Dance Metal
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Dance metal builds heavy guitar music around club rhythm, fusing four-on-the-floor kick patterns, pumping sidechained synths and EBM-style basslines to distorted down-tuned riffs so the songs are engineered to move bodies on a floor. The groove is mechanical and danceable rather than swung, snares crack on the backbeat over relentless 128-150 BPM kicks, and arrangements lean on stomping verse-chorus hooks, shouted gang vocals or barked half-clean leads, and synth stabs that double the riff. Production is loud, compressed and percussive, splitting the difference between a metal mix and a techno banger with bright top end and a punchy, quantized low end.
History
The danceable strain of heavy music emerged from late-'90s industrial-metal groove: Static-X dubbed their 1999 debut Wisconsin Death Trip 'evil disco,' welding Ministry's machine pulse to a stomping four-on-the-floor on 'Push It,' while Germany's Neue Deutsche Härte (Rammstein, Oomph!) made metal you could march and dance to. The EBM/aggrotech scene then pushed it onto literal dancefloors - Combichrist's 'Get Your Body Beat' (2006) bridged club and metal-festival stages - and Hanzel und Gretyl and Rob Zombie kept the strut alive. The 2010s saw electronicore and synth-driven metalcore inherit the four-on-the-floor drop, and the tag now spans festival main-stages and goth clubs alike.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Wikipedia: Push It (Static-X song)
- Wisconsin Death Trip (album)
- Wikipedia: Get Your Body Beat (Combichrist)
- What the Fuck Is Wrong with You People?
- Loudersound: Static-X 'Push It' - the story of the song ('evil disco')
- Wikipedia: Hellbilly Deluxe (Rob Zombie)
- Neue Deutsche Härte overview