5 Essential Albums from Grindcore Karaoke

At the end of the first decade of the 2000’s, musicians across the world witnessed the exponential growth and expansion of the now highly influential and polarizing website, Bandcamp, which enabled easier music hosting and artistic accessibility than ever. Paralleling the expansion of this new digital platform and the great migration from sites such as Myspace towards it, was the proliferation and prevalence of “net-labels”: labels dedicated solely to the digital hosting of music from different artists and bands.

Spearheading this phenomenon, and arguably the most influential to do it, was Jay Randall of Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s, Grindcore Karaoke, a free download, Bandcamp hosted net-label that was active from 2011 to 2014 before reopening as a subscription based service in June of 2020. With over 500 plus releases, Grindcore Karaoke was committed to the mass uploading and distribution of some of the internet’s most extreme and bizarre music, specializing in genres such as harsh noise, powerviolence, and grindcore, as well as experimental electronics.

Grindcore Karaoke was not just an umbrella home for extreme artists and bands, it acted as a rich digital library of some of the Web’s most niche and outsider music and sounds. As much of a novel digital age feat in and of itself, it also was and still is an important archive of challenging and unusual audio that undoubtedly served as a point of entry to extreme music and art for many internet savvy young people scouring for new music.

A microcosm of the extreme and experimental music scene, Grindcore Karaoke persists onward and many of its releases are still solely available on its platform. Here are five of the best albums from one of the internet’s most unique and influential labels.

Hoglust - Support Hate

A superb Grindcore Karaoke kickoff point, and “must-be-included” recommendation from a good friend, Hoglust’s Support Hate is a five-and-a-half minute, straight-to-the-point grinding powerviolence album featuring dual vocals, fast punk riffs, and blasts that doesn’t shirk on its moshy and dancey moments. Teeth grating, angry music perfectly geared up for repeated listening. 

CUSTODIAN - Time Folds Upon Itself

Those steeped in knowledge of the brutal death and grind scene may be familiar with the band Foetopsy. However, did they know their drummer had a noise project? Custodian’s Time Folds Upon Itself is harsh and unrelenting, a truly cruel and unfairly gnarly harsh noise album filled with soaring feedback and glitching low end. Not only a strong noise release on Grindcore Karaoke, but a great entry track for those interested in exposure to harsh noise. 

I Know It’s Over - I Know It’s Over EP

Completely bonkers mathcore and still one of the best of its genre heard to date. I Know It’s Over’s Self-Titled EP explodes with pinball machine guitar leads, freakish drumming that moves from breakdowns to light speed blasts, rhythm guitar playing that at times doesn’t even sound like guitars, grounding, technical bass lines, and shrieks, growls, moans and wails spanning the full vocal spectrum. As hypnotic as it is crushing. A shining star in the expansive Grindcore Karaoke discography. There could be an entire article about this sole release.

False Light - False Light

Powerviolence and sludge. Two great tastes that go great together. False Light’s Self-Titled is a stand out release on Grindcore Karaoke for its gritty guitar tones and crunchy low end which interplay fabulously, creating rumbling soundscapes of lumbering feedback and string rattling low end. A completely spiteful sounding EP, False Light’s tasteful juxtapositions of fast and slow enhances every track on this release.

Limbs Bin / Sangre Y Tierra - The Call of Death is a Call of Love

The Limbs Bin and Sangre Y Tierra split EP, The Call of Death is a Call of Love, is versatile and subversive, and a great example of the sonic diversity Grindcore Karaoke attracts. Sangre Y Tierra kicks the split off with a haunting acoustic track blended with ambient noise (it works better than you’d think) followed by an eerie, forward thinking raw black metal track. Limbs Bin arrives and delivers two disgusting, noisy remixes of digital noisecore sure to ruin any stereo system.