Abstract: For this assignment, I analyzed the album Cuddlemonster by the band The Sawtooth Grin through the lens of gender, subgenres, and emotional performance in grindcore. In revisions, I clarified my comparisons between bands, tightened my paragraph structure, and improved transitions. I’d still like to work on making my writing more concise without losing nuance, adding more specific examples, and ending with a stronger conclusion.

Cuddlemonster: The Sawtooth Grin

For counterculture genres such as metal that are easily dismissed or overgeneralized, subgenres help create distinctions and markers. Grindcore, known for its short song lengths and blast beats, also can be divided into subgenres. Amongst them all is a common thread of hypermasculinity and ideals of brutality, generally against women and targeting men that challenge those ideals. This paper explores how their debut album Cuddlemonster both reflects and subverts grindcore’s gendered expectations, showing how sasscore complicates the line between satire, sincerity, and discomfort.

The Sawtooth Grin emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the speed and aggression of grindcore, but a style and attitude more aligned with emo and sasscore. With tight clothes, theatrical stage presence, and emotionally charged lyrics, they stood in sharp contrast to the genre’s usual macho aesthetic. This contrast raises key questions: What happens when a band sounds brutal but looks like the feminized Other? What does it mean to embrace emotion rather than repress it? Instead of rejecting grindcore’s norms outright, The Sawtooth Grin distorted them—using irony, grotesque imagery, and absurdity to challenge ideas of masculinity, power, and performance.

In a more extreme case as shown by Rosemary Overell’s research on Australian Grindcore band Blood Duster, this behavior goes beyond the music and its aesthetics. It presents itself as a lifestyle and ideology that affects how others are treated. The band openly mocks the emo genre and its sincerity, aligning themselves with an exaggerated form of masculinity. They go out of their way to label the genre as “K-mart metal”, for its commercial success and association with sincerity and feelings. In their album promotion album Lyden Na by dressing up in emo drag, complete with fringes, eyeliner, and neck tattoos, they poke fun of the scene’s uniform, “emphasizing that emo was something performative and fake” (Overell 217).

Jason P.C., one of the frontmen, once urinated on a bandmate during a mixed-genre concert, allegedly in response to “emo kids with backpacks” in the crowd. These actions can be taken as gendered acts as “emo’s openness was makes it emphatically… ‘Not Brutal At ALL’,” positioning emo as grindcore’s gendered other due to its feminine association” (Overell 215). Especially in subgenres such as pornogrind and goregrind, Blood Duster’s lyrical examples such as  “Up the date / And up the cunt / With my fingers / I will hunt” (Overell 218) present misogynistic sound bites that ooze aggression and entitlement. Through their gendered lyrics and hatred towards genres for possessing “feminized” traits, they’re presenting a constant female presence conceptually that lies at the heart of the genre. 

The female figure and presence is a common source of inspiration for bands within the genre, often using her as a narrative device and symbol. Across lyrics, album art, merchandise, these figures could be divided into two categories, one of an adult woman that plays an object of desire and that of a helpless little girl trapped in a harmful and decaying environment. The duality of these figures is central to how bands construct their visual and lyrical worlds in every album. The female figure becomes a canvas for male anguish, longing, and rage to be projected onto and altered as a result. This binary of the helpless girl and idealized woman sets the stage for how The Sawtooth Grin builds more ambiguous, emotionally conflicted versions of femininity.

 Lyrics often describe power dynamics laced with brutality, sometimes the female figure is the victim, other times the instigator. This framing reflects the “final girl” trope in horror films, where women survive only after being subjected to trauma for the audience’s consumption. The use of femininity as adornment to extreme violence reflects not just a fascination with gendered contrast, but a reliance on female-coded imagery to evoke deeper unease through softness and beauty. One clear example is Pig Destroyer, whose various albums explore specific female characters they create. 

In their long discography with an adult female figure as the protagonist, their most popular album Prowler in the Yard (2001) tells a loose narrative through poetic, fragmented lyrics of a man’s disturbing infatuation with a woman named Jennifer, her mutilation, and his emotional unraveling. While the dynamic initially shows Jennifer as a passive victim, she slowly becomes a haunting, knowing presence that looms over him like a ghost or muse would. The album’s writing style blends poetic fragmentation with clinical detachment, often juxtaposing grotesque visuals regarding physicality and romantic melancholy. Titles like “Body Scout” or “Mapplethorpe Grey” reveal a fascination with the body as both object and metaphor, while the language throughout oscillates between sincerity and disturbing theatricality. There’s little humor or camp here. This serious tone contrasts the vulgarity and surface-level presentation of masculinity of Blood Duster, revealing the range in which female subjects are explored across the genre. Pig Destroyer’s approach elevates grindcore’s brutal aesthetics into something more psychologically rich, where themes of possession, guilt, and degradation take lyrical center stage. Unlike bands such as Blood Duster, whose lyrics lean into vulgarity for shock value, Pig Destroyer’s approach is rooted in intentionality and emotional weight. Much of the album’s disturbing intimacy comes from its autobiographical roots as vocalist J.R. Hayes has openly shared that Prowler in the Yard was inspired by a deeply toxic breakup that left him emotionally wrecked. The album’s lyrics, pacing, and internal world are all intentionally executed to leave listeners feeling haunted. 

