The image above is from a japanese band called NOCTURNAL BLOODLUST (all in capital letters!). Their music is heavy. They make use of screams and breakdowns, as well as intercalated clean melodies. And they are a band that is part of the visual kei scene. And they are not the only ones who mix all of this.

But what visual kei is? Visual kei means literally “visual style”, coming from the union between the word “visual” with the japanese word “系 (kei)”, meaning style. Sometimes it is called Visual Rock or just V-Rock. Visual kei isn’t exactly a genre, but mostly a musical scene that covers a whole variety of bands that play from pop rock to deathcore. The scene’s obvious difference and that constitutes it as a scene is its visual/artistic appeal: very well produced customized clothes, heavy makeups, stylized haircuts, androgynous visuals, acting on stage, videos and photos.

Visual kei’s birth has to do with the glam wave in the USA, back in the 80’s. When the wave came to Japan, it was embraced by bands like X JAPAN, D’ERLANGER, DEAD END, BUCK-TICK, but this visual scene gained real commercial popularity in the 90’s, through bands already mentioned and with others like L’Arc~en~Ciel, Kuroyume, GLAY, Plastic Tree, Dir en grey and so on. In the last five or ten years, fans have been speculating the “death” of visual kei, being pointed out factors like the saturation of the scene and the lack of originality from bands, but the truth is the scene keeps itself very alive still nowadays, with bands being formed every day (this is almost literal, because there are much more visual kei bands than it’s possible to know), and some of them earned wide popularity in the last ten years: the GazettE, Versailles, D’espairsRay, DELUHI, MEJIBRAY, alice nine., An Cafe, lynch., DEATHGAZE, and many more.

Very well, then visual kei is just a musical scene that includes bands from several genres that have their visual as the only differential? Not exactly. The truth is that visual kei can be, in many points, seen as a synonym of musical freedom. In the text Crossfaith: the kings of electronicore, I talked briefly about how japanese musicians love musical experimentation, and this factor is a key element when talking about visual kei. Even though bands with an exactly innovative music aren’t always coming up, it’s very commom for a band to take elements from at least two music genres and incorporate them into their music, or to take a music genre and make music in a way little or never seen in the western scene, making the genre classification of that band a hard task. This point considered, visual kei is almost a genre itself, and it’s not really wrong to consider it that way.

If visual kei experiments with different sonorities, broading lots of genres, it couldn’t let metalcore outside. There are many bands that already experimented with metalcore elements, or even built their entire music with metalcore as a foundation. The point is, many times the music that comes as a result of that isn’t very similar to what can be heard from western bands, but the elements are there and are recognizable. Some bands, of course, follow the genre’s formula and differentiate themselves only for being visual kei.

There are bands that merge metalcore’s sound to their own in a very interesting way. It’s the case of girugämesh (ギルガメッシュ), a band that had an outstanding pass through the visual kei scene while they lasted.

NOCTURNAL BLOODLUST, first band cited on this text, takes elements both from metalcore and deathcore, defining itself as a definitely core band. An interesting fact about them is that they were initially a regular metalcore band, and only after they joined the visual kei scene.

There was a band that lasted from 2008 to 2011, which their disbandment left many broken hearts, that incorporated metalcore influences in a more subtle way to their music: DELUHI. With four talented musicians, their heavy sound doesn’t fit in a exactly way in any genre.

One of the most successful bands in Japan is the GazettE, having already more than ten years on the road, and having already flerted with many musical genres. Recently they produced songs that borrow many elements from metalcore, making something that could only be done by japanese musicians, for it can’t be taken as anything a western band would do inside metalcore.

There’s a band called Deviloof, which is proud of being the most heavy band on the visual kei scene, posssessing an undeniably deathcore sound. It’s definitely brutal, owing nothing to any big western deathcore band. And just like NOCTURNAL BLOODLUST, Deviloof was also a band outside of visual kei scene right at their start.

It’s impossible to write an article about metalcore inside visual kei scene without talking about DADAROMA, one of the most successful band of the last years. If fans felt that the scene was saturated, DADAROMA managed to break this thought with its first ever video, bringing all their musicians’s skills, merging elements from metalcore and even some from deathcore.

It’s worth mentioning Signal, a band that said goodbye in 2013, leaving behind a career full of heavy and well executed songs.

Those are only some of the visual kei bands that incorporate metalcore elements to their music. There are many, many more that can be discovered through YouTube on in the Monochrome Heaven forum, one of the best specific forums I ever had the pleasure to join and spend hours exchanging ideas and talking non-sense.