Although the metal world has somewhat opened up to newcomers and outsiders over the last decade, for most of its existence, the subculture was gate-kept by self-appointed arbiters of “real metal” and “true fans.” These Comic Book Guys in jean jackets wanted to keep their fandom pure, which usually meant they only wanted to surround themselves with other ugly white guys in jean jackets. Safe spaces, right? I’ll bet the first time a girl was asked to “name three songs,” she was wearing an Iron Maiden shirt.
In the subculture down the street, hardcore punks kept things similarly closed out. Like the metalheads, they liked loud guitars, insane BPMs, shouted vocals, and lyrics about depressing shit. Also, they didn’t get any pussy either. The only true difference between punks and metalheads is that punks shaved their hair every couple days, and metalheads never got haircuts at all. Other than that, they were the same. And they HATED each other.
Luckily musicians aren’t as prejudiced as their fans, and some time around the mid-eighties the punks started mixing their chocolate with the metalheads, and the metalheads started mixing their peanut butter with the punks. And that’s how hardcore punk bands like Black Flag and The Cro-Mags, by the 1990s, had morphed into POST-hardcore bands like Helmet and Quicksand.
Quicksand’s Slip is absolutely an album of its time, in that it sounds like a lot of other turn-of-the-1990s New York hardcore albums: tight, noisy, swaggering, macho. But Slip would have a surprisingly long tail, as it was a foundational template for a commercial behemoth like Deftones a half decade later. Deftones kept Quicksand’s dynamics and drop D guitars, and swapped Quicksand’s aggro singer Walter Schreifels for the more melodramatic and tortured Chino Moreno. That’s right, a grunge singer. Add a turntablist and voila: nu-metal. That’s how a new genre is born.