Genre Mashup / Music

The coolest band that never existed.

This happens a lot in music, because combining genres is less likely to go horribly wrong there. See Avant-Garde Music, Song Style Shift.

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Examples:

Music - Artists

• Yoko Kanno. All forms of music are mixed together at her whim. The Seatbelts were a dream band fronted by Kanno, formed for the express purpose of making the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack, and they lived and breathed this trope.
• Garbage: Most of their material is a melting pot of Industrial, Power Pop, Grunge, Electronic chill, Goth Rock, and Hip-Hop.
• Atheist, a Technical Death Metal band, combines Death Metal with Latin music and Jazz.
• Todd Rundgren: more on the page.
• King Krule's sound combines punk jazz (an actual genre), soul, indie rock, darkwave, and rap.
• Blackmahal: An outfit that mixes up traditional Punjabi bhangra, jazz, 70s/80s-styled hip-hop, and funk. Resulting in jazzy raps, intercut with chants, about mustaches.
• Deep Purple is a hard rock band, no question about it, but in 1969 they performed along with the London Symphony Orchestra under conduction of Malcolm Arnold. This unique album in their catalogue was released as Concerto for Group and Orchestra and was in fact their first Live Album!
• New Kingdom: Psychedelic Rock, Jazz, Funk, Soul, Hip-Hop and poetry thrown into a blender.
• The Mavericks, a Cuban-American band from Florida, are what you'd get if you took mariachi, polka, zydeco, and early rock-and-roll, and processed it through Phil Spector's Wall of Sound.
• Alter Bridge: Myles Kennedy's voice is essentially hard rock wailing a la Robert Plant, grunge breathiness with a hint of soul. Mark Tremonti's playing is basically progressing alternative Speed Metal with just a bit of blues, Spanish guitar and southern twang making surprise appearances. The rhythm section can have some progressive tendencies as well. All while being considered a swan song to 70's classic rock and a spiritual successor to Led Zeppelin.
• Red Hot Chili Peppers' album Blood Sugar Sex Magik. The band produced songs as diverse as the Sex God anthem "Sir Psycho Sexy" and the Funk Metal "Righteous And The Wicked" to the Ode to Sobriety "Under The Bridge", the Grief Song "My Lovely Man" (dedicated to ex-guitarist Hillel Slovak, who died of a heroin overdose in 1988) and the Break Up Song "I Could Have Lied".
• Some of The Outside Agency's songs:
  • End Boss standing at 240 bpm (read= 4 beats per second, so that’s slightly faster than your usual hardcore techno (160-180bpm)). With that title and speed, you’d expect something terrifying and aggressive, but it has an oddly soothing melody that wouldn’t feel out of place in a progressive house song.
  • Levitator – Hardcore Techno meets Creepy Circus Music
  • Wait Your Turn – Dubstep meets Speedcore
• Imagine what would be if a church organist goes crazy, learns to growl, masters the wisdom of working with sound on computer, learns to beat drums rhythms in the manner of Slipknot, plays drum machine à la Venetian Snares. Have you imagined that? Well, Igorrr is something of this kind.
• The French solo artist The Algorithm is a very good example, as he plays something that could maybe be called some sort of... Dunno... 8bit Math-Break Step? Oh, I'm not nearly insane enough to get an accurate name for this. Doesn't matter, it's the best and most awesome thing I ever heard anyway. He made a cool remix of Igorrr (see just above) too.
• Shiina/Sheena Ringo blends jazz, jpop, electronica, classical, and rock together quite flawlessly. Justified in the fact that she grew up listening to plenty of the bands listed here.
• Firewater mixes klezmer, punk, Romani music, jazz, and just about anything else Tod can think of in pretty much every song. And they were one of the first.
• Electrocutica is a Japanese band using a strange but wonderful blend of classical, electronic, rock/metal music and alternating between human and Vocaloid singers. The end result is usually something extremely amazing and Mind Screw-y.
• Dr. Carmilla & The Mechanisms are self described as "Diesel Punk Cabaret", with the former also Identifying as Visual Kei and the Latter as Space Folk. Influences from Cabaret, Psychedelia, Classical, Jazz & Rock music can also be identified.
• Bauhaus mixed punk, glam, krautrock, dub, and Looks Like Cesare. Some people were very enthusiastic about the end results.
  • Tones On Tail, formed by former Bauhaus members Daniel Ash and Kevin Haskins, were psychedelic/surf/goth rock.
  • Somewhat ironically, many of the bands that initially inspired Goth have very little to do with any cohesive, named genre, including the one they helped create. The Birthday Party were more like a de-funkified version of The Pop Group (see below), while The Virgin Prunes were essentially performance artists with a post-punkish musical element.
• Buckethead has mixed and played many genres, including funk, different kinds of rock and metal, jazz, ambient and many others to some unique and sometimes downright weird results. It's no wonder people usually classify his music simply as Avant-Garde Music.
• Skindred is a mix of reggae and metal. In their song "Nobody", they refer to themselves as "Ragga metal punk hip-hop"
• German techno duo Mouse on Mars are an IDM act who also incorporate ambient, ska, krautrock, disco, and (on the album Varcharz) drum n bass into their work. Throw in the occasional cartoon sound effects, and the result is some warm, whimsical techno once described by Spin Magazine as "Squarepusher DJ-ing at Chuck-E-Cheese".
• Several classically artists have begun incorporating different musical stylings into their music. Some famous ones, Vanessa Mae combined classical violin with techno, and the girl group Bond has combined classical with rock, pop, world, and pretty much everything else. It actually caused a problem for Bond, they were trapped in a "too pop for classical charts, too classical for pop charts" conundrum for quite a while.
• The Clash were punk/everything else, at least on their later albums.
  • Sandinista! in particular, with lots of dub experiments. Perhaps copying Public Image Ltd.'s Metal Box?
  • In fact, the New Wave movement in general can be described as punk/everything else.
• Public Image Ltd. — so much, in fact that alot of their songs were aimed at weeding out the punks who complained about Johnny Rotten's new sound. See Albatross, Foderstompf, This is what you want, this is what you get.
• Nearly every Beck album contains some flavor of this, to the point where you could say that mixing and matching musical genres is his genre.
  • "I've always dreamed of being a music/poet that transcends genres even as he reinvents them."
• The Dresden Dolls, in their own words, are "Brechtian punk cabaret", something they made up because they didn't want anyone to use the word "goth" when trying to label them.
• Lindsey Stirling likes to put violins where they don't normally belong, for example in dubstep.
• E Nomine's music is a combination of techno and Ominous Latin Chanting.
  • When it doesn't sound like Rammstein.
• KOMPRESSOR is an industrial/novelty one man band.
• Nouvelle Vague, quite possibly the world's only bossa nova New Wave cover band.
  • Dread Zeppelin is a reggae Led Zeppelin cover band with an Elvis Impersonator on lead vocals.
• Rasputina and Apocalyptica are rock WITH CELLOS!.
  • Ra Ra Riot and Cursive (from 2001 to 2005) are indie rock WITH CELLOS!
  • And now, Primitivity: Megadeth with cellos!
• Electric Light Orchestra started off as a mix of prog-rock and classical chamber music.
  • And gradually mutated into a technopop band with a string section.
  • Since 2001 onwards, the band became more of a soft rock one, with some keyboards thrown to imitate the strings.
• Clutch mix doom metal, a little thrash, blues, southern rock, a little rap, and whatever else they feel like almost seamlessly.
• Havalina Rail Co. (later just Havalina) mixed up the styles with every single album they did:
  • Their self-titled debut was a mix of zydeco, folk, and swing.
  • The Diamond in the Fish was a mix of Rat-Pack jazz, rock, and blues.
  • Russian Lullabies mixed rock and blues with East European folk influences (the band read about Russian folk music, but they deliberately didn't listen to any of it, so the end result was something else entirely).
  • America had the band playing rock, bluegrass, surf rock, country, jazz, Latino rock, Hawaiian, blues... one gets the impression they were trying to cover every single genre that could be considered uniquely American.
  • Space, Love, & Bullfighting was a mix of space-rock and Latin music.
• 16 Horsepower mixed country, bluegrass, rock, and European folk music.
  • And Woven Hand, one of the spin-off bands, adds Medieval and Native American influences to the mix.
• Xera is Asturian folk (think Celtic music and you won't be too far off) mixed with techno.
• In their last two albums, the White Stripes have had Jack White playing a marimba on several tracks on one, and two songs with BAGPIPES on the other, one of which was a heavy, "White Rabbit"-esque psychadelic freakout. With a bagpipe.
  • Though hardly critically acclaimed, Korn beat them to the punch by years.
• Speaking of Korn, they really deserve special mention. Their debut album Korn was an extremely bizarre take on Alternative Metal. Having elements of Funk Metal, Hip-Hop (without actually rapping), Hardcore Punk, Grunge, Groove Metal, and even elements of Progressive Metal. This was a particularly successful example of this trope, as it spawned an entire infamous genre of bands trying to Follow the Leader (which they lampshaded with their album Follow the Leader) and helped revive Heavy Metal as a whole in the mainstream.
• Songs to Wear Pants To is a website which produces songs, in pretty much every genre imaginable. A lot of them are genre blends as well, when they're not being outright silly. One of the site's more popular songs, "Celtic Techno Burrito," is pretty much what it sounds like—techno and Celtic. And it is awesome.
• There's an artist named Bud Melvin who combines Game Boy chiptunes with banjo and steel guitar.
• Bristol post-punk band The Pop Group were by design a fusion of punk rock, hard funk, dub reggae and free jazz, with bits of West African ritual drum music, surf-pop, Captain Beefheart (see below), early hip-hop and psychedelic noise. In spite of many imitators, it is generally agreed that there has been no-one quite like them since.
  • Summed up with this image◊.
• Flight of the Conchords is New Zealand's fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo.
• Emilie Autumn mixed influences from classical and electronic music to create a genre she calls "Violindustrial" or "Victoriandustrial".
  • Emilie's music during the Enchant era is also very hard to classify. It could probably be described as a mixture of pop and jazz, with classical violins.
• Vernian Process are described as mixing punk, classical, industrial, trip-hop, dream pop, goth rock, darkwave, cabaret, deathrock, goth and more. They call it "steamwave".
• Abney Park is a Seattle-based band that does steampunk music, mixing gypsy and celtic sounds with rock and electro-swing.
• Doctor Steel mixed hip-hop with industrial, early jazz and even opera.
• Unextraordinary Gentlemen mix post-punk, synth-pop, industrial and darkwave.
• Soul Coughing were (and still are) so hopelessly sui generis that they had to invent a genre name for themselves — "deep slacker jazz". It's very jazz-inspired (especially evident on Ruby Vroom), but there are rock songs, and indie/pop rock is often injected into the mix.
• Van Canto are an capella power metal band from Germany. They have five vocalists, four whom just make instrumentesque noises, a singer and a drummer. Check out their cover of Metallica's "Battery". Also Nightwish's "Wishmaster".
  • Actually, despite the unusual (lack of) instrumentarium, they do not differ stylistically from any heavy/power metal band. Their covers are a good example since they do not stick out as "different" from the rest of their songs.
• Tom Waits is his own genre. His voice sounds like a Lounge Lizard version of Cookie Monster and he plays piano in a way that mixes Ragtime, Jazz, Punk Rock, and his voice. It's probably called Neo-Gothic Rock.
• Gazpacho has been described as "classical post ambient nocturnal atmospheric neo-progressive folk world rock."
• If you happen to be listening to a band who can go through funk, pop, jazz, soul, swing, alt rock and death metal in the same song and think "Business is usual" you're probably listening to something by Mike Patton (Faith No More, Fantômas, Mr. Bungle).
• A Day to Remember from pop punk to death metal with post-hardcore and metalcore in between... well it's something.
• The '90s underground band Switchblade Symphony mixed hip-hop with wailing goth.
  • One review described Switchblade Symphony as "Gothadelic Trip-Hop."
