On November 7, 2025, I gave a talk at the national American Musicological Society–Society for Music Theory joint annual meeting in Minneapolis. I’ve presented there a few times before, but this time I was there to talk about my second book project, about the Swedish extreme metal band Meshuggah.
If you’re interested, I’d be happy to share my slides and script! Feel free to email me to ask. You can always find my contact information at my faculty bio page for my job at Occidental College.
Here’s the official title and 350-word abstract for my talk, which I’m planning to write up as a chapter in my second book.
“Corpus of Chaos: Headbanging to Conventional Form Cues in Meshuggah’s Unconventional Songs”
Meshuggah’s extreme metal songs often have disorienting forms, which eschew conventional verse-chorus teleology (Nobile 2022), instead staging a progression of static sections, creating seemingly intractable expanses of time. And yet, their audiences all seem to know when to start moshing, and when their song forms are written down, their proportions often strongly resemble metal’s normative song form, compound AABA (Hudson 2021). How is it that song form which look so conventional on paper can feel so disorienting in listening?
To answer this question, I build on theories of metal drumming and song form—which often foreground affordances for physical participation. Traditional theories of pop song form focus on section types determined by lyrics (“verse,” “chorus,” etc.) but metal fans experience also experience form implicitly through embodied feeling and active motion, such as headbanging and moshing. Metal’s riff-based version of compound AABA structures this participatory listening by offering fans both specific formal cues, especially drum patterns (Kozak 2021; Garza 2021; Hudson 2022), and familiar patterns of song form that organize physical engagement, especially buildup intros, verse-chorus “energy cycles” (Pillsbury 2006), transforming or transporting bridges (Hudson 2023), half-time breakdowns (Gamble 2019), and vamps. In this way metal song forms create ritual spaces for heaviness, by implicitly choreographing participatory dance to create shared moments of physical impact (Hudson 2026, Chapter 9).
I use this conventional framework to analyze Meshuggah’s unconventional song forms, showing how they retain some familiar cues and patterns while also departing from these norms. Several of Meshuggah’s most well-known songs follow a pattern of two verse cycles followed by a bridge, with a guitar solo occurring roughly two-thirds of the way through the song’s duration—just like compound AABA (Example 1). However, most of Meshuggah’s songs do not have the conventional teleology of a quieter verse leading up to a louder chorus; instead they alternate, without a sense of directionality or hierarchy, between verses and what I call “pseudo-choruses.” I show how even Meshuggah’s most experimental songs often retain some conventional formal cues (especially drum pattern shifts and guitar solos) which guide listeners’ participatory movement, shaping shared experiences of heaviness.