Yet it is within this framework that bands like The Sawtooth Grin begin to challenge grindcore’s foundational assumptions. While they were known fans of Pig Destroyer, a recorded performance of theirs at Purchase College music festival in 2002 brings attention to some key differences visually and sonically. In the video the group explodes into a rhythmic clapping section of the song Please Shit All Over Me, I Love It as the lead vocalist prances around before erupting into high pitched screams and jagged riffs. They aren’t wearing the typical oversized band tee and cargo shorts, as sported by previous bands mentioned, but instead small shirts and bootcut skinny jeans. The guitarist plays these quirky riffs on a Telecaster, known for its bright and twangy tone more often associated with blues or country rather than metal. Emerging in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they retained the grindcore’s sonic extremity but adopted a visual and lyrical style more aligned with emo, mathcore, and most notably sasscore. Sasscore is a loose term to describe this subgenre “of hardcore punk and metal that emerged as a response to the prevailing masculinity within the scene… “initially used to describe a post-hardcore style, it draws influences from various genres outside of punk”(Stounn). Their presence raises critical questions: What happens when a band sounds brutal but looks like the feminized Other? What does it mean to mock emotion instead of repressing it? 

Their debut album Cuddlemonster engages with the recurring themes of grindcore from a radically different angle. Lasting just fifteen minutes, the album delivers a short but chaotic listening experience that favors unique time signatures, and asymmetrical song structures. The bright orange cover, featuring a blue cartoon-like creature sprinting across the frame, immediately signals that this isn’t typical grindcore that relies on gore or explicit imagery. Its playful color palette mirrors the albums emphasis on high end frequencies through shrill, screechy vocals and piercing, bright guitars pushing boundaries not only visually but sonically as it embraces theatricality. The female presence on the album leans more ambiguous where their connection isn’t explicitly mentioned but is someone who this unreliable narrator is emotionally tethered to.

The difference in tone and narrative intention is especially clear when comparing Cuddlemonster’s opener “Give Me the Amulet, You Bitch” to that of Pig Destroyer’s “Jennifer” from Prowler in the Yard. Jennifer sets a grim atmosphere where a computerized voice narrates a short story of Jennifer performing certain acts as men watch from afar, convulsing and contorting with another female character. While Pig Destroyer uses a robotic narrator to create emotional detachment, Sawtooth Grin flips this by opening with a kitschy sample recently revealed to be from a Winnie the Pooh interactive story book for kids. The title itself references the 1987 horror film, Monster Squad, where a vampire character yells this in the face of a little girl. Both songs depict obsession, but Pig Destroyer’s approach is clinical and gloomy while Sawtooth’s emotional spiral is expressive, near-comical in tone, yet still sincere in its depiction of instability. The line “to uncover your eyes and bleed them like love letters and suicide notes” mirrors that of the emo genre while still maintaining a silly tone in the various layers of references. Rather than romanticizing male suffering or fetishizing female destruction, Cuddlemonster embraces the sentimentality of emo in a grindcore context.

In songs like “A 2 Minute Lecture on the Finer Points of Instability”, the speaker obsesses over romantic failure. Their writing is intensely metaphorical and erratic which leans more towards confessional poetry than traditional lyricism, filled with emotional tangents and bodily imagery. “No flowers for you til you put the knife away” contrasting a romantic gesture with violent imagery and culminating in the haunting, contradictory tenderness of “you’re the killer, my little star, tell me how.” That last line perfectly captures the band’s style, a blending of adoration and violence. In “Sometimes She Tasted Like Burnt Plastic Smells,” lines like “regret is my only keepsake” and “your silence is shoveling dirt in your grave” echo this same romanticism, where love is always tangled with decay. The imagery is toxic, synthetic, and decaying, not just emotionally but physically so. These aren’t songs about a break-up or resolved grief, instead they’re messy monologues where desire distorts into guilt and self-loathing. 

“Meathook Marty and the Pajama Party” exemplifies Cuddlemonster’s fascination with the collision of youth and violence.  The title alone adds the tone for the album’s unsettling contrasts, pairing something as innocent and girlish as a pajama party with the grotesque suggestion of a figure named Meathook Marty. In just a few lines, they set a violent scene that’s both vivid and oddly domestic. The speaker’s voice switches between numb detachment such as “Severed heads don’t roll quite as well as expected” and melodrama, suggesting a kind of performative grief or rehearsed chaos despite its casual tone. Lines like “club soda is an economically sound solution” inject a dry, dark humor by treating gore as inconvenience. Lines such as “a perfect body bag prom queen” continue this lineage of fascination with femininity as both an aesthetic and a site of destruction. It’s all written in a surreal, confessional tone that doesn’t shy away from narcissism and openly heartbroken. The album ends in an instrumental mathcore track titled “Good Touch Bad Touch 123” that twists the language of childhood safety into something grotesque and emotionally charged, suggesting confusion around intimacy and trauma. 