  • Also known as Witch-Hop.
• If music reviewers are any indication, every band who ever existed mixed krautrock into their music.
• French band Magma can best be described as Progressive/Symphonic/Gospel/Jazz fusion with vocals sung in a made-up language called Kobaian. So unusual and unique, that bandleader Christian Vander came up with a new word to describe it: Zeuhl, which means "celestial music" in Kobaian.
• Primus. Full stop. Their music is kind of like thrash metal crossed with psychedelic... funk... polka?
  • Related note: "...have you heard the brand new sound? It's a cross between Jimi Hendrix, Bocephus, Cher and James Brown. It's called Heavy-Hometown-New-Wave-Cold-Filtered-Low-Calorie-Dry" from the Primus song "Mr. Krinkle".
  • Useless trivia fact: Primus are the only band to have a genre in Winamp's drop down list named after them.
    • The programmer for that menu justified the band's inclusion as a genre into themselves by saying:
    "You show me another band whose sound is based on a classically trained banjo player treating a four-string bass guitar like a banjo, and we'll call it a genre. Until then, Primus is Primus, and nobody else is."
• Les Claypool's (bassist and vocalist of Primus) solo career is made of this trope. Only weirder.
• The band Sub City Dwellers refer to themselves as "Ska Soul Reggae Rock 'n' Roll". They are also well known and loved in the Winnipeg Punk Scene.
• The band In/Humanity jokingly called themselves "Emotional Violence" or "Emo Violence" to make fun of both the genre names for Emo and Power Violence, two horribly named but decent genres they drew much of their influence from.
  • Humorously, this became one of the more "serious" replacement terminologies for screamo (as opposed to more blatant joke terms such as scramz) after the title was stolen in the public conscious by metalcore bands of the early 2000s
• Ayreon is a rock opera with prog metal, symphonic metal, prog rock, folk music, and pretty much everything else at some point. The vocalists range from extreme metal growlers to more typical rock singers to very operatic singers.
• The Pixies are what would happen if you put Talking Heads and the Velvet Underground into the Brundlefly machine.
  • Or, to borrow from the newspaper ad that led to their formation: a band whose members really dig Peter, Paul and Mary and Hüsker Dü.
• Jethro Tull combine hard rock, the blues, jazz, English folk music and progressive rock styles, and combine electric, acoustic and electronic instruments on the same tune at the same time. The lead singer plays flute, which is more of a lead instrument at times than the electric guitar. The band have also dabbled in pop, East Indian and Arabic music, new age, electronica, new wave synth-pop, symphonic rock and bits of psychedelia. Despite this, they have their own style, and very few bands have been successful at copying them.
• Your average Béla Fleck and the Flecktones song will combine at the very least Jazz, Funk, and Bluegrass. Some go much farther than this— on varying albums, they've added everything from Indian traditional music (on Shanti) to Classical (Fugue from Prelude, their heavily latin-inflected take on a Bach piece) into the mix. The apex of this is their take on "The Ballad of Jed Clampett", which featured both hip-hop vocals and scat singing over a funk/bluegrass beat with elements of jazz dissonance. While this all might seem a little odd, it usually works beautifully.
  • Likewise the Dregs/Dixie Dregs. Classical Southern Prog Rock Metal Jazz Fusion, often all in the same song.
• The Veronicas Acoustic synthetic classical pop rock
• The World/Inferno Friendship Society play "cabaret punk" or "circus punk" with plenty of references to Weimar Germany and smashing the state. Oh, and they did a tribute album about the life of Peter Lorre. Of course.
• Jaga Jazzist is one of the most prominent bands in the Nu Jazz scene. They started off by mixing big-band jazz with drum-n-bass and trip-hop. On later albums they also incorporate elements of post-rock and prog-rock.
• Big & Rich's first two albums featured country, metal and rap all rolled into one. And many critics said it was great.
  • Similarly, Big & Rich protegé Cowboy Troy performs country rap, although he's hardly the only artist to do so.
    • And have you heard the solo album Big Kenny put out before Big & Rich existed? That's something along the lines of synthpop, lounge lizard and British invasion, with happy country lyrics.
• John Zorn, the producer of Mr. Bungle's first album, known for blowing the minds of music nerds with his free jazz / metal / surf / western nonsense albums like: Radio, Torture Garden, and Leng T'che, featuring Boredoms vocalist Yamatsuka Eye. But the rest of his catalogue is eclectic too. Name any musical genre and he has played it, even switching back and forth in one and the same track.
  • Mr. Bungle themselves too, most apparent in their song "None of Them Knew They Were Robots", on their album California.
• Dwight Yoakam is highly eclectic himself. His style is reminiscent of Buck Owens' Bakersfield sound, but with several rock influences ranging from Elvis to Queen to Cheap Trick. Yes, he actually did a country cover of a Queen song.
  • Granted, the song in question ("Crazy Little Thing Called Love") certainly has a Rockabilly feel to it in the first place.
• That's how The Polyphonic Spree's sound got built up: The lead singer, bassist and drummer were members of the alt rock band Tripping Daisy, the flautist was big into avant-garde progressive stuff, the percussionist & harpisit were clearly classically trained, the synth & theremin players brought some electronica influence, etc...
• Sufjan Stevens' first album, A Sun Came, mixed rock with American and Middle Eastern folk music. His breakout hit albums, Michigan and Illinois, mixed rock and folk with neoclassical orchestrations of varying levels of bombast. The Age of Adz was a mix of orchestral music and Synth-Pop.
• Calexico mixes rock, country, Mexican folk (particularly mariachi), post-rock, and occasionally funk or jazz. Any given song may feature trumpets, accordion, violin, cello, steel guitar, synthesizers, or any combination of the above.
• Queen are an incredibly versatile band, going from proto-metal to heartfelt piano ballads to gentle folk to blues rock to punk-tinged hard rock to synthpop to prog rock epics to arena rock to funk rock to disco to what could almost be called proto-rap. Not to mention Freddie Mercury's frequent excursions to Classical Music and Opera, which started on A Night at the Opera and ended with his Solo Side Project Barcelona.
• Ozric Tentacles combine space rock, progressive rock, dub, jazz fusion, world (Indian, Moroccan, Algerian, you name it), electronica, and tea.
• Over the course of their career, Led Zeppelin did folk, country music, gospel, synth-pop, reggae, punk and heavy metal while incorporating Motown, Middle Eastern and South Asian influences. And yet, they're still seen as a heavy blues-rock band.
• Opeth. "You got your progressive rock in my death metal!" And vice versa. Not only that, but it works.
  • As they fit quite neatly into prog-metal territory.
• Frank Zappa is practically a genre unto himself. Rock-funk-dance-classical-heavy-bluesy-jazz-fusion-progressive-pop-lounge with unusual time signatures, frequent tempo changes in strange keys leading into what sounds like freeform fusion guitar noodling solos that are in reality all entirely written out as complete compositions — all in one song. There's no easy way to describe the kind of music Frank made, except to call it Zappa.
  • He also retired from rock for a while to do orchestral music. He said in an interview that he returned to rock because he used a section of prerecorded music in a classical concert, and the critics couldn't tell the difference. His best known orchestral albums are London Symphony Orchestra, The Perfect Stranger and The Yellow Shark.
  • Also note that quite a bit of his music can be considered cartoon music without the cartoons, early rap/hip-hop and his spoken word themes - combined with the other genres, he's probably THE epitome of the trope itself.
  • Notable among his classical influence was Edgard Varèse. His 15th birthday present was a long-distance call to Varèse's house. He also admired Anton Webern, Igor Stravinsky, many jazz and pop artists, his friend Captain Beefheart (found below), and well, many others. Hence this trope.
• Captain Beefheart, a frequent collaborator with Frank Zappa, is perhaps even more eclectic. Starting with a base of psychedelic rock and blues, he went on to incorporate jazz, boogie, Avant-Garde Music, and experimental styles with discordant but melodic riffs; combined with a unique lyrical style that blended the poetic, humorous, and surreal. What puts him in another league to Zappa is the fact he wasn't afraid to do serious pop songs - "Too Much Time" from "Clear Spot" being the most impressive. Beefheart was always trying to make people feel something with his music, whereas Zappa mostly created things for his own amusement.
• Little Feat is another band with a Zappa connection (original leader Lowell George had been a guitarist for the Mothers of Invention) that definitely falls into this category, incorporating ever-shifting elements of rock, country, blues, jazz, funk, and gospel into their sound.
• Japanese band m-flo mixes rap and hip-hop with a number of things, including jazz, techno, Barbra Streisand ("The Way We Were"), among others, depending on the album/song.
• Add to all this the possibility of being in the Contemporary a Cappella genre — that is, being a jazz musician (or rocker) (or folk musician) (or whatever) but being too cheap to buy instruments and having to sing all those parts instead. (The theme from Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego is probably the instance you personally are most familar with.) With a little creativity, you can do just about any genre you want in a cappella: witness, for instance, the death-metal barbershop quartet.
• of Montreal's recent albums, especially Skeletal Lamping, where, as one reviewer stated, "Barnes leaps through genres that don't even exist, from acid glam psychedelia to sixth dimensional heroin pop." This is a bit of an understatement - listen to "Id Engager," keeping in mind that in its place on the album, it comes off as extremely restrained, an obvious radio single. The other single from the album has the last minute or so replaced with a loop of the chorus to hide the Mood Whiplash. Their sound includes funk, disco, R&B, talking songs, psychedelia, indie pop, and jangle pop.
• Mago de Oz is normally just a Spanish language guitar rock band... but has numerous songs that have a Celtic rhythm, 80's guitar band power chords, and lyrics in Spanish.
  • Actually it's a Folk Metal/Heavy Metal with Classic, Celtic, Symphonic Metal and Hard Rock influences, open to new styles.
• Sleepytime Gorilla Museum is a combination of epic metal, folk, choir music, and nightmares.
• Some of Estradasphere's members have been trained in metal, jazz, and classical music. They also have a guy who plays keyboards and shamisen. The result is cool and wierd.
• The Beatles themselves went from '50s-influenced rock to Merseybeat to jangly folk-rock to swirly psychedelia to acoustic pieces to blues, soul, jazz, pop, music-hall, country, rockabilly, the avant-garde, reggae/ska, Beach Boys influences, proto-punk, proto-metal, proto-prog, proto-funk... and yet, they developed their own distinctive style(s), and distinctive slant on the styles they tackled. The most Genre Roulette album they ever brought out was The White Album.
• The Swedish band Movits, who recently appeared on the Colbert Report, blend hip-hop with the swing jazz popularized by Benny Goodman and Cab Calloway.
• 127 mix rock, jazz, punk and Iranian dance music. And they sing in Farsi, English and French.
• Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds are bluesy, semi-gothic, gospel, funk folk rockers. With the occasional sea shanty.
  • Well Nick Cave was the lead singer for the Birthday Party. Check out The Friend Catcher, Release the Bats, Mr. Clarinet, and Mutiny in Heaven. Plus now he has Grinderman, which is Noise and blues and whatever else it is.
• The Cat Empire play a mix of jazz, ska, funk, hiphop, flamenco and sometimes reggae.
• When the Australian hip-hop group The Herd aren't doing political songs, they mix polka and rap. Unpredictable even has rap verses in Czech and Spanish accompanied by a traditional folk song that's slowly speeding up.
• Between the Buried and Me has described their fourth album, Colors, as "new wave polka grunge" and "adult contemporary progressive death metal".
• Discounting flirtations with harsh noise, jazz and post-rock, Caïna's core sound consists of a fusion of ambient black metal, shoegaze, The Cure-esque goth rock and acoustic folk. And it sounds AWESOME.
