I really don’t understand people who complain about bands being “formulaic”. Of course they are. That’s the whole point in listening to Death and Black Metal these days. It’s always been.
Think about the gym. You start lifting weights, you throw punches at a sandbag, you are not looking for a different experience every single time you go there to unleash your rage. You want the same movement, the same resistance, the same impact. You want something familiar that does its job. Being familiar with something that is supposed to release your energy is part of what this whole thing is about.
And when I say “the whole thing,” I mean every reflection of extreme metal that actually matters. Black metal, when it works, operates in mystical and esoteric terms: atmosphere, symbols, that sense of stepping into a ritual space where the same old elements are there for a reason. You’re “in the zone”, as you pump blood and breathe in and out. Death metal and Grindcore tend to operate on a similarly destructive pattern in their physical display of rage, the “body” music side of it, the part that pummels and churns. There are nearby genres that share blood with these, and plenty of little mutations and local dialects. But the core is the same. Different alphabet, similar goals.
People talk about “evolving” as if it’s some sort of moral duty. As if the genre owes anyone novelty. As if repetition is a defect rather than the mechanism.
Not really my point of view on this. Must be I live this music in a visceral way. Even if I wear glasses now, it doesn’t mean I am some sort of old school critic. This is, in my opinion, a genre built on recognizable shapes because those shapes are the point itself. They’re the conduit, the trigger that lets you switch the brain off and turn the engine on. That’s why any of us can listen to ten records that share a skeleton and still feel something real. The skeleton IS the tool.
The Grammar Holds: Mannerism, Metal, and the Myth of Novelty
I say it. Mannerism is king. And I mean that in the full art-historical sense. Mannerism is what happens when a tradition has fully matured: the grammar is so well established that the interesting work shifts from what to how. You’re not inventing the form anymore, we have plenty of bands that crashed against this wall in the mid ’90s.
You’re inflecting it. Every gesture becomes about refinement, exaggeration, stylization within a known framework. Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino weren’t rejecting the Renaissance. They were fluent enough in it to twist it, and the twist was only legible because the foundation was shared. That’s precisely the space extreme metal occupies now, and has occupied for decades. The riff vocabulary, the production aesthetics, the structural logic all of it is codified enough that the real artistry is in the execution: the weight, the angle, the small choices that separate a record that genuinely hits from one that merely goes through the motions.
It also reframes what originality even means in this context. In a Mannerist framework, originality is mastery expressed as personal signature. Which is actually a far more demanding standard than novelty, because you can’t hide behind the shock of the new: the execution becomes everything. And this is where modern music journalism often loses the plot.
A lot of it, especially the safe kind, the shitty big portals, big glossy publications, condescending toward music in a very specific way. It wants to grab everyone’s attention at once, so it overpraises anything that can be sold as “experimentation,” as if experimentation itself were a virtue that automatically upgrades the art. But the deeper problem isn’t that they just value novelty. Or at least what their search engines perceive as such.
They don’t have the vocabulary to evaluate craft within a tradition.
A critic who genuinely knew the genre could tell you why one so call formulaic or “mannerist” death metal record hits harder than another doing the exact same things, small variations of perception one just cannot come up with if they don’t get it. They default to novelty as a proxy for quality because it’s the only axis they actually understand. That, and checking lyrics and symbolism for trigger warning some current sensibility.
The journalistic bias toward experimentation is, at its core, a bias against Mannerism, against the idea that working within and refining a tradition can be just as serious, just as artistically meaningful, as breaking from it. Which is a historically illiterate position, but here we are.
In extreme metal (and more or less related), band does experiment but still works, it’s almost always because they haven’t actually abandoned the skeleton, they’ve just dressed it differently. The moment a band genuinely steps outside the grammar, the reaction is usually not excitement but disorientation, and not the good kind. The ritual has been interrupted rather than varied. One can certainly write a new language. Art is meant to upset and disturb in any way conventional or not. But one in a million makes it.
Might be worth mentioning that for some reason, cool journalists also often indulge a glaring double standard worth naming. “Formulaic” gets weaponized against extreme metal by people who’d never apply the same word to the blues, where repetition and formula are essentially sacred. The twelve bar structure, the bends, the call-and-response are treated as tradition worthy of reverence. The bias reveals itself pretty cleanly there.
The genre lives on repetition, energy, destruction, discipline, horror. The same outlet, because that outlet is what people came here for in the first place.
When someone says a band is formulaic, that “they all sound the same”, my first reaction is still the same: of course it is. That’s why it works.