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Featured Album
Masters of Morbidity (2022)
Featured Power Metal Album
No Grave But The Sea (Deluxe Edition) (2017)
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Featured Melodic Death Metal Album
Everything's Wrong (2018)
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Browse World Metal Bands
7 bands found
August Burns Red became one of metalcore's defining technical bands by making precision feel physical. Their breakthrough run through Messengers and Constellations set the template: fast-picked melodic guitar lines, restless rhythmic shifts, tightly plotted breakdowns, and drumming from Matt Greiner that treats each song like a moving architecture of accents, fills, and sudden turns. Jake Luhrs' vocals give the music a hoarse, urgent center, while guitarists JB Brubaker and Brent Rambler build riffs that often move from bright lead patterns into crushing, syncopated weight. The band kept stretching that approach on Leveler, Rescue & Restore, Found in Far Away Places, Phantom Anthem, Guardians, and Death Below, adding progressive structures, guest vocals, orchestral colors, and darker atmosphere without losing the focused aggression that made them stand out. August Burns Red are also unusual for how little they rely on clean-chorus formulas; melody usually comes from the guitars, not a softened hook. Their catalog is heavy, intricate, and disciplined, but it still feels designed for a room full of bodies moving in time with every stop, surge, and collapse.
Kill The Lights formed in 2019 as a Welsh-American heavy metal and metalcore group led by musicians with deep histories in modern heavy music. Former Bullet for My Valentine drummer Michael "Moose" Thomas began the project after wanting to return to a heavier, more organic style, bringing together players connected to bands including Throw The Fight, Still Remains, Threat Signal, Glamour of the Kill, and later Bullet for My Valentine bassist Jason James. The band debuted with "The Faceless," introducing a sound built on sharp riffing, double-kick drive, melodic choruses, and a clear affection for mid-2000s metalcore and classic heavy metal. Their first album, The Sinner, arrived in 2020 and established the group's mix of aggression and accessible hooks. Death Melodies followed in 2024, expanding the guitar work, vocal range, and darker melodic atmosphere. Kill The Lights stands apart through experienced musicianship: the songs are compact and hook-conscious, but the arrangements keep a strong metal focus through fast leads, breakdowns, and muscular rhythm-section work.
Killswitch Engage are the band that brought metalcore to the mainstream, forming in Westfield, Massachusetts in 1999 and essentially codifying the genre's blueprint of melodic singing over crushing breakdowns. Albums 'Alive or Just Breathing' and 'The End of Heartache' are canonical metalcore records, with both vocalist eras (Jesse Leach and Howard Jones) producing essential material. Their cover of Dio's 'Holy Diver' became an unlikely hit, and their influence on every metalcore band that followed is beyond calculation.
Skarlett Riot are a Scunthorpe heavy rock band built around the voice and guitar presence of Chloe "Skarlett" Drinkwater, with Danny Oglesby, Luke Oglesby, and later Tim Chambers helping push the group toward a heavier, more modern metal sound. The band began after its members met at school, first working under another name before adopting Skarlett Riot and releasing early EP material in 2010. Their debut album Tear Me Down established a melodic hard-rock foundation, while Regenerate moved them into darker, sharper alternative metal territory. Invicta and Caelestia expanded that direction with heavier riffs, bigger choruses, and more prominent metalcore textures. Skarlett Riot's music is driven by contrast: polished vocal hooks and anthemic melodies set against thick rhythm guitars, electronic accents, and breakdown-ready dynamics. Their appeal rests in that balance between accessible modern rock songwriting and a muscular metal backbone, making them fit comfortably alongside contemporary melodic metal and hard-rock festival lineups.
The Amity Affliction made their name by pairing metalcore's physical force with choruses designed for collective release. Joel Birch's screamed vocals carry the band's most recognizable emotional weight, often circling addiction, depression, grief, suicidal ideation, and the exhausting work of staying alive. That directness has been present from early records such as Severed Ties and Youngbloods through the breakthrough weight of Chasing Ghosts and Let the Ocean Take Me, where clean vocal hooks and bleak verses became inseparable parts of the same language. Later albums expanded the formula in different directions: This Could Be Heartbreak emphasized large melodic refrains, Misery experimented with electronics and moodier pacing, and Not Without My Ghosts pulled the band back toward heavier, more anguished metalcore. Their songs often rely on contrast rather than surprise, setting bright, mournful melodies against down-tuned guitars, rolling drums, and breakdowns that feel like emotional collapse made physical. The Amity Affliction's durability comes from that balance: they can write accessible songs without sanding away the despair, and they can hit hard without losing the wounded human center of the music.
Until I Wake are a Buffalo, New York metalcore and post-hardcore band formed in 2019, combining melodic hooks, polished production, and heavy breakdowns in a modern active-rock-facing style. The band began with Cody Jamison, August Geitner, Ryan Ridley, and Alex Curtin, later signing with Fearless Records and releasing an early self-titled EP before the full-length Inside My Head. Songs such as Nightmares, Octane, Forsaken, and Messenger show a group focused on emotional accessibility without giving up metalcore's punch. Their music often alternates between clean vocal choruses, screamed peaks, tight guitar chugs, electronic accents, and lyrics about anxiety, betrayal, self-doubt, and mental pressure. Until I Wake are part of a contemporary wave of bands that sit between post-hardcore melody and streaming-era metalcore production, making songs that can work in heavy playlists and radio-adjacent spaces. The band's lineup changes, including a later vocal shift, have altered its presentation, but the core idea remains clear: direct songs with enough heaviness for core audiences and enough melody for broader rock listeners. Until I Wake matter because they represent Buffalo's newer heavy scene in a polished form, turning personal strain into concise, forceful, hook-centered metalcore.
Your Spirit Dies are a Columbia, South Carolina metalcore band whose music looks back to the metallic hardcore and melodic death metal collision of the early 2000s while keeping a contemporary hardcore urgency. The band works in a style where sharp tremolo lines, mosh-ready breakdowns, desperate vocals, and melancholy guitar harmonies are all part of the same emotional vocabulary. Releases such as The Process of Grief and My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest present a group interested in grief, spiritual exhaustion, memory, and the physical release of heavy music. The songs often feel like they are moving between mourning and violence: melodic passages carry sadness, then the drums and guitars drop into sections built for full-room impact. Your Spirit Dies are part of a younger wave of bands reviving classic metalcore's emotional and metallic side without treating it like costume nostalgia. The production is clear enough to show the riffs, but not so polished that the hardcore edge disappears. Their appeal is in sincerity and force. The band sounds less like it is chasing a trend than trying to make inner collapse useful, turning pain into tightly arranged, pit-ready metalcore with a strong regional underground identity.
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World Metal Index is an index of World heavy metal bands — death metal, black metal, thrash metal, doom metal, metalcore, hardcore punk, and all heavy music. Browse bands by genre, find metal concerts near you, and discover the World metal scene.