• Look at this: on the one hand, you've got black metal, which consists of fuzzy, distorted guitars, insanely fast drumming, demented screaming vocals and a focus on a dark, evil atmosphere. On the other hand, you've got post-rock, which consists of a base of clean, slowly picked guitars, mid-tempo, carefully played drums, no singing whatsoever, eccentric song structures and what music critic Ciarán Tracey called "the redemptive note common to all post rock": a vaguely hopeful atmosphere. Despite the obvious contradictions, in recent years bands combining the two have become increasingly common, most notably Wolves in the Throne Room and Irish band Altar of Plagues.
  • Interesting note: A lot of Wolves in the Throne Room's songs cover environmentalist topics. (Insert green metal jokes here)
  • Drone metal progenitors Sunn O))) — originally an Earth tribute band, but whose reputation has far overshadowed their obscure early influence — have been inching closer to post-rock territory, with such recent efforts as Monoliths & Dimensions. Don't mention this to purist fans; they might be offended (though their hearing is so damaged, they'll probably never notice).
    • Even farther away from drone-metal is Deep In Ocean Sunk the Lamp of Light by Æthenor—a side-project, including O'Malley from Sunn O)))—which serves up disturbing random-noise glitch with (almost pretty!) twinkling music-box chiming, then dumps it all into the Pro Tools Cuisinart set to Liquefy.
    • Earth themselves fits sort of into this field, as while their earlier albums was pretty standard drone doom, with the release of "Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method," they have essentially become a drone-western band.
• Finnish band Alamaailman Vasarat jokingly refer to themselves as "kebab-kosher-jazz-film-traffic-punk-music." This is about as accurate a description of them as you're going to get.
  • If you're curious: most of their songs kind of sound like the Beetlejuice theme with a distinct oompah klezmer vibe. They've done heavy metal tracks and ballads as well, and the band members primarily play horns and strings. They're really cool.
• Blood Stain Child are a Japanese band who make a mix of Melodic Death Metal and Trance. It's awesome.
• Prince. His style (now nicknamed the "Minneapolis sound" since others imitated it) can basically be summed up as: funk + pop + rock + heavy metal + New Wave + whatever the hell else he decides to do (soul, jazz, hip-hop, ambient, electro, etc).
• Omodaka is a collaboration between electronic musician Soichi Terada and enka singer Akiko Kanazawa. The two genres combine surprisingly well, it turns out.
• Ian Dury's first group was a pub act called Kilburn and the High Roads, which combined the rockabilly stylings of Dury's hero, Gene Vincent, with the New Wave punk influences which were popular in the pub rock circuits. With the Blockheads, he started to incorporate rock 'n' roll, jazz, folk, reggae, ska, a bit of disco and old vaudevillian, music hall comedy songs into the repertoire.
• Travis Shredd and the Good Ol' Homeboys, the first and (likely) only "country metal rap" band.
• Björk's Medúlla is esentially a capella electronica. Highlights include "Oceania", "Who Is It", "Where Is the Line", and "Triumph of a Heart", which is an a capella dance song.
• Tori Amos' "Professional Widow" combines elements of blues, industrial, medieval, classical, and rock. In other words, imagine an alternative rock song with a harpischord instead of an electric guitar. Also, the song goes from harpischord rock to bluesy piano ballad a couple of times during the song.
  • The Beekeeper is a mixture of baroque pop, R&B, and blue-eyed soul.
• Canadian band Enter The Haggis combines traditional Celtic music with rock, pop and jazz influences. The band includes a full-time bagpiper.
• Another Canadian band, going by the name Unexpect, is a great example of this trope. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about them:
  Unexpect often is an avant-garde extreme metal band from Montreal, Canada with an amalgamation of different styles of music, including black metal, death metal, progressive metal, melodic heavy metal, European Classical music, opera, medieval music, jazz, electro, ambient, noise, gypsy music, and circus music.
  • Although the band prefers to just be called a "metal" band. They, like a few other bands these days, can't understand the bizarre genres like "New-Wave of American Psychedelic Rap Metal".
• The debate rages on to this day as to what exact genre you can call Children of Bodom. Considering they've done covers of songs by Britney Spears and Kenny Rodgers, you can see their influences are far and wide.
  • They're generally labelled as melodic death metal, and the covers are less of an indication of actual influence and more just a general trademark, that being one or two wacky/ironic covers per album as bonus tracks. Of course, it's become predictable enough that the joke has lost its luster.
• Although commonly associated with Progressive Rock, influential Canadian band Rush has seen considerable variation in their sound. Starting out as a straightforward Hard Rock/early Heavy-Metal band, they evolved through Prog Rock and Synth Rock, while incorporating elements of Jazz, Reggae, Pop, and even Rap; before returning to their hard rock roots, including releasing an album of classic Rock covers.
  This trope is actually made into lyrics in Rush's song 'You Bet Your Life': "...light pop hip-hop metalist..."
• Diablo Swing Orchestra are making a name for themselves in the avant-garde metal scene by combining, of all things, swing and metal. They dislike genre classifications, but if pressed will describe their sound as "riot opera," which they feel is the best description of their sound. Let's put it this way: the band posted some details about their upcoming third album on their Facebook page, including the statement "Expect some Turkish pop mixed with black metal and Chinese boy choirs among other things." They received numerous comments about how excited people were about the album, but none expressing any disbelief at the mixture.
  • Not to mention throwing in some jazz, tango and big band.
• Before they were Mute Math, they were Earthsuit, whose musical style was a mix of rap, rock, electronica, jazz, and reggae. And it was a Christian band.
• John 5. Industrial Bluegrass. Yeah.
• In the same vein, Greg Koch. Instrumental Country-Blues-Metal-in-the-vein-of-Steve-Vai. Also yeah. Not to mention his comedic talent.
• Music professor Gil Trythall released an album in 1971 titled Country Moog. Yes, that's country as in the folksy musical genre, and Moog as in the space-age synthesizer.
• The Tiger Lillies are... well, okay: the lead singer is a raw falsetto who can make his voice sound like Louis Armstrong's, only six octaves higher. The bassist plays a thin standing base like it's a cello. The (brush) drummer has a suitcase full of discarded toy cars, rattlers, firecrackers, baby dolls, rubber chickens and dildoes, which, yes, he uses to make noise. They perform in whiteface and bowler hats. Their songs range from serious ballads about sailors dying alone on the ocean to manic screaming being in love with a giraffe's vagina up in the sky. Their material is written by Edward Gorey (among others). Their fans include Terry Gilliam, Matt Groening, the Franz Ferdinand guys and John Cameron Mitchell. Marilyn Manson and Dita von Teese got married to their music. And they called themselves "Brechtian Punk Cabaret" long before it was hip.
• Linkin Park has always been built around four ingredients = rock, electronica, metal, and hip-hop. Which of these elements take prominence depends on the song, and new elements can be brought in at any time. In fact, each individual album fits:
  • Hybrid Theory and Meteora mixed together Nu Metal, Rap Metal and Electronic Rock.
  • Minutes to Midnight is more Genre Roulette — ranging from Heavy Metal songs, to Arena Rock anthems, to adult contemporary ballads, with the occasional rap song in-between.
  • Living Things could be described as "Electronic Music meets Rap Metal", being a combination of the previous four albums made to create something completely new.
  • The Hunting Party brings back Nu Metal elements, but it gets buried underneath the Hard Rock, Hardcore Punk, and Heavy Metal influences that it isn't as noticeable. Easily the heaviest and least commercial friendly of the lot.
• House duo Duck Sauce's album Quack features an interlude where a series of characters try to define what Duck Sauce's music reminds them of:
  " Yeah, I dunno, for me it's, it's sort of, I dunno, acid house meets Elmer Fudd."
  "I think it's sort of, Mel Gibson meets ancient aliens."
  "Well, for me, it's kind of, nah, I'd say it's more the traveling circus meets Rodney Dangerfield."
  "Nah nah nah, see, I think it's like Color Me Badd meets Oscar the Grouch."
  "Arright, well if that's what it is, well then, for me it's Zumba meets Nicola Tesla meets The Casimir Effect meets The Arturians meets The Hermetic Aura of the Golden God meets Dadaism. In a pyramid. You know. Tae-bo."** A Thousand Suns is alternative progressive experimental industrial Space Rock with flavorings of Techno and Hip-Hop.
• Short-lived band 38th Parallel was a combination of Linkin Park-esq Nu Metal and... Contemporary Christian. They released one album in 2002, then broke up.
  • There were a shit-ton of Christian nu-metal/rapcore bands before them. P.O.D., Pillar, Project 86, PAX217... the list goes on. The only thing that made 38th Parallel original was that their name didn't begin with a "P" and they barely squeezed by on that.
• The three members of Italian instrumental experimentalists Zu play bass guitar, drums and a (highly distorted) baritone saxophone. They frequently feature guest musicians, including Melvins guitarist King Buzzo, Mike Patton of Faith No More and Japanese electronic musician Nobokazu Takemura. The result is a groaning, squealing and cataclysmic semi-improvised fusion of Metal, Noise-Rock, Free-Jazz, Mathcore, and No-Wave Punk. Compared by one struggling and confused music reviewer to "Lightning Bolt covering Trout Mask Replica in the middle of a knife fight".
• Doctor Steel has been described as hip-hop industrial opera, much to his enjoyment.
• U2 in The '90s: Alternative Rock + Funk + Madchester + Industrial Metal + Shoegazing + Electronic Music + Techno + Dance.
• Crowded House were once fairly easy to define but by Together Alone, they had combined Power Pop, Grunge, Dream Pop, Folk, Post-Punk, and especially traditional Polynesian music. Their most recent albums featured electronic influences.
• The Suicidal Rap Orgy, a group of Australian noise artists who inexplicably decided to make a, uh, rap collective. Basically, imagine guttural 'or' shrieking male vocals, absurd shrieking female vocals, and lyrics based entirely around various creative combinations of human waste, sex, and violence. "The band are often known for their disgusting live shows in which they wind up naked and horribly grotesque lyrics that are in a similar vein to GWAR and GG Allin."
• Dälek combines Hip-Hop with Shoegazing, Noise Rock, and Industrial and has occasionally been dubbed as metal-shoegaze-hip-hop, but not by themselves. They just prefer to be called hip-hop.
• Meet Slaughter of the Bluegrass, a band which makes death metal song covers... in bluegrass style. It's pretty awesome.
  • In a similar vein, say hello to Hayseed Dixie. They do bluegrass covers of AC/DC, Queen, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, KISS and a metric buttload of others, as well as their own original rock/bluegrass tunes, including the worlds most epic break-up song.
• The pAper chAse make post-hardcore/classic emo with minimalist classical structures, accompanied by heavy industrial beats and sampling, in a heavily-orchestrated style with touches of jazz and blues on literary Noise Rock concept albums heavy on the Nightmare Fuel.
• Bone Thugs-n-Harmony combines barbershop doo-wop harmony, with speed rap, with tinges of Jamaican patois in their rhyme scheme.. Usually within the same song where they change the tempo of their delivery mid-verse.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has a song that mixes opera and rap. For some, this is the only rap song they will ever like.
• Klaus Nomi: A mix between opera and electronica, as exemplified by his singing on the albums Klaus Nomi and Simple Man. Think Luciano Pavarotti meets Depeche Mode.
• This trope is just one reason why Yoko Kanno is the goddess of anime music. Seriously, she does everything. All at once. Awesomely.
• Yuki Kajiura is no slouch in this department either considering she's post-pop neoclassical Buddhist New Age trance-turbofolk world music electronica.
• The Doors were made up of a jazz drummer, a flamenco guitarist, a classical organist, and a poet-vocalist.
• Gentle Giant: What happens when you get together three brothers out of a soul group, a classically trained keyboardist, a blues guitarist, and a volatile series of drummer, and they all start playing recorders? You end up with Gentle Giant, whose songs ranged from quasi-medieval violin-powered tunes, to entirely percussive pieces, to a cappella ballads.
• A professor of mine used almost this exact phrase to describe the sound of the band Lucero.
• Body Count deserves a mention, having been a thrash metal band fronted by Ice-T, with gangsta-ish lyrics to match.
