(Andy Synn contemplates chaos, and genre tags, with the new album from Defacement)
The genre tag “Post-” – as in “Post-Rock”, “Post-Hardcore”, “Post-Black Metal”, etc – is one of the most maligned (and often misunderstood) terms in music (according to some of the comments I’ve seen, anyway).
The thing is, while the initial idea behind “Post-Rock” was to take the fundamental elements of the genre – the distorted, crunchy guitars, the heavy, hooky rhythms, the bombastic, larger-than-life melodies – and separate them from their traditional structures and conventional constraints, allowing for more expansion, more experimentation, and more dynamic depth (especially in terms of pushing the classic “quiet/loud” dynamic even further) that’s often not how the “Post-” prefix has come to be used in recent years.
Let’s face it, the term “Post-Hardcore” is often just as synonymous with “Melodic Hardcore”, while a lot of “Post-Black Metal” artists are just Black Metal bands stealing directly from the tropes of “Post-Rock” (or vice-versa), and too many people in general just seem to use the term “Post-” when they actually mean something like “Progressive”, “Atmospheric”, or “Avant-Garde” (and we can argue about what those terms mean another time).
So perhaps we need to think of another way to talk about a band like Defacement – who have been wilfully and unapologetically deviating from the formula since 2018 – that properly reflects their ongoing attempts to deconstruct extremity in order to let something new, or at least something else, fill the gaps.
