There is a lot to admire about Metalcore’s longevity as the spearhead of the mainstream end of Metal. Each of the other leading Rock/Metal subgenres that had their turn in the sun celebrated a much shorter, brighter burn as the leading light. Heavy Metal dominated the early eighties, before Thrash seized the throne in 1986, only to be replaced by Grunge five years later, which in turn was bumped by Nu-Metal in a relative heartbeat in the mid-nineties. Yet, if we take Alive Or Just Breathing (Roadrunner) as a yardstick (and some of us old bastards still prefer to think of metalcore in its original form, and acts such as Earth Crisis, Crisis and bands without the word crisis in their name, such as Integrity have had to accept the term has been stolen from us), Metalcore has headed things up for over fifteen years.