• Alabama 3 (you'd know them for the Sopranos theme) was formed in an attempt to prove that it was possible to combine country with acid house.
• Blondie started out a reggae-influenced punk band, added synthesizers and pop hooks and moved into new wave, and in the process incorporated elements of funk and rap.
• British rock group Motörhead blended heavy metal and punk rock in an unprecedented manner, giving birth to a genre variously known as "speed metal" or "punk metal". They are notable for being one of the few bands to straddle the fierce punk/metal rivalry of late 70s/early 80s Britain, well respected by the most die-hard fans of both camps.
• The New Orleans sludge scene drew inspiration from grunge, hardcore punk and doom metal to create a unique style of slow, gritty metal. No one band can be said to have invented the style, with various groups often sharing members and engaging in frequent collaboration, although The Melvins and Black Flag are both noted as major precursors.
• The Band Morphine mixed Lounge, Blues, Jazz, Rock N' Roll and Indie Rock with a Two String Slide Bass, a Baritone Saxophone and Drums. They invented Low Rock.
• Afro Celt Sound System is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: A mix of African folk, Celtic, and electronica.
• Iwrestledabearonce mixes Deathcore / Mathcore with random other genres ranging from Trip Hop to Country Music in every song.
• Industrial Rock one-man band Celldweller fuses genres to the point that it's almost impossible to keep track of all the genres that are being mashed together.
• Waltari are a perfect example: Alternative metal, punk, techno, electronic, rap, death metal, grindcore, hard rock, symphonic, folk, thrash, pop, funk, industrial and drum 'n' bass are all quite merrily put together on the same album. And the best part is it actually works.
• Scissor Shock, who have even managed to combine this with Genre Roulette.
• One of the reasons we still keep Kanye West around is because his music quite awesomely mixes different genres he likes, not to mention his "baroque pop" excursion 808s & Heartbreak. To date, he sampled King Crimson, Michael Bolton, Bette Midler, The Doors, Shirley Bassey, Elton John, Daft Punk, Labi Sifre, Can, Nina Simone, Tears For Fears, The Alan Parsons Project and the list goes on...
• Guns N' Roses. The band's classic lineup were all into rock music but the band members each had their own style influenced by a different genre. Axl was included by more melodic and heavily arranged music like Queen, Slash was based in blues and ratty hard rock like Aerosmith, Izzy edged more towards simple acoustic song writing like Bob Dylan, Duff was punk and Steven was the hair metal scene. Together these influences came together and made Appetite for Destruction what it was. They replaced Steven with Matt Sorum, which swapped the hair metal vibe for a big epic arena sound which added a little flair to Use Your Illusion.
  • And that's before getting into the long-delayed Chinese Democracy, where Axl was the only member of the original lineup left, and a rotating cast of musicians contributed to the album. The album has more of an Industrial Rock feel, helped by the fact that Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck is one of the few to perform in all songs.
• Mangue Bit is a musical movement from the Brazilian state of Pernambuco which mixed traditional music styles, mostly maracatu, with hip hop, punk rock and trash metal. It's awesome!
  • Also from Brazil, two bands (one with a comedic vein, and another straight satire) embodied this in the 90s: Raimundos played "Forrócore", mixing traditional rhythm forró with hardcore punk, and Mamonas Assassinas had along with straight comedy rock (or in one case, comedy metal), rock parodies of Brazilian country, forró, pagode and Portuguese music.
• LCD Soundsystem pioneered Dance-Punk by mixing together, well, dance and punk. The elements range anywhere from Electronic Music to Disco, and other aspects like New Wave Music, glam, Pop, Spoken Word, krautrock, acid house, Alternative Rock and more can show up at any time.
• Thrice. They started out your typical hardcore metal band, but moved into far more experimental territory with their later albums. Some songs on the Earth disk of the Alchemical Index sound like Bluegrass and Jazz!
• Gorillaz; their music is a mix of Hip-Hop, Rock, Rap, Electronica, Soul, Country and many many more.
• Delhi 2 Dublin plays a mix of Indian Bhangra and Celtic jigs, with some ragga thrown for good measure.
• Rabbit Junk is essentially Hardcore Punk, Industrial, Black Metal, and Hip Hop. Different songs tend to focus more on one genre than the other (though usually two at once), their early stuff is mostly Hardcore Punk Industrial.
• With so many references to "Thrash crossed with..." it's possibly easy to forget that Thrash itself was a cross between early 80's British Metal and the Punk music.
• The Yoshida Brothers fuse rock stylings with the distinctive sounds of the shamisen, a traditional Japanese instrument that looks something like a three-string banjo. They've been called the "Jimi Hendrix of the shamisen", just to give you an idea.
• Candiria plays something they like to call "urban fusion", which draws influences from metalcore, jazz fusion, hip-hop, and ambient.
• Caravan Palace is a French band that combines French house music and Gypsy jazz and American swing.
• Voltaire (the musician) calls himself a "Neo-Victorian gypsy pirate vaudeville band." ...and that seems to miss out quite a few genres fans of his notice.
• Kid Rock can turn out some songs that certainly feel like this. Rock, rap, blues and country influences kinda mix together in a way that allows his material to be played on a majority of major radio stations without fully breaking genres. It's so bad that some people classify him as his own genre at times to make things simpler.
• Brazilian band Pato Fu is pop rock mixed with just about any rhythm conceived. It culminates in an album recorded with toy instruments.
• The Kentucky Headhunters. At first glance they seem like a Southern rock band, but closer inspection shows plenty of soul and bluegrass influences. Who would've ever thought that traditional country like "Oh Lonesome Me" or "Only Daddy That'll Walk the Line" could fit on the same album as covers of "Spirit in the Sky" and "Let's Work Together"?
• Sugarland seems to be heading towards this. Although mainly a more acoustic bent on modern-day Country Music, their song "Stuck Like Glue" features a prominent accordion line, as well as a reggae-rap breakdown and a pinch of Auto-Tune near the end.
• Type O Negative's music is a mixture of punk, doom and thrash metal, goth with a hint of Beatlesque melodies.
• Cake combines jazz standards, country, crooning, funk, soul, and alt rock beautifully.
• Deerhunter call themselves "ambient punk" (?) and sound like neo-Shoegaze/indie rock/trippy weirdness (varying wildly from one track to the next).
• Mindless Self Indulgence refer to their genre as "Industrial Jungle Pussy Punk." It's as close to accurate an adjective you'll find for it.
• Singer-songwriter Michael Gira's second (and current^note Reformed with a new line-up in early 2010) band Swans. Each album essentially has its own genre distinction, the most inexplicable being their first (1982's Filth) and "last" (1997's Soundtracks For The Blind). The latter, in particular, has no sense of genre distinction whatsoever and is best described as a 150-minute sonic Mind Screw.
  • This trope is applicable to all of Michael Gira's projects, as well as almost everyone he's been associated with. Look at Akron/Family. Or David Coulter. Hell, Fire On Fire...
• The Style Council. Just the Style Council
  • Just look at the list of genres wikipedia lists: Rock, New Wave, synthpop, Sophisti-pop, deep house, Avant-Garde, Classical, Jazz, Funk. And they leave out rap, acid jazz, and many others. And everytime they do something new, it is epic. Can you say nearly 8 minute long funk songs?
    • 8 minute funk songs are typical for P-Funk.
• Stoner metal band Monster Magnet are primarily based on Hawkwind and Black Sabbath, but also include elements of NWOBHM, glam, surf, Delta blues, The Doors, garage rock, and the occasional Latin-tinged ballad.
• Brave Combo made their name playing polka versions of Jimi Hendrix songs.
• The Kronos Quartet are a string quartet who, along from works from the classical tradition, have also covered Jimi Hendrix and Thelonious Monk tunes.
• Electro Funk (aka Boogie): Which was/is a mixture of funk, R&B and electro. Arguably The Zapp Band was the prototypes.
• The Red Hot Chilli Pipers, inventors of "bagrock". Let's play rock music on the bagpipes! Then let's play rocked-up versions of traditional pipe tunes! Then let's play both at once! (For instance, "Long Way To The Top - If You Wanna Bagrock" is a medley of "The Old Hag At The Churn", the titular AC/DC track, and "Steam Train To Mallaig".)
  • There are now two bagrock groups: former Chillis guitarist Gregor McPhie recently formed Bags of Rock.
• Good Hustle is mostly rock with experimental twinges of anything from blues, funk, to all flavoring of metal, pop, punk, electronica, noise, and has, at once point, done a country song. Their main gimmick is that they've vowed to never play any of their songs the same way twice - they'll just as often drop a funk line into what had been metal a few moments ago, or turn a smooth funk into noise.
• Kaizers Orchestra can most easily be described as Tom Waits-esque Gypsy Punk with a profound respect for untraditional percussion.
• 311 is well-known for their blend of rock, reggae, rap, and funk.
• Put Fela Kuti-style Afrobeat, Brian Eno's electronic treatments, Americana, and the energy of The Clash into a blender, and you get Talking Heads.
• The Velvet Underground took standard pop and brought in the influences of classical composers such as John Cage and La Monte Young. The result? They spit out distorted jams like the 17-minute "Sister Ray" from White Light/White Heat now considered a masterpiece. And, of course, they also wrote a lot of nice little pop ditties as well.
• Vektor fits under the progressive thrash metal label, but there's so much stuff going on with them that "progressive" is almost an understatement. You've got thrash, yes, but they also throw in technical death metal, black metal, 80s shred, progressive rock, post-rock, power metal, Florida-style death/thrash, and even some down-'n-dirty Motorhead/Venom-style riffing. It has to be heard to be believed.
• BrokenCYDE's music is a combination of Glam Rap and Punk and Screamo called Crunkcore.
• The Forgotten Archetype parodies this by mixing grindcore, rap, pop, electropop, chamber, jazz, power metal and many more genres.
• Nobuo Uematsu surely gets an honorable mention for his most famous Crowning Music of Awesome piece, One Winged Angel from Final Fantasy VII, which is basically the bastard love child of Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" (from which it borrows lyrics) and Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze".
  • And that's to say nothing of "Otherworld".
• Japanese Black Metal band Sigh invoke both this trope and Genre Roulette often within the same song. Not only do they frequently incorporate influences from Progressive Rock, Psychedelic Rock, classical, Thrash Metal, jazz, and a number of other styles within their songs, but they often shift entire music genres on a dime, with oddities like dub reggae or disco breaks thrown into the middle of songs, or classical snippets overlaid with what appears to be samples of hundreds of giggling babies used to close albums. Imaginary Sonicscape is probably their most blatant use of this, but pretty much all of their works starting with about Infidel Art clearly invoke it, and there were suggestions that their sound would develop in that direction even before that.
• Mr B. the Gentleman Rhymer combines rap with the posher version of British Music Hall. And the banjo.
• Italian parody metal band Nanowar of Steel mostly aim their arrows at either Manowar or Rhapsody, but in Odino & Valhalla they manage to parody Ennio Morricone, the lambada, Pink Floyd and System of a Down, all in the same song.
• HORSE The Band combines an unlikely mixture of Post-hardcore and Chiptune, occasionally with a post-metal vibe.
• Vanilla Ice started out with radio-friendly pop-rap on To The Extreme, then switches to funk/jazz/rap on Mind Blowin, and then he went for a Nu-Metal sound on Hard To Swallow, since then his music has been a combination of industrial metal, nu-metal, punk, gangsta rap and hip-hop, Ice himself describes his music as "Molten Metal Hip-Hop".
• The Prodigy became one of the greatest electronic acts of the 90s by codifying the genre of music called "Big Beat" out of Acid House, Drum'n'Bass, Jungle, and Breakbeat on the electronic side, and Punk, Metal, Progressive, and Psychedelic, on the rock side, along side the heavy use of sampling from such diverse genres as Funk, Jazz, and Reggae.
• Sting & The Police threw jazz, reggae and punk into a blender, adding New Wave into the mix later on. And that's not counting the other styles that Sting has explored in his solo career.
