The mid-1990s were a pretty bleak period for grindcore. The genre's progenitors had either retired into their dotage or were aimlessly wallowing in creative bankruptcy.

A change was needed, and New Jersey upstarts Discordance Axis were about to upend 15 years of grindcore tradition and  establish the template for 21st Century extremity. Where first album Ulterior owed obvious debts to their musical forerunners,Discordance Axis found their unique voice on 1997's Jouhou (Japanese for "Information"), turning in 18 minutes of sleek, cyberpunked grind that directly addressed human frailty and emotions rather than recycling the same political jeremiads and empty slogans.  

Unlike the first wave of grind, which owed obvious debts to '80s hardcore, Discordance Axissounded fresh and modern, buoyed by guitarist Rob Marton's forward thinking playing, which melded fleet-fingered technique with streamlined, pinpoint aggression. Marton was influenced as much by Voivod as he was by Napalm Death, and he was one of the few grindcore guitarist whose compositions revolved around actual riffs that were driven by Dave Witte's frenetic, pinpoint drumming. Added to that, Jon Chang introduced a whole new lexicon that appropriated themes and images from manga, science fiction and cartoons and turned them into metaphors for loss, loneliness and alienation, topics that grindcore had never seriously addressed. Together, the trio were the first to make a bid for grindcore as a capital-A Art form. There was more to their blastbeating than a bunch of kids mouthing off at the world.  

  

- Andrew Childers, Grind and Punishment