Top 10 Best Scottish Underground Metal Bands, According to Homegrown Grindcore Guru Chairmaker
If you aren’t listening to Chairmaker, then seriously, what are you doing with your life? If you missed the Scottish grindcore multi-instrumentalist Neil Erskine’s fiery installment in The Bad Penny‘s ongoing On Tyranny series late last year, go read it now and then heave your rear end back over to this page to consume our second feature involving the bloke with the most.
Still hyping his scintillating, breathtaking and euphorically exhausting LP from last year, Leviathan Carcass, Erskine did The Bad Penny another solid by taking a respite from his dedicated mission to destroy every eardrum on the planet to share what he considers to be the best bands that his Scotland homeland has to offer.
(Erskine also obliged us by taking a break from mixing the debut album by his new death-metal band, Suffering Rites, with Black Sun frontman Kev Hare. Expect that release to hit the racks early next year.)
Enjoy the read, because if you don’t, either he or The Bad Penny will hunt you down and set you straight.
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Coffin Mulch
Glaswegian Buzzsaw champs with a borderline theological commitment to DIY ethics. For fans of Asphyx and early Entombed. Music that could not be more suited to vinyl or cassette. Both the Septic Funeral EP and Spectral Intercession LP are great, but if you fancy something a bit different, there’s also a collaborative release with Mick Harris called In Dub. Vocalist Al runs the At War With False Noise label, which is a one-stop shop for horrible music from Scotland (and elsewhere).
Broken Oath
Seminal Glasgow hardcore band that has recently made a long-overdue comeback. Very much a slowed-down Slayer with loads of beatdowns and gang vocals at the end of the hardcore spectrum. They have two LPs, Blood Cleanse the Streets and Given Half a Chance. Both are great, but the production is a lot more polished on the latter, so you might want to start there. Or on the former, if rawness is more your thing. Drummer Ali Walker is in about 40 other bands you can probably chase down via Metal Archives, and every one of them is great. The bastard.
Gendo Ikari
Precision grindcore. A little hard to pin down but perhaps best likened to Discordance Axis or Agoraphobic Nosebleed. You can decide for yourself. They’ve issueed a few releases, including the album Rokubungi, which is 25 minutes of satisfyingly varied, scalpel-sharp riffs and screeching. In an excitedly rare feat for grindcore, it has bass parts mixed sufficiently that you can hear on pretty much any playback system. Imagine!
Ashenspire
An avant-garde black metal project that, perhaps surprisingly, is the most overtly Scottish-sounding band on my list due to the clearly enunciated vocals. Musically very dissonant, a quality that’s usually exaggerated by the clarity of the guitars and the interwoven violins, saxophones, piano and dulcimer. These all appear in far more flowing and less contrived ways than this sort of stuff, which usually turns up as garbage “jazz interludes” in metal. Fans of A Forest of Stars will surely love them, but fans of A Forest of Stars probably already know who they are. I’m fucked if I can suggest any other obvious comparanda. Just give the album Hostile Architecture a listen.
Scordatura
I’ve covered an old-school death metal band, so here’s a distinctly modern-sounding one. Reminiscent of Suffocation, self-titled era Cryptopsy and Cephalic Carnage. Been on the go for 20 years, presumably having started when they were all about 10, because I’m sure they’re all much younger than me. Start with their 2026 album, Led into Oblivion.
Black Sun
Jaggy* and bleak-as-fuck sludge. They sit somewhere between Godflesh, Amebix and Swans. Most of their releases are probably tough to track down, but the most accessible one (to locate, not to actually listen to) is their final album, Twilight of the Gods, from 2010. It has the bonus of featuring Oxbow’s Eugene Robinson on a couple tracks. Nowadays, Kevin Hare (vocals/guitar) runs Deep Storm Productions, a cool residential studio that has been churning out amazing records too.
Internet dictionaries want to claim jaggy is synonymous with prickly, which it can be in Scots’ usage, but I use it here in its more aggressive sense, where the sensation is less brushing your fingers against a rose stem and more like getting repeatedly jabbed in the ribs with a chisel.
