Emmure, deathcore extremism, and hitting the edgelord dead-end

The assassination of Charlie Kirk has infected every branch of American culture, and deathcore isn't immune to that brain sickness. Last week, Emmure frontman Frankie Palmeri did what he's famous for: proudly revealing himself to be a cruel, apathetic imbecile. In an essay-length screed of red-pilled drivel (and several day's worth of puerile follow-up posts), the 39-year-old deathcore vet decried those celebrating Kirk's death as terrorist sympathizers, positioning himself in staunch opposition to the uniquely American disease of anomic gun violence.

Then, like so many right-wingers who've opportunistically used Kirk's murder to whitewash his explicitly hateful legacy and cast themselves as moralistic superiors, Palmeri undermined his phony commitment to principled non-violence by aligning himself with Kirk's fascist vindicators. He retweeted a bunch of America-first Nazis who frame the country's political divide as a battle of "good vs. evil" and equate Antifa with Al-Qaeda. He doubled down on an older tweet revealing he "truly don't give a fuck about the Gaza situation." He retweeted another ethno-nationalist account promoting the opposition of "reckless third world migration." A few days later, Palmeri himself posted that anti-fascist protestors are "dysgenic freaks with no purpose. Just put them in the fucking ground."

Palmeri, who pays for a blue check to boost his posts on x.com, knew that these statements would court controversy. That's what he does best. Hordes of critics flooded his mentions to point out Palmeri's obvious hypocrisy. That this avowed pacifist is the same man who notoriously tried selling shirts emblazoned with actual school shooters and fictional Nazis. Who defiantly named a song "Bring a Gun to School" two years after that debacle. Who liberally threw slurs around in the 2010s, and is still making "hard r" jokes in 2025. Who's made a 20-year career out of screaming hypermasculine tirades into a microphone that are purportedly rooted in real-life violence, or at the very least play-acting real life violence.

Most metal music is fundamentally violent, and artists should always have the incontrovertible right to express violent ideas in their sound and lyrics. I, for one, encourage and celebrate violent music. Interestingly, Palmeri has mixed feelings about his own contributions to that form. In 2020, he tweeted: "Trust me when I say; I emotionally and spiritually reject almost every lyric I've ever written. It all stems from material pain, a fragile ego, an inability to cope. It's unfortunate anyone has ever identified with any of what I've said in my music. A lot [of] people are/were hurting."

It was a rare bout of public self-reflection from the career troll. One that reveals his demented misunderstanding of violence: that the vague, vindictive, fantastical violence in his lyrics is a symptom of a wider societal issue that he feels some degree of shame for expressing. However, the real-life violence that he advocates for against his political enemies is necessary and deserved. It's the very breed of cynical, ideological gibberish that sits at the heart of Trump-era conservatism, in which the right-wing reactions to Kirk's death so clearly epitomize. Violence is wrong and those who think otherwise should be met with violence. 2 + 2 = 5 (not to be confused with the most complicated guitar tab in Emmure's discography).

Palmeri is an archetypal millennial edgelord who, like any of his first-wave deathcore peers, had the opportunity to grow and change over the last 15 years. To disavow any of his extra-musical actions that muddied the lines between Emmure's artistic violence and his own personal affinity for using violence for attention. Instead, he's reached the logical conclusion of being a one-trick provocateur: filling his ideological void with reactionary hatred. Ironically, Palmeri's hypocrisy in a cultural and political landscape where hypocrisy no longer has any valence is exactly what makes Emmure one of the most prescient bands of the 21st century. Nothing has meaning. No action has consequences. Hope feels so distant. And Emmure's music is nothing but a container for misdirected anger. The narcotized thrum of brazen stupidity and sadistic evil.

The FBI recently created a new designation – Nihilistic Violent Extremist – to try and make sense of the influx of assassins and mass shooters like Tyler Robinson and Joshua Jahn, whose alleged motives are as inscrutable and fuzzily non-ideological as the online subcultures they were supposedly "radicalized" within. Nihilistic Violent Extremist is obviously a vague, desperate, and probably futile framework for trying to lump this new generation of murderers into the same category. Which is exactly what makes Nihilistic Violent Extremist so emblematic of this chapter in America's collapse. People have been dispossessed and neglected for so long that our culture of shootings now has its own genres and waves. This wave is characterized by a contradictory jumble of legitimate anger at a venal system and a demented ​cynicism to kill for the meme.

I thought it was striking to see Palmeri weigh in on this topic. Not because his position surprises me; I've seen his tweets enough times to know he's a deeply misinformed, deeply misanthropic person with terrible politics. It was striking because Emmure are the most Nihilistic Violent Extremist-coded band I can think of. Listening to an Emmure album, something I've done many times in my life, doesn't feel psychologically afar from replaying the Kirk shooting video on a loop. Their music, fiendish and blunt, has the effect of lulling you into a maladaptive trance that grinds down your amygdala until the shocking becomes the banal, even peacefully familiar. In Palmeri's lyrics, frivolous grievances are weighted equally with grave warnings. There's no nuance. No coherent ideology. No indication of when the fronting ends and the auto-biography begins. To me, scrawling "If you read this, you are gay lmao" on a bullet is spiritually Emmure.