  • How about Stewart Copeland?
• Ludo is, well... something like this. There really is no way to describe it. The Other Wiki has them down as Power Pop, Pop Rock, and Alternative Rock; TV Tropes lists them as Alternative Rock, Geek Rock, and Rock Opera.
• Progressive Metal band Painted In Exile are an almost ludicrous example; Skylines travels during its 9 minutes through hip-hop, extreme metal, jazz, progressive rock and melodic, poppy material and manages to remain a somewhat cohesive song.
• Kylie Minogue's 1994 single "Confide in Me" is a mix of trip-hop, baroque pop, dance pop, R&B, and new jack swing.
• The 1970's group Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band mixed disco with 1930's big band swing.
• Singer/composer Akiko Shikata 's music is a combination of neoclassical, darkwave, medieval, Renaissance, folk, ambient, Celtic, pop, and symphonic metal.
• Balkan Beat Box mixes klezmer, Arabic, and Balkan music with hip-hop beats.
• Russian band Xe-NONE mixes Eurodance and Heavy Metal. Yes, really.
• The band, Friends of Dean Martinez, are a good example of this. Two of their members composed the soundtrack to Red Dead Redemption, and their music certainly carries some of the spanish/western feel present in the game, but there's also a classical touch, and a little Post-Rock, surf rock, and psychedelic rock thrown together. And it's awesome.
• Kagrra, combines VisualKei/rock and traditional Japanese music. They call it "Neo Japanesque".
• Dorso combines Heavy Metal, Grindcore, Thrash Metal, Jazz, Progressive Rock /Metal and his last album is mixed with Industrial Metal.
• The Egyptian artist Mohamed Mounir combines Egyptian pop, Funk, Jazz, Reggae, Blues, and traditional Nubian music. He is therefore one of the most popular—and definitely the most enduring—contemporary artists in Modern Egypt.
• Enter Shikari embodies this trope perfectly. Get post-hardcore, stick a load of electronica in, add a twist of metal, flavour with dubstep and such as needed.
• Electric Six. Disco, metal, funk, garage rock, New Wave and lyrics based chiefly around sex, drugs, dancing and FIRE.
• Rolo Tomassi. You got your mathcore, your acid jazz, your experimental rock, your 8-bit Nintendo synths, your grindcore and your Soprano and Gravel singing styles both coming from the same girl.
  • Perhaps their music could be termed "dreamgrind"
• Streetlight Manifesto mix ska, punk, acoustic, big band, funk and hardcore. Fans of Streetlight Manifesto, and frontman Tomas Kalnoky's side project Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution (another genre-splicer, fusing acoustic, ska and Middle Eastern influences), sometimes refer to this as "the fourth wave of ska".
• British genre-hoppers Sikth were described in one review as "speed metal, progressive metal, thrash, nu metal, metalcore, and cock-rock". Add in the lightning-speed jabbered vocals that border on scat-singing and the haunting piano melodies and you're halfway there.
• Kvelertak mix black metal, rock 'n' roll, power metal, prog, disco, hardcore punk, folk, hard rock and acoustic passages. And scream in Norwegian. And play almost entirely naked.
• Keelhaul play a bizarre fusion of mathcore and stoner metal, like Dillinger Escape Plan meets Kyuss with a shedload of marijuana. And it is awesome.
• Slipknot. No, don't look at me like that - before Corey joined the band, they were the Mr. Bungle of nu-metal, mixing the genre with death metal, groove metal, industrial metal, funk, jazz and disco of all genres. This style can be seen on their demo album, Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat.
• Cattle Decapitation started out as fairly typical deathgrind with some noise influences, but as their career went on they grew more and more eclectic. As of now, they blend together deathgrind, technical death metal, post-rock, darkwave, noise, post-punk, free jazz, progressive rock, and various other genres into one very unpredictable package.
• Blur. They went from shoegazer band to Britpop and then basically became a noise rock band with influences from grunge, gospel, trip hop and Pavement style lo-fi indie rock, before finally finishing up as something resembling Albarn's other project, Gorillaz - influences from jazz, hip hop, dub and world music.
• The Crystalline Effect. Techno, trip-hop, EBM, industrial and electronic, and you never know what they'll come up with next.
• The String Cheese Incident is mainly a bluegrass band, but with elements of funk, progressive rock, reggae, jazz, and even electronica.
• Richard Hell and the Voidoids' first album Blank Generation mixes the stripped-down punk sound with the minimalist jazz/prog of Hell's former band, the Art Rockers Television. The second album, Destiny Street, included different styles including blues covers (I Can Only Give You Everything, originally by Them and also covered by MC5, and I Gotta Move, a Kinks cover), pop punk (Kid With The Replaceable Head), a sentimental punk ballad (Time), and the title song, Destiny Street, a seven-minute funk song. And every bit sounds just as Punk Rock as the Sex Pistols or the Ramones.
• Zdob si Zdub. The Other Wiki lists them as "Ska-punk rapcore" which they may very well be. Let's just say there's a lot of guitar riffs, rapping, trumpets, sampling and Moldovan folk music. Just...just go listen to them.
• Space are generally classified as indie, but draw influences from hip-hop (particularly on Spiders), film soundtracks, big band, rock 'n' roll, techno, and electronica, with Tin Planet being the most noticeable example of this. It's kind of expected, really, since the band had a singer who was more influenced by films than music, a classic rock fan guitarist, one drummer into jazz and another one into hip-hop and loops, a keyboard player who was seriously into dance music, and a bassist who liked literally anything. Jamie's songs were more indie/rock oriented, while Franny's tracks were almost entirely electronic instrumentals. Spiders made heavy use of loops and samples, Tin Planet was noticeably poppier, while Suburban Rock 'n' Roll and the never-released Flies had a harder edge to them. The lost album Love You More Than Football was somewhere in between. Their latest material has more of a Ska and Rockabilly feel blended with the Spiders sound.
• British expatriate Edward Ka-Spel — of The Legendary Pink Dots, The Tear Garden, and Mimir — is fond of blending multiple musical styles and influences in his various projects; to the point where his music is typically categorized as "Experimental" or "Neo-Psychedelic", as it tends to vary widely between Post-Punk, Post-Rock, Psychedelic, Industrial, Electronica, and so on.
• This is one way to describe the awesomeness that is Outkast. Another way is "Southernplayalisticadillacmusic."
• ZZ Top was one of the few bands that managed to pull off New Wave electro-Blues Rock in the 1980s, with the albums Eliminator and Afterburner.
  • Another was Robert Plant with 1983's Big Log.
• John Paul Larkin started off simply doing scat-style jazz music. His manager suggested that he combine that with hip-hop and modern dance music. While hesitant at first, he later warmed up to it and it was this combination that would earn him fame as Scatman John.
• A Hawk and a Hacksaw are pretty strictly folk music, but they mash many different folk traditions—Balkan, Turkish, Romani, Klezmer, Mariachi—into something unique.
• Deftones started as one of the pioneering Nu Metal bands, but eventually evolved into a sort of one-of-a-kind band that has elements of Alternative Metal, Dream Pop, Doom Metal, Stoner Rock, Post-Rock, Alternative Rock, Shoegazing, Trip Hop, Psychedelic Rock, Progressive Metal... you're starting to get the idea.
• Run–D.M.C., during the fierce rivalry and segregation that existed between rock and hip-hop in The '80s, were one of the few acts to seamlessly combine the two together. Their unique style was the basis of the Rap Rock genre, and they proved that the two can coexist together. They are one of the few that were highly respected by both camps, which holds true to this day.
• Sound Horizon is usually a Symphonic Metal band. Sort of. It's not unheard of for them to dip into baroque, pop rock, choral, orchestral, Russian folk, jazz, and, facetiously in one live concert, chiptune.
• Vanessa Amorosi: "Hazardous" included Rock, Power pop, Synth pop and rap. "Mr Mysterious" is proof of this.
• Bear McCreary combines Western and Eastern melodies with rock and chorus on Battlestar Galactica.
• Namgar combines traditional Buryat-Mongolian Folk Music and chants with modern rock.
• Foster the People seems to be electro/folk/industrial/dance/progressive alternative rock. One song on their Torches album is called Call It What You Want.
• Revocation is technical/melodic death metal at their core, but in addition to copious amounts of thrash, they also throw in jazz, blues, Southern rock, first-wave metalcore, grindcore, math rock, 70s hard rock, 80s shred, surf rock, funk, 70s prog, and pretty much whatever the hell they feel like putting in. And it works.
• Pop Will Eat Itself. British punk + goth rock + electronica + rap. At the time they were associated with "grebo", a loosely defined scene in the late 80's and 90's combining elements of alternative rock, garage rock, hip-hop, and electronic dance music.
• Kerli refers to herself and her musical style as Bubble Goth, a combination of Bubblegum pop and Goth music.
• 30 Seconds to Mars combines Progressive Metal, Alternative Metal, and Space Rock with elements of Emo, Post-Hardcore, Progressive Rock, Hard Rock, Screamo, Synth Rock, Post-Grunge and Alternative Rock.
• Bal-Sagoth is the ultimate epitome of this trope: Epic Black Symphonic Power Metal. Their singer also doubles as a narrator with a deep, sexy voice.
• Fleshgod Apocalypse - Symphonic technical death metal. Classical music at 300 BPM.
• Coheed and Cambria is rooted in Progressive Metal, but unusually has prominent Pop Punk and Emo influences.
• Jim Croce mixed folk, country, blues, and pop, with the occasional bit of rock 'n' roll, bluegrass, or classical thrown in.
• Birdeatsbaby have recently renounced associating themselves to any particular genre. Some heavy influences are classical music, dark cabaret and power pop.
• The music of the Japanese band Dir en grey has covered just about every Sub-Genre of Heavy Metal, with the exception of maybe Power Metal.
• Cardiacs. Half the people who hear it call it punk, half the people who hear it call it prog rock, all of them are somehow right...
• Pepe Deluxé started their life playing big beat and trip-hop. Over time, they morphed into playing Psychedelic Rock instead, while maintaining a big beat approach to song construction. (Pepe Deluxé used to feature a lot of samples in their music; since the transition to psych rock, one of their guiding principles is to create songs that sound like they were built from samples, without actually using any samples.) Their 2012 album Queen of the Wave combines psych rock with Surf Rock and Baroque Pop, with additional influence from early electronic music, opera, soul, 60s girl-band pop, acid folk, and easy listening.
• Maximum the Hormone are oft considered a nu-metal band, but their songs all have mixed elements taken from pop-punk, funk, extreme metal, punk rock, glam-rock, ska, and J-pop.
• French rapper MC Solaar started as a fairly orthodox rapper in the 90s, mostly known for his optimistic themes and talent in convoluted rhymes. In the 2000s however, he started to mix his rap with pretty much everything, from jazz to rock to folk to techno to symphonic music to what-you-want (starting with Solaar pleure in 2001). He also sometimes adopts quite a unique diction, halfway between rap and singing. Sadly, it didn't work out that well for him since his old fans started to complain it wasn't rap anymore.
• As described by Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine, her style could be described as "Chamber pop goth stomp, crossed with a choir of nuns being thrown down the stairs." iTunes classifies her albums under the umbrella term "Alternative".
• Rip Rig + Panic's music contains (both separately and in various combinations) elements of punk, jazz, classical, funk, dance pop, soul, noise rock, spoken word, and African and Latin rhythms. They are probably best known for this appearance on the Britcom The Young Ones.
• Natalia O Shea combines Celtic and Slavic Folk Music with fantasy influences and The Power of Rock to produce a distinctive sound very popular with the Role-Playing Game movement.
• Now what kind of music does Ween play again?
• Area 11 are band formed into 2010 that is establishing a new genre called "Gaijin-Rock", which blends J-Pop and Western "guitar worship" shred rock. Their lyrics reference Japanese culture, specifically anime, and sometimes video games. They're from Bristol, in the UK. Hence "gaijin", which means "foreigner" in Japanese. By their own admission, their music is made of elements of Pop Punk, Heavy Metal, Progressive Rock, and glam.
