The Influence of Djent on Newly Emerging Styles of Music

This video is about the ways in which an underground style of progressive metal called “djent” is influencing newer trends in music. The video briefly overviews the history of djent, its characteristics, and then discusses the ways in which djent is currently inspiring newly evolving trends.

Hey, I’m Cole Krasznay and I’m a Music Technology major at George Mason University. Today I’m going to be talking about a style of progressive metal called “djent”. I am going to explain what it is, some of its background and how it is already inspiring new trends in music, mostly metal, but also some other interesting styles of music. The two most notable characteristics of djent involves its use of complex rhythm and the way the guitars sound tonally.

Typically a lot of rock music utilizes some sort of polyrhythm occasionally (such as 4:3 polyrhythms), djent deploys polyrhythms in a more complex manner almost constantly within their works.

In terms of guitar tone in rock and metal, it isn’t necessarily news to people that this kind of music has heavily distorted guitars, but it is the way in which djent uses rhythm and the type of guitar tone that is achieved in it that has brought so much attention to this style and helped it sort of catch on in the metal community.

Let’s go back to 1995, which is when the Swedish metal band Meshuggah released their second album “Destroy Erase Improve.” In this album, we hear crazy polyrhythms, even what sounds like multiple time signatures happening at once at times which many call polymeter, and this very punchy and bassy guitar tone that no one had ever really heard before. It was controlled but also chaotic and very experimental sounding.

In 2002, Meshuggah release there album Nothing, which had a bit more high-quality sound to it… the guitar tone was a bit more refined, more compressed, and even bassier sounding… they do a little bit more single note stuff where it isn’t as focused on doing power chords the whole way through like their previous album. Some people say it has more groove and is less rigid sounding in terms of rhythm as well, with songs of theirs like Rational Gaze.

The term djent was initially being used in attempt to describe that kind of rough palm muting sound that these band members were trying to explain…

…but recently, I’ve been hearing more and more djent sounding music that, is sort of like djent, but doesn’t contain all of the features of it, whether that be the instrumentation or the rhythmic style not being as flashy and experimental.

Some of these examples include songs like F U from Sordid Pink, where it instantly starts off with that really high-gain sound that’s so blatantly characteristic of the djent guitar timbre, but as the song progresses, it sort of has this shuffle beat like rhythm as opposed to the complex rhythmic style typically heard in djent. It’s kind of a like a popularized djent rock approach that, is actually quite good sounding and well balanced in terms of the songs features. Another interesting adaptation of this style comes from the band Northlane and their song Echo Chamber. This song starts off sounding like a straight EDM or Electronic Dance Music song. All the sudden the bass guitar and drums come in and it has sort of an EDM / rock sound to it, with the drums keeping a four-on-the floor back beat drum groove. It isn’t ’til around half way through the song where the guitar really opens up, and it has that familiar djent tone that people are really starting to get used to hearing in modern rock and metal productions..

So that’s a couple of examples of how the djent guitar tone is being refashioned in newer musical pieces, let’s now talk about some ways in which I hear certain rhythmic and compositional trends trickling their way into some other genres of music. Let’s start with the song Crazy Tweaks made by GEM. This song is all over the place in terms of rhythm but has that common time signature or 4/4 like approach where it’s mostly just syncopation and the way the music that’s phrased that makes it sound rhythmically complicated or polymetric in some way. There is a part in particular that sort of drones or anchors heavily around a particular note on the lower end of the piano that sounds allusive to or quite borrowed from djent. Another song that really stuck out to me is a song called Levitation 21 by Tigran Hamasyan. We have a part that’s similar to GEM’s Crazy Tweaks where a part of the song similarly anchors itself around certain notes in the same way djent does.

There+M51s one more song I want to mention and its a song called Cocoon by Richard Henshall. Richard is the guitarist, pianist and vocalist in the album that this song comes from. It seems to have much more of a fusion-like approach in the way that he mixes heavy djent like guitar riffs (with both the rhythm and timbre of djent) with these sections of keyboard synthesizers and utilization of drone-like and repetitive djent style sounds without any guitar riffs what-so-ever (at those sections). The song also features bass guitar, drums (played in varying fashions from a light jazz/fusion manner to a heavy backbeat djent style where the bass drum follows the melodic line of the guitars) and even a guest saxophone player! The song has very improvisatory like jazz piano sections and other moments where the song is very dense and very progressive metal-like. The entirety of the song has a focus on interesting rhythmic phrasing in some way or another. This song is important because it synthesizes all of the different styles that I have mentioned up to this point.

Based on the evidence I have found throughout my research, it would seem like the world of jazz, fusion and djent is merging together to create something new. There seems to be a divergence between the rhythmic style and tone of djent, but also a sort of repurposing of these characteristics that recombine these characteristics in new and interesting ways never done before, whether it be the instrumentation or compositional approaches that these artists are taking to do so.

Thank you very much for watching.