Emmure aren't the most typical deathcore band. The genre, a bastardization of brutal death metal and beatdown hardcore that came to fruition in the mid-2000s, marked a pivotal shift in the sound and presentation of extreme music. This was a genre of metal that followed nu-metal's omnipresence on MTV, that arrived a decade after death metal's initial shock value had worn off, and that was brutalizing ears when thrash-metal had become as inoffensively quaint as so-called classic rock. Although deathcore was basically a simplification – a dumbing down, one might say – of traditional death metal, accessibility wasn't the goal, as was the case for metalcore during the same period.

Deathcore was a "fuck you" to extreme music in the way Jackass was a "fuck you" to television. Petulant. Tacky. Gleefully un-stylized. Unapologetically edgy. Sometimes brilliant in its moronic bluster. Mostly just moronic. To the extent that the second-wave black-metal bands had an ideology, as juvenile and undeveloped as it was, deathcore was never saddled with the same political baggage. Deathcore, in its most enduring incarnation (2006-2012), was the sound of American suburbia caving in on itself. The last feral cry of xillennial mall-punk culture before the malls became boarded up.

Death metal and black metal bands aim to bring their listeners into an atmosphere of evil. Deathcore has no atmosphere. It's less about evil than it is about wanton destruction for the sake of it. Because it's br00tal d00d. Heavy metal vandalism committed by plainclothes offenders in zip-up sweatshirts and black Vans. Playing two-chord breakdowns instead of 20-fret riffs. ​Flaunting two-inch gauged ears just to piss off moms. Hawking band t-shirts scrawled with vacant shock-jock innuendos that revel in coarse misogyny and lamebrained violence. It wasn't social commentary. It wasn't playful. It wasn't camp. It was, and is, as stupid and ugly as it looks. Emmure's music was some of the stupidest and ugliest. So simple and repetitive that even deathcore fans hated them for it.

Back when I was in high-school, the common metal nerd refrain about Emmure was, "well, anyone could do that." Maybe so, but Emmure actually did it. Shamelessly and prolifically, releasing an album nearly every year between 2007 and 2012, flooding the genre during deathcore's "golden" epoch. There was an attractive power in Emmure's elemental rage. Their music was to deathcore what powerviolence was to hardcore. An even more stripped-bare, strung-tight idiom that was initially subversive not for breaking rules, but for assigning rules to a lawless format. Emmure's guidelines were rigid: no guitar leads, no dynamic builds, and no forgiving clean sections. Just breakdown after breakdown. Open chord chug after open chord chug. Seething scream after seething scream.

In Emmure's most notable material, Palmeri alternately talk-raps and shrieks, his voice descending to an unsteady monotone – like a deadly serious Fred Durst – and then rising to a shrill caterwaul while the guitars panic and pulverize. Emmure's version of deathcore is reductive by design. They burglarize death metal for the easily pawnable jewels (impulsive fury, violent provocation) while totally disregarding the considerably more valuable, albeit cumbersome to steal, artifacts hanging on the parent genre's walls (songwriting craftsmanship, musical ability). That slapdash crudeness is the appeal of Emmure. And to be sure, Emmure's music is appealing in small doses.

Breakdowns are the musical backbone of deathcore, but there's more to Emmure's schtick than just endless breakdowns. Palmeri's lyrics aren't the typical deathcore fare of sophomoric slasher violence and vague anti-authoritarianism. They're candid vignettes of petty street beefs – maybe real, maybe imagined – and romances turned sour. "You're gonna die, and I'll be there in court to tell your mother why," Palmeri snarls in 2009's "Felony." In "Drug Dealer Friend," a grim highlight from 2011's Speaker of the Dead, he howls: "I want to watch you suck his dick/I know you fucking love it/Bitch."

That the guy firing off those noxious threats genuinely appeared to be a mean, anti-social person is what made Emmure's music seem, especially to a naïve teenager, convincingly dangerous. As an adult, I find Emmure nauseatingly bleak and suffocatingly one-dimensional. Listening for more two songs at a time feels like doom scrolling under the covers. Like living in a windowless apartment. The musical equivalent of a fatal vitamin deficiency. Knowing the person Palmeri grew into – or rather, refused to grow out of – all these years later makes it even sadder. He's one of the million Slim Shady's raised in the age of Eminem and Marilyn Manson, onetime world-class provocateurs who eventually ran their course musically and became caricatures of the tedious, ghoulish establishment they earned their credibility railing against.

Emmure suffered the same edgelord plight. They took their sneering deathcore bird-flips as far as they could go and then just kept going. After four albums of increasingly simplistic, repetitive deathcore vitriol, it became obvious that Emmure were out of ideas. Palmeri's edginess wasn't hitting like it used to as deathcore became more ​popular, more accessible, and less subversive. As their cultural purchase waned, Palmeri's pleas for attention became more desperate.

