Hardcore music metaphorically choked on its own vomit in the early 1980s, when enough of the imitators had flooded the genre as to reduce its overall impact to that of an entropic flood of minimally-different bands. Those who still wished to stay apart from society, and make violent simple music, turned to grindcore, which adopted the same gruff vocals as death metal (two parts Lemmy from Motorhead, and one part Wattie from the Exploited) but like its parent genre, thrash, put metal riffs to use in punkish songs. The result was a fomenting blast of unrecognizable noise, and since that time, grindcore has had a following in those who would rather give society the finger. The first generation of grindcore was in lyrics almost a continuation of the more abstract punk, such as Discharge or Crass, and embraced populist politics, but later generations attacked with a hint taken from metal, and used the metaphor of death and decay, as did Carcass, Repulsion and Terrorizer, to describe the sensation if not the mechanism of failures seen in the social system. Many fans did not understand this method of communication, leading to an increasingly literalism in grindcore, at which point it had removed most of its mystique and was assimilated by either death metal or crossover hybrids like metalcore. Despite this, many grindcore bands found large fanbases in the 1990s because of the simplicity with which they delivered their fury; even if listeners did not necessarily respond to the lyrical content, they responded to the impact of sound.

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