------------------|
F#||--3-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-|-2-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-|
C#||--------------------------------|-------------------------------|
E |-------------------------------|---------------------||
B |-------------------------------|---------------------||
F#|-1-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-|-------------7-7-7---||
C#|-------------------------------|-3-0-0-0-0-0---------||
and I can gallop on my four thick strings with a certain rockstar ease as I shout completely mic-less over the amp and the drums BLACK METAL HOUNDS!!! FASTER THAN SOUND!!! BLACK METAL GODS ROCK AND ROLL!!! With the right amount of makeshift infernal distortion, it sounds pretty sick.
But we’re not just any cover band – or, at the very least, we don’t feel like any cover band. We may be faking any sort of musicianship but there’s a twist to the one song we’re capable of carrying out to completion. You see, we might be young, but we have a blood-pact sort of bond going on between the two of us over being a bit of encyclopaedic little shits when it comes to music that sounds like car crashes and, after a lot of misspent hours on Myspace, we’ve found out about this one genre that has blown our mind to bits: it’s called grindcore and even the name sends our brain spinning.
Grindcore is a genre of extreme metal music. On a sonic level, it is characterized by a terroristic usage of speed and distortion. The rhythm section is dominated by blast beats, a term coined by the quintessential grindcore band Napalm Death to describe their absurdly fast style of drumming. It sounds more like a prolonged pummelling than a beat, honestly. The guitars and bass are distorted, downtuned or, at the very least, fucked with in one way or another. Vocals are an excuse to see how far human lungs and vocal cords can stretch.
As far as the lyrics go, they fall into one of these two categories: they are either anti-capitalist, or they are about gore and guts. While the second category might often be a little boring and juvenile, the first was vital and, at least in my case, eye-opening. The vision that dawns on the front cover of Napalm Death’s Scum – a world of capitalist trash watched over by these few decrepit overlords – rung awfully believable. It was a brain-splitting moment, a rude awakening.
On top of that, it's no exaggeration to say that grindcore was the first form of properly experimental music I’ve ever been exposed to – because, despite the lowbrow reputation that stalks extreme metal and extreme music in general, that’s what grindcore is, at the end of the day: a form of wildly experimental music.
In fact, the best description of grindcore as a genre is a savage attack at the very song-form: not only the classical rock-band-instruments are played or tempered with in a way as to sabotage how they “normally” work in a rock or pop song and the content of the songs is often quite revolutionary in nature, but the very structure of a rock or pop song is put into question. Grindcore songs are often extremely short, relinquishing the verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure completely. Often times, they are so short as to appear almost comical in the eyes of mainstream audiences and the studio industrial complex – the most infamous example being, of course, Napalm Death’s You suffer. If it wasn’t for all the noise and anti-capitalism and gore, we’d probably consider it an artistic vanguard of some sort.
This was the sort of meat-grinder we put Venom’s Black metal into. Our cover sucked, but grindcore stuck with me and it actually came back to me like HPPD this year, 2023, because it seems like grindcore is having a bit of a bizarre renaissance. In a (somewhat) new, digital guise, granted, but a renaissance, nonetheless. That new guise is called cybergrind.
Cybergrind is quite simple to describe: it is grindcore, but with some electronic enhancements. The enhancements classically come in the form of a drum machine instead of an actual drummer – an instrument that can blast beat way faster than any human ever could. This classical grindcore-plus-drum-machine form of cybergrind is best exemplified by bands like Agoraphobic Nosebleed or The Berzerker. But in 2023, cybergrind has come to mean so much more, with bands openly incorporating various (and sometimes honestly odd) forms of electronic music to magnify the mayhem: 8-bit electronics, Skrillex samples, autoned vocals openly inspired by the emo trap music of the late 2010s. Yeah, it’s weird.
Despite the weirdness, cybergrind has gained some traction in some online spaces: Bandcamp has featured cybergrind a few times on its page as a paradoxical "next big thing" of sorts and there's a vibrant, ever-growing online community constantly posting cybergrind memes (and rightly pestering Anthony Fantano about his lack of recognition of the cybergrind community). Hell, they even got The Flenser tweeting about it.
But the genre is still loud, horrid, hostile: how can it be so beloved? And, most importantly, why is it so beloved now?
Baffled and lost, I reached out to Xandra Metcalfe for some answers. Xandra is mostly known for her ear-devastating project Uboa, one of the most interesting acts in contemporary heavy music. Her music is harrowing, traumatising and cathartic and, at this point, she is one of the most exciting figures fucked-up music has got going for it. Coincidentally, she is also heavily into cybergrind. She played cybergrind since the early 2010s and her current Uboa incarnation clearly bears the mark of cybergrind’s extremity. None the better to give me an insider perspective.
When I asked Xandra why cybergrind is having its little moment of online fame, she told me that «it’s having a renaissance for several reasons: first enough time has passed for culture to go through a full loop and people to find it nostalgic again, as a lot of it is very inspired by the myspace-era of heavy music (the 2000’s) […] a lot of influence is taken from 00’s metalcore/post-hardcore and emo bands. There is also a big influence from ‘nintendocore’ projects like Horse The Band as well as what is now called ‘Sasscore’, i.e. Blood Brothers and The Locust, which was always an ‘effeminate’ take on grindcore and mathcore» - an answer that, of course, I agree with completely. First and foremost, I myself have discovered grindcore and cybergrind on Myspace and feel earnestly nostalgic for that period in heavy music. And secondly, and most importantly, because most contemporary cybergrind bands re-elaborate that past in new ways, emphasizing certain underlying tensions that were always present in these sorts of extreme music – in a very zoomer sort of confrontation that cannot be described as just straightforwardly nostalgic, but also rather aggressive and transformative. Contemporary cybergrind is a perfect balance of nostalgia and cultural offence.
