Djent — The Remainder Engine — Post-Prog-Metal

Djent — The Remainder Engine

A riff ends when the phrase runs out, not when its cycle does, and the leftover is the sound. Djent runs an odd-length rhythmic cycle against a steady 4/4. Its signature hiccup comes where the phrase trims or stretches that cycle to fit.

A word its inventors apologize for

• Meshuggah's own account is a joke at their expense. Mårten Hagström (2018) tells it this way: Fredrik Thordendal, drunk, imitated the band's palm-muted tone for a fan as a repeated “dj-dj-dj”, and the fan asked whether it was a Swedish word. “A drunk misunderstanding, as always with Meshuggah.” Blabbermouth's headline for the same interview: “We're very sorry for creating that genre… our bad.”
• Its main popularizer calls it a technique. Misha Mansoor posted “djenty” clips on the Meshuggah forum, which is where he met Acle Kahney and John Browne. He calls djent “a technique that makes it sound more metallic, let's say.” Periphery released Periphery V: Djent Is Not a Genre in March 2023. Tosin Abasi is more relaxed: “I think people need to call things stuff.”
• The scene, with years: After the Burial's Rareform (2008); Animals as Leaders' debut and Born of Osiris's A Higher Place (2009); Periphery's debut and Veil of Maya's [id] (2010); TesseracT's One, Vildhjarta's Måsstaden and Uneven Structure's Februus (2011); Monuments' Gnosis (2012). SikTh and Textures, both debuting in 2003, are the usual precursors. Mark Marrington names SikTh alongside Meshuggah in The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music (2023).

The remainder, measured

• Pieslak named the texture in 2007. In “Re-Casting Metal: Rhythm and Meter in the Music of Meshuggah” (Music Theory Spectrum 29/2), guitars and bass play the odd grouping while “the pedal bass (kick) drum doubles the guitar and bass rhythms, the cymbals maintain a consistent quarter-note pulse.” His term for it is metric superimposition. Capuzzo's follow-up, “Rhythmic Deviance in the Music of Meshuggah”, is also in Music Theory Spectrum (40/1, 2018).
• The arithmetic is short and decisive. A 4/4 bar holds 16 sixteenths. An odd cycle of c sixteenths shares no factor with 16, so it first realigns with the bar after 16 × c sixteenths, which is exactly c bars. A 7-sixteenth riff realigns after 7 bars, a 5 after 5, a 13 after 13. So an odd cycle is never home at the end of a 4- or 8-bar phrase; the first time it lands on a 4-bar line is after 4 × c bars, which is 28 bars for a 7.
• So the phrase adjusts the last cycle, and you can hear the adjustment. In “Stengah”, five 11-eighth cycles plus a sixth cut to nine fill 64 eighths, exactly eight bars. “Rational Gaze” goes the other way: four measures of 25/16 and a fifth stretched to 28/16 make 128 sixteenths, again eight bars. Either way the remainder is audible: the riff disagrees with the bar about when to end, and the bar wins.
• Letting the cycle finish is the rarer, stranger choice. Pieslak notes that the 25/16 cycle of “Rational Gaze” would have to be “repeated sixteen times”, 25 bars, to realign on its own; the band settles it at eight instead. Part 3 goes the other way and lets the cycle run.
• Bodies can lock to either clock. In Capuzzo's example from a live performance of “Perpetual Black Second”, the guitarists and bassist headbang on beats 1 and 3 while the vocalist headbangs with the start of each riff statement. The band itself splits between the two clocks.

Thall, the colder branch

• Vildhjarta have never defined their word. The line that circulates, “I'm bound by the law to inform you thall is thall,” is a fan's paraphrase of the band's reply, and the blogger who looked into it concluded “it has no meaning.” The World of Warcraft etymology is an unconfirmed fan theory.
• Calle Thomér calls thall “djent's colder younger brother” and describes the method rather than the name: “It's like building a puzzle more than writing a riff,” and “I try to mimic robots playing guitar. It's supposed to sound like a machine.” Guitar World describes melancholic cleans and winding, seemingly random riffs over neck-breaking chugs, with pick scrapes, whammy effects and harmonics.

The production is part of the instrument

• Four takes of the same riff. Quad-tracking puts two takes hard left and right and two panned tighter, and builds density out of the tiny differences between performances. Sound on Sound documents it as standard modern-metal practice, along with DI recording and reamping.
• The silence is engineered. Gates are keyed from the clean DI rather than the distorted signal, because a high-gain signal cannot tell sustain from noise (Fortin). Mark Mynett keys drum gates from sample copies nudged about 10 ms early so no transient gets clipped. The gaps between chugs are part of the riff, and they have to be dead silent.
• The boost works as a filter. Sound on Sound documents an Ibanez TS808 run at minimal gain in front of the amp purely to cut the lows and add a little compression. It tightens the sound rather than distorting it.
• The bass is split in two. Adam “Nolly” Getgood describes blending the clean DI back under the distorted signal to “keep the grind and the attack of the distortion” while getting “the nice, rich, clean fundamental tone as well.” On Periphery II a Darkglass pedal with its own blend control made a separate clean track unnecessary.
• The kick has to click. Mynett places the click around 4 kHz or 8 kHz and says the higher band “often needs to be dialled in to provide maximum clarity for fast double-kick performances.” GetGood Drums was founded by Nolly and Periphery's Matt Halpern.
• The tools arrived with the scene: Fractal's Axe-Fx in 2006, the Kemper Profiler at NAMM 2011, and Neural DSP's first Archetype plug-ins (Plini in April 2019, Nolly that September). One pitch fact is worth keeping to hand: a standard eight-string's F♯1 is 46.25 Hz, which is above a bass's open E at 41.20 Hz.

Short form: