Music family
Punk & Hardcore Music Genres
Explore punk, hardcore, and DIY scenes defined by urgency, independent networks, loud guitars, and direct social expression.
11 genre guides
1964Garage rock
A rough, fast-moving rock form from mid-1960s America, garage rock turns limited means into force: clipped chords, scraping guitars, and performances that feel one take away from falling apart. Its afterlife matters too, because later punk and revival scenes kept returning to that blunt, homemade electricity.
1970J-Punk
A broad umbrella tag for Japanese punk and punk-adjacent bands, useful for writing about the scene’s harder, poppier, and more garage-leaning branches without pretending they all sound the same.
1974Punk
A concise, evidence-based punk entry centered on the mid-1970s New York and London scenes, with examples drawn from official artist pages and canonical recordings.
1977Britpunk
A useful blog-facing tag for early British punk, but not a tightly standardized historical genre name.
1977Hardcore punk
A concise, source-grounded profile of hardcore punk that keeps the early U.S. scene, the DIY ethos, and the first-wave bands in view.
1980Crossover Thrash
A fast, hard-edged hybrid born from punk and metal trading blows in the 1980s U.S. underground.
1980Crust Punk
A raw UK-born punk-metal hybrid with a militant DIY streak and a grim, politically charged voice.
1984Emotional Hardcore (emo / emocore)
Emotional Hardcore, often abbreviated as emo or emocore, is a subgenre of hardcore punk characterized by its expressive, confessional lyrics and a focus on emotional expression. The music typically features dynamic shifts, combining melodic and aggressive elements, with an emphasis on personal and introspective themes.
View guide1994Spazzcore
A cautious update: spazzcore looks more like a listener-made umbrella label than a formally documented genre, so the record now emphasizes the best-supported bands, the chaotic aesthetic, and the uncertainty around its origin.
2004Crunkcore
A strongly internet-era fusion style that blurred screamo, crunk, and scene-pop into something garish, catchy, and polarizing. The label is real and documented, but its boundaries were always fuzzy, and the genre lived as much as a scene identity as a strict musical formula.
2007Afro-punk
Best treated as a cultural and scene-based label with punk at its core, not a tightly bounded genre definition.