On February 6, 2026, I was honored to give a talk at the University of Iowa as part of their Musicology/Music Theory Colloquium series, hosted by Prof. Joshua Albrecht. I gave an hour-long lecture about the Swedish extreme metal band Meshuggah, consisting of material from my second book project, which I’m currently drafting.

My work on Meshuggah is building very directly on my first book, which is now available open-access through Oxford University Press!

Please feel free to reach out if you’d like to know more about this project! You can always find my contact information at my faculty bio page for my job at Occidental College.

Here’s a short description of my talk:

The Swedish extreme metal band Meshuggah has already been the subject of extensive music analysis research. My first intervention is to retheorize Meshuggah’s distinctive complex rhythms as “overlays,” a groove-based construction which repeats a short unit of odd length to create a rival accent pattern over 4/4—which has been previously studied in jazz, soul, and EDM by Pressing (2002), Cohn (2016), and Butler (2006). This retheorization connects existing Meshuggah research with numerous concepts to better explain the physical experiences that their rhythms create (groove and perceptual rivalry, cycles of release and relock, metrical displacement, etc.). My second intervention is to highlight Meshuggah’s connection to previous thrash/groove metal (which also frequently used overlay riffs), helping to explain their music’s brutal physicality in terms of new research on previous metal practices of heaviness, headbanging, etc. This reverses a trend in existing research which mostly highlights Meshuggah’s “deviance” from mainstream metal (Capuzzo 2018). Overlay analysis shows how even Meshuggah’s most complex, “mathematical” riffs emerge from recursive recombination of physical, groove-oriented riff techniques from previous metal. These two interventions connect analysis of Meshuggah’s music directly to ideas about groove and physicality from studies of African diaspora popular music traditions, troubling common assumptions about complexity, detachment, and race in popular music—and especially in the context of thrash metal, a genre which is often described as “leaving the blues behind” through increased complexity, detachment, and control (Pillsbury 2006). I end with broader thoughts about musical complexity: problematizing the association of certain kinds of complexity with whiteness or embodied detachment, questioning the status of complexity in music theory, and riffing on old questions about mind-body dualism.