• Britpop band Supergrass was originally described as the Buzzcocks, the Jam, Madness, the Kinks, Small Faces, Elton John, David Bowie, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones thrown into a blender.
• Toto's original drummer Jeff Porcaro described the band's debut single, "Hold the Line", as: "a perfect example of what people will describe as your Heavy Metal chord guitar licks, your great triplet A-notes on the piano, your 'Sly'-hot-fun-in-the-summertime groove, all mishmashed together with a boy from New Orleans singing... and it really crossed over a lot of lines."
• The Sound of Danish Band Volbeat can be best described as a combination of Heavy Metal, Groove Metal, Hard Rock, Punk Rock and Rockabilly.
• Hideki Naganuma's peculiar musical style heard in Jet Set Radio and Sonic Rush incorporates funk, rock, house, drum 'n bass, hip hop, techno and other styles to create an awesomely unique sound.
• Bastion's soundtrack is described by the composer as "acoustic frontier trip-hop."
• King Crimson might be classified as Progressive Rock but they go well beyond convention. They regularly mixed Classical Music, Jazz, and Hard Rock with hints of Proto-Metal, Proto-Industrial, Funk, Noise Rock, and Jimi Hendrix. Not only does it work, but they were doing this in 1969.
• Delhi 2 Dublin is a band that mixes traditional Indian music (sitars and the like) with Celtic fiddles and whistles, and filters the lot through a little bit of techno.
• Todd Edwards takes snippets from old Soul, R&B, Folk, Rock, Gospel, and Disco records and blends them all together into a mix of 2-step Garage and House.
• The Avalanches' Since I Left You album ended up becoming this, due to the wide variety of samples used. It sounds like a mix of Breakbeat, Trip-Hop, Hip-Hop, House, Soul, Funk, Cabaret and Ambient music, with elements of 1940s-50s Easy Listening thrown in.
• With all these references to Jimi Hendrix, it's easy to forget that he played slightly noisy Rock and Roll mixed with Blues, various types of Jazz, Funk, Psychedelic Rock, and R&B with Punk Rock attitude.
• The Cars were a curious mix of New Wave, arena rock, garage-rock, synth pop, Power Pop, mainstream pop-rock and '60's-influenced bubblegum (topped with Ric Ocasek's beat poet-influenced Word Salad Lyrics) with occasional dabblings in synth-minimalism, Queen-like vocal harmonies (Queen's early producer Roy Thomas Baker produced the first four albums) and Roxy Music-like art-rock, who were equally capable of fitting in with alternative, pop and hard rock demographics. And yet they never fully fit in with any of those styles. It did manage to fit in well with the music of the day and sell millions.
• Darren Korb, the composer for the Bastion soundtrack, refers to it as "acoustic frontier triphop" and, by Pyth, it sure is. His soundtrack for Supergiant Games' subsequent project Transistor also fits - he described it as "old-world electronic post-rock".
• Sounds of Mass Production(SMP) is Industrial Metal Hip-Hop.
• Helalyn Flowers: Gothic New Wave Electro Industrial Metal Alternative Dance.
• Mr.76ix: Detroit Acid IDM Chiptune Dubstep Breakcore.
• mind.in.a.box, as well as Stefan Poiss's solo side project Thyx, combine elements from Dark Wave, Progressive Trance, Futurepop,Dubstep, and Demoscene music, with Chiptune added to the mix on R.E.T.R.O..
• Blowupnihilist is a combination of ambient, industrial, noise rock, and death metal.
• Pentatonix: A Cappella + techno, dubstep, pop...
• Project Pitchfork's current style is a mix of Dark Wave and Hellektro/Aggrotech.
• Inna: Europop + Balearic house + electro + hiphop.
• Front Line Assembly's Echogenetic combines their classic EBM sound with dubstep.
• MacUmba is a group that blends Brazillian Samba drums and rhythms with Highland bagpipes.
• Boiled In Lead has been variously described as "celtopunk", "rock and reel", and probably most accurately, "unclassifiable". Their blurb on allmusic.com lists their "styles" as : "Celtic, Alternative/Indie Rock, Celtic Rock, Post-Punk, South/Eastern European Traditions, Middle Eastern Traditions, Traditional Middle Eastern Folk, Worldbeat". That pretty much says it all.
• Billy Idol's music is a mixture of pop, Hair Metal, Punk, New Wave and Synth-Pop, with occasional Rockabilly and (in 1993) Industrial influences.
• Abacinate mixes elements of brutal death metal, metalcore, NYHC, thrash metal, beatdown hardcore, grindcore, stoner metal, and even some blackened death into an odd but strangely cohesive package.
• Ayria, at least her present style, is basically Industrial Electropop.
• Pensées Nocturnes is essentially Voltaire style Gothic music meets Emperor style Black Metal meets Classical Music Symphonic Bombast with a French twist (they are French after all).
• TD Cruze on his Pavlov's Dogs EP. It combined aspects of Hip-Hop, Noise, Post-Punk, and House music.
• Sally Shapiro's style may be described as Trancy Italo Dream Synthpop.
• French progressive metal band Sebkha-Chott incorporate influences from so many disparate genres that it's difficult to describe them, apart from comparing them to other examples of this trope such as Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Mike Patton, Magma, and Frank Zappa. The band themselves make a mockery of genre by categorising themselves as made-up styles like Mekanik Metal Disco, Abstract Low Coast Hip Hop, Concrete Violence, AvantPorn Mekanik Metal, and Bizarre AvantPorn Mekanik TheaterCore.
• Portland-based metal act Nux Vomica is, well... what the hell are they? When you get a band that mixes sludge metal and crust punk with, among other things, melodic death metal, post-rock, black metal, emo, and noise rock, you'll find that classifying them is a daunting task.
  • Inter Arma is an even better example. Mixing elements of sludge metal, black metal, post-rock, noise, Southern rock, progressive rock, neofolk, and country, they've created a sound that ensures that no one will ever really sound quite like them.
• Norwegian band Shining began as an acoustic jazz quartet. Now, they combine black metal, free jazz, progressive rock, industrial, classical music and noise.
• Russkaja combines Russian folk music, ska, punk, polka, metal, and funk, including the use of the "potete", a homemade instrument that combines a trumpet and a trombone. They refer to themselves as "Russian turbo polka".
• tool is notoriously difficult to classify due to the sheer amount of genres they cover. Progressive Rock, post-hardcore, Math Rock, Post-Rock, Noise Rock, ambient, art rock, and more all blend together to create something that really can't be conveniently labeled. "Progressive rock" and "progressive metal" are the most common labels applied to them, but even those are spotty at best.
• Ghoul combines elements of thrash metal, death metal, goregrind, punk rock, surf rock, and hard rock to create a unique, fun, and immensely catchy style that ties in with their mythos very well.
• The brony band Evening Star is a mix of Neoclassical, New Age, EDM, and drum & bass.
• Justice started out as a French house act, but take a lot of influence from genres as diverse as disco, punk, indie rock, alternative metal, industrial and, especially on their second album Audio, Video, Disco, progressive rock.
• Living Colour is a mixture of Heavy Metal, Punk Rock, Funk, Hip-Hop, Jazz, and Alternative Rock. The elements were subtle enough that they didn't alienate any listeners.
• Panic! at the Disco frontman Brendon Urie has described the band's genre as "trip-hop cabaret dance punk". And that was just their first album, A Fever You Can't Sweat Out. Their second album was Beatles-esque pop rock, and while their third was a return to the genre of the first, their most recent album is a combination of pop, rock, techno, and dance, with strong dubstep influences.
• Robots with Rayguns is what you get when you combine synthwave, tech-house, hip-hop, and freestyle.
• Postmodern Jukebox is the living embodiment of this trope. Wham's "Careless Whispers" as a 1930s jazz tune. Radiohead's "Creep" performed in vintage soul style. The acoustic electro-swing hiphop version of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.
• Lorde's music has elements of Dream Pop, Electronica, Synthpop, Minimalism, Ambient, Indie Pop, Art Pop, Dark Wave, Contemporary, and even a few traces of Hip-Hop can be found in the beats. All of this combines together to form a kind of music that's both Pop and Alternative simultaneously. Case in point, her Breakthrough Hit "Royals" topped both the US Pop and Alternative charts when it was released.
• The genre of the band Twenty One Pilots is notoriously hard to pin down. Their music has elements of styles such as indie, pop, alternative rock, rap, and electronica/techno, among others. The tone can vary a lot from song to song, and even the same song can have parts that normally wouldn't really fit together, but they somehow make it work. And even though one song can be heavy on the electronics and rapping and another can be a light tune played on a ukulele, they still have a distinct sound that connects it all together. They just don't care about sticking to what other people define as genres. When a label is absolutely necessary, they're usually categorized as schizo-pop. Alternative Hip Hop is a term that's been used to describe them as well.
  Tyler: I would describe our music as a burrito that has all the things that you want in it. Even chocolate. ...Which some people don't like. It's like, everyone likes chocolate. Not everyone might like chocolate and steak together, you know, which are two great things... So it's an acquired taste.
• M.I.A.'s genre simply can't be labeled. Supposedly she's a rapper, but that's just a small portion of what her music consists of. She combines hip-hop with alternative dance, reggae, world, dance hall, electroclash, baile funk, Tamil film music, grime, rave, punk rock, and industrial. All of that is made into upbeat songs with dark, politically charged lyrics pertaining to child prostitution, ethnic conflicts, and terrorism or simply going out to raves. All the while, she's still made Pop hits (most notably "Paper Planes"). M.I.A. herself classifies her genre of music as "Other".
• Trans-Siberian Orchestra is Neoclassical Progressive Symphonic Rock/Metal that plays Christmas-themed Rock Operas.
• The Missing Parts is an acoustic trio based in Tucson, Arizona who frequently collaborate with other local bands and artists. Their genre is a bit difficult to pin down, but it definitely has some mixed Celtic and European folk elements.
• Laurel Halo combines deep tech-house and IDM.
• Issues is perhaps one of the first bands to combine the hard-hitting instruments of metal with the poppy R&B vocal styles of Top 40 music. They combine metalcore and nu metal together in a way that seems refreshing, and are among the first bands in over decade to make us of turntables. Their debut album took elements from just about every non-metal genre and mixed them together, including electronica, hip-hop, and even a gospel choir at the end. Word of God says their next album is going to be even more experimental. You could say they've formed a genre of their own, that some critics refer to as "Pop Metal" (whether that term is positive or not depends on your point of view).
• Sleigh Bells has been described as a mix of pop, metal, punk, electronica, and R&B.
• Gunslinger (the electronic band, not to be confused with bands of the same name in other genres) are a fusion of alternative rock, synthpop, psytrance, and dubstep.
• Lifelover seems to be one of the most known to do this. While they were mainly focused within the Black Metal genre, they often threw themselves with Post-Punk, Doom Metal, dark ambient, depressive rock, hell even Pop music. This resulted with each of their four albums to sound different and more radical than before.
• Clipping is a band that features fairly traditional rapping... over Harsh Noise.
• Estradasphere were an experimental rock group who were very fond of mixing genres: On their website they claimed to have invented such genres as "Bulgarian Surf", "Romanian Gypsy-Metal", and "Spaghetti Eastern". The album Quadropus was a deliberate effort to tone things down and at least stick to one genre per song, though it's still unusual to hear Surf Rock ("Crystal Blue"), Rap Metal ("Body Slam"), and a traditional Greek instrumental ("Mekapses Yitonisa") all on the same album.
• Don't forget Oingo Boingo, who started out as a performance art troupe (The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, inspired by Frank Zappa, above) which mutated into a mix of rock & roll, ska, scat, jazz, punk, new wave, funk, world music, and several other genres (whew!). Former members Steve Bartek (who got his start with psychedelic band Strawberry Alarm Clock) and Danny Elfman now write film scores, many of which are Genre Roulette/Genre Mashup themselves.