Lesser Beings
A little hard to pin down genre-wise. The vocals and beatdowns probably make them sit best on a metallic hardcore playlist, but there are a lot of sludge and D-beat touches, and even some staccato noise-rock moments. Representative of Scottish metal’s incestuousness, especially anything hardcore-adjacent from Glasgow, there are crossovers galore here. Two of Lesser Beings used to be in Coffin Mulch, and vocalist Lev’s other bands Hard Stare, No Known Weakness and Kingpin could all also easily be on this list.
Endless Swarm
Edinburgh-based powerviolence with Spazz-esque shared vocals. Frantic and pissed off. The Tetsuo-inspired The Body Hammer LP is your best starting point, I think, but they’ve put out another two albums and a whole bunch of splits (check out in particular the one with Gets Worse. Their appearances on tributes are also worth perusing.
Co-Exist
Extremely confrontational grind stalwarts that were delivering punishing music to kids in Glasgow when most of them were probably only listening to Korn at home. This was in large part due to Quzzy (sadly, RIP 2021), who was Glasgow’s friendliest drummer and the most welcoming champion of the scene you could imagine. One-time vocalist Dawson is producing awesome noise stuff these days as Pripyat, which is also worth a listen.
Hellripper
A one-man studio project from Aberdeen with a revolving but consistently excellent live lineup. Big Darkthrone and Venom vibes. They’ve released four albums, but I’d start with the gritty Complete and Total Fucking Mayhem compilation of early material. Probably the most likely of this list to be familiar to an international audience but worth highlighting because they should hopefully still be on tour in the US with Havok by the time this publishes online.
For more on Chairmaker, and to pick up a copy of Leviathan Carcass, head over to Bandcamp.
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For more authoritative lists of the best bands from non-U.S. countries, as picked by bands that hail from those places, check out:
• Top 10 Best German Metal Bands, According to the Country’s Power-Metal Vets Stormhammer
• Top 10 Best Norwegian Metal Bands, According to Homegrown Heathens Horrifier
• Top 10 Best Massachusetts Heavy Bands, According to Hometown Heroes Caspian
• Top 6 Best Lithuanian Metal Bands, According to Native Sons Erdve
• Top 10 Best Chinese Metal Bands, According to Homegrown Heathens Dehumanizing Itatrian Worship
• Top 10 Best Russian Bands, According to Native Son Ovfrost of Malist and Crimson Crown
• Top 10 Best Chilean Metal Bands, According to Native Black-Metal Act Ad Finem Omnia
• The 10 Best Canadian Metal Bands, According to Montreal Thrashers Ombra (Exclusive)
• The 10 Best German Heavy Bands, According to Native Black-Metal Sons Der Weg einer Freiheit (Exclusive)
• The 10 Best Bay Area Bands, According to Death-Thrash Hometown Heroes Absolute Darkness (Exclusive)
• The 10 Best Swiss Bands, According to Native Dark-Jazz-Grind-Doom Experimentalists Convulsif (Exclusive)
• The 10 Best Irish Bands, According to Alt-Pop-Addicted Electronic Producer Phenom Vaticanjail (Exclusive)
• The 10 Best Chilean Bands, According to Guitarist for Santiago-Based Noisy Punk-Rock Squad Niño Nuclear (Exclusive)
• The 10 Best Venezuelan Heavy Bands, According to the Country’s Most Badass Garage-Rock Guitarist, Diego Ramirez
• The 10 Best Italian Metal Bands, According to the Country’s New Post-Metal Phenoms Orbita (Exclusive)
• The 10 Best Belgian Metal Bands of All Time, According to Gnarly Native Sons 30,000 Monkies (Exclusive)
• Edge of Sanity Frontman Dan Swanö Reveals 10 Swedish Bands That Made Their Way Into His Musical DNA
• The 10 Best Swedish Heavy Bands Ever, According to Native Sons Prime Creation
• The 10 Best Portuguese Heavy Bands Ever, According to Portugal’s Own Fernando Ribeiro of Moonspell
• Germany’s Top 10 Best Metal Bands Ever, Per the Country’s Native Death-Metal Sons Fleshcrawl
• The 10 Best Finnish Bands Ever, According to Natives the Feral Kids
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