Take for example one of my favourite current cybergrind bands, Twink Obliterator. Twink Obliterator’s music, with its samples and all, sounds a lot like that one video from a Dillinger Escape Plan concert in a Virgin Megastore in 2005 where the singer walks right over the crowd. It sounds like that very Myspace mathcore-everythingcore madness. It is that sort of reckless. Better: it sounds like the (sorely missed) madness and recklessness that video encapsulated but fed into the grind (pun intended) of contemporary social media. It revives that sort of aggression to make it anew. To make it contemporary. And to make it absolutely queer.
If a name like Twink Obliterator hasn’t given that away already, the queer part is essential in this confrontation with the past. Xandra too points out that she sees: «a lot of queer people (especially trans women) attracted to it post tipping-point, given that a lot of transfeminine culture is explicitly and implicitly inspired by 'cyberculture’ (i.e. Cyberfeminism, Accelerationism etc), and a lot of important cybergrind artists use the myspace emo-boy aesthetic as a way of discussing transness. Indeed, as a former emo kid myself, tight-pants swoopy-hair aesthetic was about the closest thing to femininity I could express as a teenager in the 00’s given trans people were mostly seen as a joke (or a porn category) by the cis at the time. It was very difficult to find out anything about trans issues back then, so I think a lot of emo/myspace kids used the aesthetic to express their gender identity indirectly. I know of many such cases. So it makes sense the renaissance has come after the trans tipping point with bands such as Thotcrime, Strawberry Hospital or Jisei […] Sure there is some ‘appropriation’, but the reason for it is nostalgic, emancipatory, gender-affirming but also some artists felt there was a creative thread with cybergrind that was never fully played out in the 90s-’00’s. A lot of it is quite ‘feminine’, mixing (hyper)pop aesthetics in as a response to the toxic masculinity in a lot of metal and some feel cybergrind is a way of - as Haela of Liturgy put it - ‘feminising metal’. I expect some more old-school metalhead dudes would hate it».
Throughout this new wave of cybergrind there seems to be this overarching willingness to make the underlining queerness of Myspace/scene culture explode and spill over into a new-found gender radicalism. This makes cybergrind particularly relevant now: it bursts on the scene as a fresh aesthetic to escape straight white male modes of expression through inhuman blast beats and discover new forms of extremity. A journey outward that often also leads to interesting forms of political radicalism tout court.
In fact, it is not a rare thing to find new cybergrind bands that are openly anti-capitalist or anarchist – reviving the never-forgotten-but-also-seldom-mentioned tradition of cybergrind bands like Realicide, for example, that fused rave illegalism, digital hardcore anti-capitalist agit-prop and anarchist philosophy with grindcore. Even if the rest of the world seems to be getting more reactionary by the hour, cybergrind moves further and further left. Or as Xandra puts it: «in 2023 it feels like the leftism - albeit a more online leftism - of early grindcore is finally allowed to use a drum machine. Usually it’s focused around specific social justice projects rather than merely capitalism: trans liberation, critiques of masculinity, anti-racism, anti-ablism (especially mental health and neurodivergence) etc. However you do increasingly bump into a renewed anticapitalism as the gap between the rich and poor widen, welfare services are slashed, healthcare gets more inaccessible and general cost of living gets worse. However above all we are seeing a resurgence of fascist and reactionary ideology globally, and a lot of individuals in the cybergrind community - regardless if they belong to a minority or not - feel the need to fight back».
But there’s even more to it, I think. It is the sound itself of cybergrind that made it a thing in 2023. Let me be maximalist about it: the reason why cybergrind is having its little renaissance, mostly boils down to the fact that it capitalises on the very experimental nature of grindcore.
If you take an act like Blind Equation, for example, you’ll get what I mean. Blind Equation sounds extremely lo-fi, using a lot of poor or grating sounds. It swaps all classical rock instruments for 8-bit total destruction. Sometimes the song breaks down in sweet trap croons, but for the most part it is full-on synthetic grinding. Blind Equation feels like an uncategorizable bedroom project hellbent on destroying any and all canons and expectations, and this is a characteristic that unifies all new cybergrind. «Another interesting thing about cybergrind, being somewhat a form of electronic music, is that it’s fairly easy to make in your bedroom. It’s never been more expensive to be a touring/studio band and never been easier to record at home, so many bedroom projects are popping up where they do a light tour in neighbouring states. I’ve never met anybody from the cybergrind community face-to-face, but I think that’s a testament to how online and bedroomy it is, even with touring bands», notes Xandra, and that’s certainly what makes cybergrind so shocking (and successful in a terminally online way) in 2023. It sabotages the very fabric of metal music, and popular music as a whole too, and it does so in a way that is unabashedly fun, perplexing and unmarketable.
Whatever will be of cybergrind after 2023 is up in the air. Let’s hope it stays weird. Let’s hope it does not crystalize in some stable, predictable form. Keep on cybergrinding, you freaks.