• Major Lazer has this more-or-less as the main point. At the very least, they mix together EDM with Dancehall. However, they also take influence from African, Middle Eastern, and Indian music whenever they feel like, and experiment with Pop and Hip-Hop along the way.
• Voivod started out as punky thrash metal, but by Killing Technology, they were a one-of-a-kind mix of thrash metal, progressive rock, post-punk, hardcore, noise rock, and modern classical. Essentially, they were the result of a classically-trained violinist picking up a guitar, getting heavily into prog, and forming a band with a bunch of punk kids who were more into Motorhead, Venom, and Discharge and letting all those influences coalesce together.
• English girl group Girls Aloud were often cited for having a refreshing and experimental style especially in a time when many girl groups were all cut from a particular mold and also for having been formed on a reality TV show. Their debut single "Sound of the Underground" all contained elements of dance-pop, pop rock, drum and bass and surf rock. This was especially helped by British production team Xenomania, who were very fond of playing with and mashing multiple genres together.
• Vampire Weekend combines indie rock and pop with African music, which they call the "Upper West Side Sweato".
• The Music Tapes is a Rock band... were the main instrument is a banjo (that is commonly fiddled like a cello). Old keyboards (so old they don't use electricity), brass instruments, bass, drums and a singing saw (A saw that is bowed like a violin) are also commonly used. They also have things like a singing TV and a giant metronome to name a few. The songs themselves? Are more similar to Gothic Lullaby's then actual rock songs (Excluding a few from their first album, 1st Imaginary Symphony for Nomad).
• Raury combines Folk Music with, of all things, Hip-Hop. It's common for him to sing, but then suddenly start rapping out of nowhere, like a DIY wild rapper appearance. What's most surprising, is the fact that it actually works.
• Cyber Space mixes spacesynth with Eurodance vocal samples.
• Big Grams, a collaboration between rapper Big Boi (of Outkast fame, see above) and electronic rock band Phantogram. Since it combines both their styles of music, it could best be described as "Southern Psychedelic Electronic Experimental Shoegaze Rap".
• Future Islands: '60s Soul meets '80s New Wave.
• Jess Glynne blends old-school styles of Soul with modern Dance-pop / House Music, giving her a unique sound that feels both old and new.
• Alex Clare combines Alternative Rock with '60s R&B and Soul, along with Electronic Music genres such as Dubstep, Drum and Bass and House Music in the mix.
• Clean Bandit is a neoclassical-pop-EDM band with occasional bits of reggae and funk.
• Set It Off's genre is apparently orchestral-symphonic-synth-pop punk.
• Elle King combines indie rock, pop, and southern/country in a way few people have done before.
• Om combines stoner metal, psychedelic rock, dub, ragas, Arabic classical music, and mantra-like chants into a hypnotic package that is usually referred to as stoner metal despite being so much more.
• In part because they played Hardcore Punk when it had still been largely an Unbuilt Trope, Dead Kennedys are an example of this. In some of their songs they display elements of Surf Rock, Rockabilly, Spaghetti Western soundtracks, Psychedelic Rock, and even (occasionally) Progressive Rock. A few later hardcore bands took some of these influences, but very few of them used all of them.
• Marmozets are known for being hard-to-pin-down soundwise, and whether or not they are considered "rock" or "metal". They combine so many different forms of those genres such as Progressive Rock, Post-Hardcore, Mathcore, Alternative Metal, and indie rock music that it doesn't make for a cohesive package. They insist they're just "Alternative Rock", despite being so much more than that.
• Alabama Shakes combine Country Music, Alternative Rock and almost everything in between.
• Guano Apes combined Nu Metal with just about every other genre in existence — Funk, Pop Punk, Comedy Rock, Rap Rock, Pop, Hard Rock, Alternative Metal, Grunge, and Post-Grunge. They later abandoned nu metal for a more alternative rock sound, which didn't really fit the mold.
• Ariana Grande mixes '90s-style R&B with dance-pop, hip-hop, and EDM to create a new yet very commercially accessible sound.
• Franz Ferdinand straddles the line between alternative rock and dance-pop. They mix together art rock, post-punk, dance-punk, and indie rock music for a sound that no one else has quite replicated.
• Katzenjammer, a Norwegian four-piece who mix Balkan folk, bluegrass, country, Weimar cabaret and rock'n'roll with pretty much whatever else they feel like at the time.
• Sunday Driver describe themselves as mixing indie, world music, Asian traditional sounds, jazz and folk.
• Leftöver Crack (and their predecessor, Choking Victim) pioneered and play a style of Ska Punk called "Crack Rock Steady", which fuses crust punk, death metal, hardcore punk, and ska.
• In This Moment started off as pretty straight-forward metalcore but eventually incorporated elements of Industrial Metal, Electronic Music, Nu Metal, and Gothic Metal, all while still retaining some of their old sound, to create a one-of-a-kind metal band.
• Hacktivist is an odd mixture of Rap Metal, Djent, Nu Metal, and Grime. Some songs border on Groove Metal and Metalcore. To say the least, they have a very distinct sound. Some would even call them "progressive rap metal", quite possibly making them the only band of that kind.
• Charli XCX already fits this being a mixture of dark wave, witch house, synthpop, electronica, and pop punk, but it's taken to extremes with 2016's Vroom Vroom EP, which can be described as "hyperpop". Despite only being four songs long, it manages to cover bubblegum pop, grime, trap, EDM, future pop, and even industrial hip-hop.
• SOPHIE (producer of the aforementioned Charli XCX record) personally produces in a style referred to as "experimental pop", featuring elements taken from j-pop, k-pop, eurodance, and even boy band pop music — all taken to an "extreme" form, not mention the various noises she integrates into her music. It's almost impossible to tell what genre she's playing because of how weird and avant-garde it all sounds.
• From Ashes to New's goal is to revitalize Nu Metal in the '10s. They do this by incorporating elements of Metalcore, Hip-Hop, Post-Hardcore, Hard Rock, and flavorings of Electronic Music reminiscent of Skrillex to create a new, refreshing take on a genre that fell out of style over a decade ago.
• Bring Me the Horizon started off a pretty straight-forward Deathcore, then played straight-forward Metalcore with the second album. Later albums featured them expanding on that style, mixing Metalcore with elements of Progressive Metal, Post-Rock, and electronica by Sempiternal. Then, all of this was (pardon the pun) "throne" out the window with That's the Spirit. They abandoned metalcore completely in favor of lighter style of music. Apart from "not metalcore", it's extremely tricky trying to pin down a genre for the album as a whole. Alternative Rock, Alternative Metal, Electronic Rock, Nu Metal, Pop Punk, Pop Rock, Emo, and Post-Hardcore have all been tagged to this album.
• Dangerkids is Linkin Park-esque Nu Metal mixed with Metalcore and Electronic Music. They basically sound like what would happen if Linkin Park expanded upon the sound of their two original albums, rather than abandoning it completely.
• Years & Years blends together '90s-esque House Music with Contemporary R&B beautifully.
• Katy B combines R&B with various genres of EDM, such as dubstep and house. The kind of Electronic Music used depends on who the producer is in each song.
• In one segment of the NPR radio-show This American Life entitled "Paint By Numbers", host Ira Glass commissioned a song combining the most-hated musical elements as voted by the public - The Most Unwanted Song. It featured, among other things, an opera singer rapping a cowboy song accompanied by a tuba and a children's choir singing about Labor Day! AND IT'S AWESOME!
  • As a point of contrast, The Most Unwanted Song was commissioned alongside a piece labeled The Most Wanted Song. The resultant glurge was five minutes of "easy listening-style adult contemporary sound that could peel the paint off of the Space Shuttle."
• Although not a full genre or a full band example, the Pogues in concert brought Lynval Golding up onstage to play "A Message To You, Rudy" in a Celtic Ska style
• Seattle over Memorial Day weekend hosts the Folklife Festival (the largest folk and eclectic music festival in the US that's still free admission). Expect a lot of experimental bands and equally experimental descriptions in the guidebook. It's not uncommon for one to find sea shanties rendered in chiptune or bagpipe and steel-drum covers of Beatles songs.
• Another single song example: Bassnectar mixes different subgenres, but usually stays within the broad genre of Electronic Music - However, the song "Pennywise Tribute" is more or less jungle dubstep skatepunk (the title being a Shout-Out to punk rock group Pennywise).
• Nero is a mix of various Electronic Music genres, including Dubstep, Drum and Bass, electro-pop, breakbeat, and electronic rock. All of these came together to make their debut album Welcome Reality what it was. Their second album Between II Worlds is a different kind, fusing together electro, future house, big beat, and progressive for an overall darker sound.
• The Glitch Mob are known for being very hard to describe. They combine gltich, electrogaze, IDM, hip-hop, synthpop, dubstep, and electronic rock together to form a sound that's one-of-a-kind.
• Flume's genre is evidently trippy wonky experimental bass downtempo EDM with some pop, R&B, and hip-hop elements here and there. His music defies easy classification yet is instantly recognizable the moment it's heard.
• Exotype combines Heavy Metal with Electronic Music. That would've been enough to qualify them, but they take it even further with the various genres on both ends. You got Djent, Deathcore, Nu Metal, Metalcore, and Progressive Metal on the metal end, and Brostep, Trance, Glitch, Industrial, and occasional Ambient on the electronic side. You also got your mix of singing, rapping, screaming, and growling all coming from the same guy.
• Unlocking the Truth blends together various retro metal styles such trad, speed, and thrash with nu metal and alternative rock.
• Cormorant describes themselves as Tiberian-Ass Bastard Folk: Progressive Metal with blends of Melodic Death Metal, Black Metal, 70's Hard Rock, Post-Rock and of course Folk Music.
• Black Sabbath is considered the first Heavy Metal band, and are often thought of as being just that. However, they created metal out of a mixture of Psychedelic Rock, Hard Rock, Progressive Rock, Blues Rock, and Acid Rock, along with varying influences along the way that helped shape metal as we know it today.
• Babymetal, one of those acts that could only have come from Japan, blend Japanese Pop Music, pretty much every genre of metal in existence from Power Metal to Black Metal, and several forms of electronic music, amongst other genres. They very well may have created their own genre.
• In an instance of following the leader, so-called "Kawaiicore" group Ladybaby took Babymetal's concept and cranked it far beyond eleven by upping the J-Pop elements and having the Harsh Vocals be live. Its original 2015 incarnation consisted of two teenage pinup models, Rie Kaneko and Rei Kuromiya (the latter had already formed an all-girl rock band with her older sister) singing cute & perky high-pitched vocals alongside Australian pro wrestler Richard "Ladybeard" Magarey… and HE was the one wearing a maid outfit and pigtails while death-screaming like something out of Napalm Death. It's a strange mix best experienced for oneself, so here's a link to one of their songs on their official Youtube channel.
  • After Magarey's departure due to a contract dispute, Rie and Rei continued on as the music became even stranger. While they did have one "normal" pop-rock song (the not-at-all straight "LADY BABY BLUE"), most of their duo output was a combination of J-Rock or J-Metal mixed with Jazz or pop plus their perky vocals… though Rei had started growing, physically and psycholgically, into a deeper richer voice better suited for rock (she was only 14 when Ladybaby started)… and of course background rapping or screaming.
  • Following Rie and Rei's professional and personal falling-out at the end of 2017, Rie decided to rebuild the group from scratch in 2018, found a female screamer named Emily Arima along with two other girls (one of whom was already an Idol in a different group), and things proceeded to get even weirder. Although there were a couple of normal rock ballad songs during this final period, "Damedame Tono" has a samba-inspired bridge, and "Riot Anthem" (partly written by Emily) defies categorization to the point it can really only be called "Progressive".
