Dysrhythmia

Dysrhythmia formed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in March 1998, built around the partnership of guitarist Kevin Hufnagel and bassist Clayton Ingerson, who had been friends since high school and worked together in the mid-90s as members of Grey Division Blue before reuniting in 1998 to work on an all-instrumental project. They were joined six months later by drummer Jeff Eber. The band entered the studio in early 2000 to record their debut album, Contradiction, which was recorded, like every other Dysrhythmia album to follow, completely live with minimal overdubs. From the outset, the trio pursued a defiantly instrumental path, fusing progressive rock, technical death metal, hardcore thrash, indie rock, avant jazz, and ambient mesmerism into a riff-heavy, mathy, high-energy attack. The band's breakthrough came as their sound matured across a string of increasingly acclaimed releases. Their second album, 2001's No Interference, with its mathy, funky interludes, found them delighting fans in Philadelphia while confounding music critics. That momentum led to a deal with Relapse Records, and their first album for the label, Pretest, was released in May 2003 to positive critical acclaim, with Metal Hammer Magazine naming it one of the Top 10 Essential Mathcore albums of all time while Revolver Magazine ranked it among the top 20 albums of 2003 alongside records by Radiohead and Metallica. The record propelled the band onto much larger stages, as they began touring with bigger named acts such as Mastodon, Cephalic Carnage and The Dillinger Escape Plan, and playing major festivals including the Relapse Contamination tours and the New England Metal and Hardcore festival, where they were profiled by both MTV2 and Fuse. The lineup shifted in a significant way when Ingerson left the group in November 2004 and was replaced by Colin Marston, a member of the group Behold...The Arctopus. With Marston aboard, 2004's Barriers and Passages won over virtually all remaining skeptical listeners, while critics embraced the band as part of instrumental metal's renaissance, and 2009's Psychic Maps, with its waves of noise, atonality, hyperspeed drumming, and impossibly knotty riffs, established them as a metal institution and made them a global concert attraction. The band continued to evolve through the 2010s, signing to Profound Lore Records and recording Test of Submission with Luc Lemay in spring 2012, released that August followed by intensive touring on both sides of the Atlantic. They brought Lemay back for their Profound Lore follow-up, The Veil of Control, cut in early spring 2016 and issued that September, after which the band took a well-deserved break so its members could pursue other projects. Dysrhythmia remains active today, with the band currently based in Brooklyn, New York, and their most recent release, Coffin of Conviction, issued on June 7, 2024. The trio of Hufnagel, Eber, and Marston has endured for two decades, and their members' extensive side projects, including Marston's work in Krallice and Behold...The Arctopus and Hufnagel's tenure in Gorguts, have only reinforced Dysrhythmia's reputation as a cornerstone of the instrumental progressive metal underground, an outfit that by the mid-2010s had become one of the most influential metal bands on the planet despite never chasing mainstream attention.