Mathematical screaming: A playlist of songs that fuse the related genres of screamo and math rock

Although this fact is somewhat more obscure in recent times, it is true that math rock and screamo (screamo is sometimes also known as “skramz”; the two are synonymous) are closely related as genres. Math rock is the somewhat older cousin: genuine “math rock” music emerged some time in the late 1980s, the bastard child of hardcore punk (or rather, post-hardcore) and a… disputed second parent, who was probably related to “prog rock” or similar. Screamo, on the other hand, is somewhat younger, emerging roughly half a decade later, within the first half of the 1990s. Screamo, too, is closely related to post-hardcore, although the relationship is even tighter, as screamo is no bastard child; most consider screamo to be a proper subgenre of post-hardcore.

Arguably, screamo and math rock grew apart as they matured. Screamo has tended to fuse with elements of post-rock (heightening its melodrama and its already complex/unusual song structures) and elements of metal-derived genres like black metal, metalcore, &c. (heightening its brutality). Meanwhile, math rock became even more instrumentally-focused — with very many math rock acts lacking vocals entirely — and, in some cases, has mellowed out its sound, with less distorted guitars, in favor of more clean and clear sounds. Although math rock, like screamo, has also been a great friend of post-rock, the fusion of math rock and post-rock has typically been done to achieve different musical goals.

Nevertheless, the kinship of these two genres persists through the present day, and many bands have fused the two genres to great effect. The purpose of this playlist is to catalogue examples of these fusions, with the limitation that at most one song per artist is allowed.

N.B.: Two of the entries in this playlist (Drive Like Jehu’s “New Math” and Clikatat Ikatowi’s “Affirmation”) are not usually considered to be “screamo” proper. Their presence within this playlist is due to their (and, as a whole, the San Diego post-hardcore scene’s) large influence on the development of both math rock and screamo, and their fusion. Perhaps “proto-screamo” is a more palatable term.

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