Throughout the album, the use of girlish and infantilized imagery isn’t mockery, but emotional iconography. These tropes are heightened through exaggerated language and a tone of endearment, something rare in a genre often defined by apathy or aggression. Unlike much of grindcore, where violence is portrayed through dominance, parody, or detached nihilism, Cuddlemonster offers a more intimate and oddly welcoming experience. Their speaker isn’t a cold criminal but someone spiraling. Someone obsessive, sensitive, awkward and emotionally raw. 

What makes it all so effective is their infusion of these contradicting feelings in every aspect of the band. Even while navigating heavier themes, there’s a lightness and cheekiness to it that keeps listeners coming back. Through the album art, their own presentation, and even musical choices all point to a reclaiming and genuine love for the genre and what it could be. The Sawtooth Grin doesn’t necessarily parody extreme music, it presents a sincere and fresh, new approach to its themes. Their constant crossing between being over-the-top dramatic to detached narcissist combined with an already vibrant and flamboyant performance present an awareness and celebration of the “campiness” of the types of stories bands typically share.

While their album and its themes are inherently satire, the replication of recurring tropes regarding violence against women raises the question about the authenticity of the band’s true nature. In her study of musicians and female metal fans in Perth’s extreme music scene, scholar Laura Glitsos writes about the emotional tension that comes with loving brutal art as a woman in a male-dominated scene quoting “Within a week I was watching Vaginal Carnage play live… My head nodded up and down to the rhythm. How is this happening? I thought. I’m a feminist. And this music is all about rape. How does this work?” (Overell 15). This mirrors broader feminist debates about how women engage with violent media without endorsing it. Yet, participants repeatedly point out that context matters. Naomi, a grind musician herself, describes the art as “a bit disturbing,” but adds that if she were actually threatened at a show, she’d “be defended straight away by people I don’t know” (Glitsos). Shelby states: “I personally listen to a lot of death metal and grindcore… and it personally doesn’t bother me,” adding that “most of the people in these bands are actually great people at heart” proving that violent imagery in art doesn’t automatically translate to violence in the community. For her, “when the guys making that music or art start actually hurting or harassing me, then it becomes a problem.” In contrast, other participants such as Lauren shared that “If anything is grind-related, I won’t go to watch the gig or buy the CD. It just doesn’t do anything for me” showing the varied ways women participate in extreme music without compromising their personal boundaries or values. As a whole they acknowledge these themes as the norm for the genre, but empower others to decide for themselves what they choose to engage with or tolerate. These varied responses underscore how participation in extreme scenes is conditional, negotiated, and personal for women.

For a band like The Sawtooth Grin, it’s important to note their origins in the sasscore scene, where many queer and female fans have historically congregated. Unlike bands like Blood Duster, whose branding leans into crude humor and shock for its own sake, The Sawtooth Grin approaches their lyrical content and visual identity with more nuance and intentionality. Their grotesque and feminine imagery does not serve to punch down, but rather becomes a vehicle for emotional purging, irony, and reflection. The violence in their work feels more internal than outward, rooted in world building rather than misogyny. Their work supports the idea that musical experience has no gender. Since vocals in grindcore and sasscore lyrics are often screamed rather than sung, the focus shifts to instrumentation, rhythm, and texture. Many fans of extreme music enjoy analyzing lyrics as a separate component similar to poetry and engage with the text beyond surface-level shock. 

The albums that followed reflect a consistent commitment to artistic exploration rather than spite. Pervavor takes a more on-the-nose approach to a murderous narrative, while their most recent album released after a 20-year hiatus, Good,  presents an entirely new emotional terrain rooted in fatherhood. This thematic shift shows that their goal was never simply to parody or shock. Instead, The Sawtooth Grin uses the grotesque and dramatic to process emotional extremes, proving that they were always committed to artistic integrity, not the sidelining of marginalized groups or having to prove themselves to bands outside of their scene. In doing so, The Sawtooth Grin expands what brutal music can express, not just aggression, but fragility, obsession, and emotional spectacle.

Works Cited

Glitsos, Laura. “‘sticky business’: An examination of female musicians in the context of Perth’s Metal Community.” Popular Music and Society, vol. 43, no. 1, 25 Apr. 2019, pp. 93–113, https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2019.1606254. 

Overell, Rosemary. “‘[I] hate girls and emo[tion]s’.” Popular Music History, vol. 6, no. 1–2, 14 May 2012, pp. 198–223, https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v6i1/2.198. 

Stounn, Phillip. “What Is Sasscore?” DIY Conspiracy, 4 Sept. 2024, diyconspiracy.net/terms/sasscore/.