In 2012, Palmeri posted pre-orders for a new t-shirt company he was launching called Cold Soul. One shirt featured infamous camera footage of Columbine school shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold with the text "shoot first ask questions last." Another contained the brand's name over a screenshot from American History X where Edward Furlong's Nazi character blows cigarette smoke in a Black boy's face. The back text read, "violence as a way of life."

The Aurora Colorado theater shooting and the Sandy Hooky Elementary school massacre are just two of the many mass shootings that America suffered in 2012 alone. Palmeri's Cold Soul designs offered no condemnation or commentary on his country's culture of violence and racism. The only message was the very absence of a message. They exploited traumatic violence for cheap shock value. It's pure nihilistic drivel. The t-shirt equivalent of a deranged loner obsessed with edgy 4chan humor shooting ICE detainees with an "anti-ice" bullet clip. Now, our daily reality is as unintelligibly heinous as Palmeri's shirts. Emmure's music, in which extremity is reduced to monotony, is the perfect soundtrack.

One of the biggest tabloid stories when I was first getting into deathcore was the Emmure vs. The Acacia Strain beef. Palmeri supposedly had issues with Vincent Bennett, frontman of the slightly older deathcore band The Acacia Strain. Their animosity eventually came to blows during a backstage fight in 2009, and then both men went on record saying that the beef was squashed. From that point forward, the two bands charted very different paths, and where both deathcore stalwarts landed in the 2020s is very telling.

As Emmure's sound calcified in the 2010s, The Acacia Strain – whose oldest music predates Emmure's by several years – matured immensely over the next 15 years, taking on elements of doom, sludge, and hardcore. While Emmure mostly toured with aging deathcore and metalcore bands at a time when deathcore's relevancy had plummeted, The Acacia Strain stayed tapped-in to youth-driven undercurrents, touring and collaborating with hardcore bands and embracing the traditional death metal resurgence in the 2020s. Their hard work paid off. I can't think of another band from deathcore's first wave that's more relevant in 2025 than The Acacia Strain.

Meanwhile, Bennett – another video game-obsessed pessimist like Palmeri – is proof that you can simultaneously be a tortured person screaming in a​ violent band while also being a ​well-adjusted human. In 2020, he tweeted that people who "don't think black lives matter" aren't welcome in The Acacia Strain's fan base. The last three times I've seen them live, Bennett has taken time between songs to declare that Acacia Strain shows are a place where anyone – regardless of gender, race, or sexual orientation – can come to blow off steam. Their music is a pained howl at a world descending into fascist misery. Palmeri has now made it clear that Emmure's music is a celebration of the ruling class's fascistic death march. Breakdowns for bootlickers. Triggered drums for triggering the libs. Empty anger that subverts nothing.

The Acacia Strain's music is oppressively dark and violent, but like all great extreme metal bands, they harness that darkness to wield a sort of cosmic, life-affirming power. Even at their most miserable, The Acacia Strain's songs don't make me feel like I haven't seen the sunlight in 13 months. Part of that is because their music is considerably more interesting than Emmure's, and some of that is because I'm aware that the band's face isn't a malevolent chud. The dark irony is that in 2019, a mass shooter killed nine people during a shooting spree in Dayton, Ohio. The killer was wearing an Acacia Strain hoodie.

Bennett immediately expressed his shock and horror, including a note about how violent music should be a stopgap to real-life violence. "Music is an outlet. Music should purify," he tweeted. "Use art as a positive outlet to your negative emotions. If you feel angry - turn to music, turn to creation. This has to stop."

Earlier this week, Palmeri replied to someone calling him a hypocrite for writing "Bring a Gun to School" – a song that offers no legible criticism of gun violence, and which Palermi said was written precisely "to piss people off" – while having a meltdown over Kirk's death. "There's music, which is meant to be catharsis and a way to safely explore taboo/dark topics, and then there's real life," Palmeri tweeted. The day before, Palmeri described Portland citizens protesting Trump's federal guard deployment as "mutants" and "terrorists" who should be put "in the fucking ground." It's interesting that Palmeri views his song about mass shootings as an exploration of "taboo" topics that he doesn't actually condone, but finds proudly calling for the deaths of untold masses of people – ostensibly by shooting them – to be socially permissible.

These displays of moral rot and artistic degeneracy relegate Palmeri to the company of Falling in Reverse's Ronnie Radke and Attila's Chris "Fronz" Fronzak. Fellow trolls of the 2010s 'core landscape who've predictably embraced right-wing "anti-wokeness" in the 2020s, exposing their "joking" provocations for the vapid, downward-punching theatrics they always were. ​Palmeri responded to one of his recent Twitter critics with a thinly veiled transphobic comment, and Fronzak – a jaw-enhancing chewing gum entrepreneur and budding crypto peddler who's perhaps best known for coining the phrase "suck my fuck" and allegedly assaulting a teenager – was right there in the comments to pile on the transphobia.

This is the team heralding Kirk as a beacon of humanity and spirited democratic debate. Nihilistic, violent, extreme. The cold soul of America.