Motionless In White

Combine gothic looks with metalcore heft, and you get a sexy, eye-grabbing genre mash-up pioneered by Motionless In White. Formed in 2005, the Pennsylvania band dress up like a pack of vampires in love with black mascara and unleash loads of spine-cracking breakdowns, industrialized blast beats, and horror-movie synthesizers. It’s a novel idea for metalcore. Motionless In White are that rare band that eschew the genre’s sweaty grit for an arty sense of theatrics rooted in the macabre. This is especially evident on 2019’s Disguise, a complex album that drops vocalist Chris “Motionless” Cerulli’s deeply confessional reflections into a twisted world of sound that could’ve been envisioned by filmmaker Tim Burton (had he grown up a 21st-century headbanger, of course). But while Motionless In White are fresh and new, there’s also something utterly classic about them. The Mainstream Rock hits “LOUD (F**k It)” and “Voices,” both from the 2017 album Graveyard Shift, are fist-pumping anthems oozing precisely the same kind of angst, paranoia, and occult creepiness with which Marilyn Manson, Danzig, and Alice Cooper have been associated in their respective eras. In this sense, Motionless In White should be considered yet another link in a chain of artists who, looking as if they dabble in the dark arts, create heavy and abrasive jams for the express purpose of winning over alienated youth and offending their parents.