• Japanese Alt-Idol group PassCode is best described as Babymetal meets Perfume (its longtime producer is a big Perfume fan) meets screaming death. Four cute girls singing J-Pop or J-Rock while the band behind them plays hard rock or Thrash or Speed Metal, the backtrack is Electronica, the girls themselves are often heavily vocoded, all while one girl – originally Yuna Imada, then Emily Arima (yes, the same girl that was in Ladybaby) following Yuna's retirement – provides Harsh Vocals. It must be seen or heard to be believed, so here is a live recording of one of their best-known songs.
• In a similar case, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas are one of those Japanese bands that can't be easily defined. While often called "Electronicore" or "Digital Hardcore" on the surface, they mix together genres completely at random such as Death Metal, Jazz, Funk, Symphonic Metal, J-pop, Post-Hardcore, Rap Rock, and... whatever else. Seriously. They even define their style as "chaos".
• Texas Hippie Coalition has a style they call "Red Dirt Metal" — which takes influences from both genres. For those who don't know what red dirt is, it's a mix of folk, country, bluegrass, western swing, and blues rock. Now imagine that sonically cranked up with heavy and groove metal influences, and you get their sound.
• Shinobi Ninja is essentially rock + hip-hop + funk + punk + metal + reggae + electronic = their own style that The Other Wiki simply refers to as "Rock".
• The Go! Team, by band leader Ian Parton's own admission, was formed when he wanted to "create music incorporating Sonic Youth-style guitars, double dutch chants, Bollywood soundtracks, old school Hip-Hop, and electro".
• Timmy Trumpet, as you can imagine, plays the trumpet... in an EDM setting.
• Ratatat define their style as "rocktronica", which is fitting because it's equal parts rock music and electronica. Over the course of their career, they've integrated elements of funk, post-rock, and psychedelia, while playing Electronic Music backed by rather intricate guitar playing.
  • They also put out a pair of Remix Albums, simply titled Ratatat Remixes Vol. 1 and Ratatat Remixes Vol. 2, in which they exclusively remix Hip-Hop songs in their "rocktronica" style.
• Tame Impala started as pretty straight-forward Psychedelic Rock, but by their third album, they became a bizarre mixture of psychedelia, pop, disco, R&B, funk, and electronica.
• While starting as a traditional Death Metal band, Trepalium seem to be becoming some sort of hybrid Death Metal/Swing band if this video[1] is anything to go by. They also seem to be incorporating Voodoo-themes into their lyrics.
• Wall of Voodoo played a mixture of new wave and Ennio Morricone-styled spaghetti western soundtrack music, in which one of the most distinctive elements was that their drummer Joe Nanini didn't usually play normal drums - instead, he played on cowbells and pots and pans to the accompaniment of a drum machine.
• Raging Silence, a side project of the futurepop duo Edge of Dawn, is Cinematic Neoclassical Industrial Synth Dubstep.
• A Girl Called Momo mixes tropical house with uplifting trance.
• Most of Savant's music is based on a foundation of complextro and dubstep elements, but he regularly mixes in Chiptune, Hard Rock, Ambient, Orchestral, Industrial, Funk, Black Metal, Disco, Hip-Hop, Folk, and pretty much anything else he feels like-often within the course of a single song. His “Genre” tag on Facebook simply reads “R.I.P GENRES”
• The latter half of Miles Davis' career was spent fusing jazz music with other genres, ranging from rock, pop, funk, rap, and even a dab of the Minneapolis Sound. Bitches Brew and Doo-Bop are just a fraction of his various experimental works.
• DJ Earworm is a mashup artist. As a natural consequence of the top pop songs every years having multiple different genres, the genres themselves end up being mashed up along with the songs in Earworm's work.
• The GrooveGrass Boyz were a late-90s project of Record Producer Scott Rouse, who recruited funk bassist Bootsy Collins and several bluegrass music veterans to create "groovegrass", a micro-genre consisting of country, bluegrass, funk, and electronic dance music. Their most successful song was a cover/partial re-write of "Macarena" done in this style.
• Bruce Springsteen's core genre is rock, but over the course of his career he's integrated a variety of musical influences. Contemporaneous rock critics initially praised him precisely for integrating many of rock's traditions. His earliest bands went from Beatles-influenced rock, to hard rock, to more soul and R&B influence. His first two albums were a mixture of folk, jazz, soul, and R&B influences with Van Morrison as a big influence. His third album Born to Run integrated influences ranging from Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, Elvis, Roy Orbison and more. His fourth album was influenced by the emerging punk scene. Later albums also began incorporating more country influence in terms of sound and lyrical themes. Plus the songs that he's given away to other artists of different genres.
• Mdou Moctar plays desert blues, also known as tishoumaren, assouf, or Tuareg rock, which is a fusion between rock and blues and traditional Tuareg music.
• Bloodywood crosses political Rap Metal in the vein of Rage Against the Machine with rhythms and instrumentation from traditional Indian folk music (the band's name is a pun on "Bollywood").
• Gryphon: While classified as Progressive Rock, there's also elements of Folk Music, medieval folk rock and Renaissance. Rounding this out is classical music as founding members Richard Harvey and Brian Gulland were both classically trained at the Royal College of Music in London.
• Eminem is undoubtedly a Hip-Hop artist, but has a unique Signature Style due to fusing it with 'white' musical influences like mainstream Pop, Classical Music (in a style his producers the Bass Brothers called "clap"), teen pop, country, Circus Synths, children's music, and especially Classic Rock.
• German band Disbelief combines death metal with elements of thrash metal, sludge metal, post-rock, gothic metal, darkwave, nu metal, and alternative metal into a unique package that is extremely accessible yet difficult to describe.
• Italian group The Sidh combines Celtic wind instruments with guitars and electronic (often dubstep) production."Shake That Bagpipe" indeed.
• Much of KMFDM's UAIOE focused on an unusual mixture of industrial dance music and reggae - member Morgan Adjei takes lead vocals on several tracks and uses a distinctly reggae-tinged vocal style, and numerous songs contrast reggae rhythms with harsher industrial sounds. This can be considered one brief phase of the group's Early-Installment Weirdness, as no future albums incorporated any reggae element.
• While mixing and matching genres is one of Vylet Pony's defining stylistic elements, Carousel (An Examination of the Shadow, Creekflow...) focuses primarily on fusing aspects of the harsher genres of electronic music with progressive rock and ambient.

Music - Genres

• Jazz originated as a mix of blues, ragtime, and brass band music.
  • Jazz Fusion started out in the 1960s as the incorporation of rock into jazz. While the term "fusion" by itself typically refers to mixing jazz and rock (e.g. Steely Dan and Chicago), it's since grown to include any genre imaginable, incorporated into jazz.
• Rock 'n' roll originated as a mixture of rhythm & blues and country with some blues, gospel and folk music thrown in for good measure.
• Progressive Rock, to a tee. Progressive rock started (arguably) when King Crimson tried to create rock music from classical influences rather than blues ones. After 30-plus years of experimentation by many bands combining all the musical genres known to humanity under the 'Progressive Rock' banner and coming up with wildly varying results, Many prog fans think that if you're in a prog band and not invoking this trope, then you're just not doing it properly.
  • Progressive Metal follows this as well. If it's metal, and you're not sure what subgenre it falls into, it's probably progressive metal.
  • Post-Rock may very well be this for rock being combined with Romantic and early 20th Century Classical.
• Industrial Metal was an unlikely combination pioneered by Big Black, Ministry, and KMFDM in The '80s. Nowadays, it's so common that most people think of industrial metal when you mention industrial music.
  • Industrial music itself combines the instrumentation of Synth-Pop with the Mind Screw elements of Psychedelic Rock and the "screw you" attitude of Punk Rock; it was also influenced by Musique Concréte, avant-garde classical and extreme performance art. Over time, Dark Wave and Trance began to influence the genre as well.
• Symphonic Metal, heavy metal mixed with symphonic classical music. Therion, one of the pioneers of the genre, takes their genre-blending quite seriously: their live album "The Miskolc Experience" featured about a dozen classical compositions rewritten from the ground up to incorporate modern heavy-metal instruments along with the original orchestras, choirs, and opera soloists.
• Punk jazz combines the energy, speed, and distortion of punk with the atonal, chaotic, and unpredictable ramblings of some strains of jazz.
• Psychobilly is punk mixed with Rockabilly, while gothabilly is goth rock mixed with psychobilly.
  • To the extent that punk was a "return to roots" movement for rock and roll (see above), psychobilly is pretty much just standard rockabilly with the volume and tempo turned up to eleven.
  • Rockabilly, is a blend of rock & roll music with hillbilly music which was coined around the same time rock & roll was in its infancy.
  • Gothabilly puts it all in a drippy surf guitar echo tank.
• Two-tone is the offspring of ska and punk.
  • Ska itself is the offspring of calypso and rock and roll, and has been mixed with everything from folk to metal.
    • Calypso itself is the combination of mento with a horn section. It also has incorporated jazz, swing and rock and roll, and its offspring Soca has incorporated electronics, disco, dancehall and Indian music as well.
    • Ska later evolved into Rocksteady, which was invented by slowly down the ska beat and then focusing on the offbeat, then evolved into Reggae by adding guitar, organ and deep, changing basslines.
• Funk metal, funk rock, funk punk... Let's just say that everything's better with funk.
• A subtrope of this is "Ethnic Punk":
  • Celtic punk, which combines punk rock with Scottish, Irish and occasionally Welsh or Breton folk. Pioneered by Anglo-Irish group The Pogues and popularised by groups like Dropkick Murphys and Flogging Molly.
  • It should be noted that this is frequently made by North Americans who claim Irish ancestry but don't actually know anything about Ireland.
  • Gogol Bordello is a self-described "Gypsy punk" band that plays a mixture of punk, cabaret, dub, and Romani folk music.
    • The Zydepunks as well, although vocally they're closer to bands like Flogging Molly.
  • The Ukrainians, who play punk-ish music with Slavic instrumentation and Ukrainian lyrics. Have covered The Smiths,the Velvet Underground, and the Sex Pistols, in translation.
  • Golem! is a klezmer-punk band and they are fucking awesome.
  • The more general term "folk punk" is used to refer to the style played without any self-conscious ethnic alignment. It developed in the UK as a sister-style to celtic punk; the two were more or less an identical movement until the latter.
• Folk Metal, which crosses metal with (usually) Scandinavian traditional folk, ranges from Ensiferum's attempts to take metal even further over the top, to Korpiklaani, which is...something else entirely. Special mention goes to Alestorm for being pirate metal.
  • Korpiklaani describes their style as "old people's music with heavy metal guitars". Frontman Jonne Jarvela's started out with Sami folk band Shamaani Duo, added synthesizers and heavier guitars and formed a new band, Shaman. Shaman then became Korpiklaani by dropping the synthesizers and Sami language lyrics, and adding traditional instruments and a more metal sound.
  • Finntroll is a special case for Folk Metal. Along with the primary components of their music being black metal, Finnish folk music and "humppaa" style polka, over the years they've also added dashes of punk, classical, Caribbean music, honky tonk, and whatever else they felt like. They also sing exclusively about trolls in Swedish (although they are from Finland, Swedish sounds more like Troll).
  • There are a number of different approaches to folk metal, ranging from the Black Metal with added Scandinavian folk of Finntroll to the English folk song made dark and growly of Skyclad
  • Folk Metal is usually a combinatin of Death/Black/Power Metal with whatever the band members' local/ethnic folk music traditions are. It has spawned several sub-genres — Celtic Metal, which is Folk Metal incorporating Celtic revival styles; Oriental Metal, which is Folk Metal based on Middle-Eastern musical traditions; and "Mongolian metal", pioneered in part by Tengger Cavalry, which is rooted in Central Asian musical traditions and uses throat-singing in place of normal Harsh Vocals.
    • It has also indirectly spawned two other, similar sub-genres — Viking Metal (Power, Black, or Death Metal with some traditional Scandanavian influence) and Pirate Metal (Power Metal with a touch of Folk Metal and a romantic pirate theme).
• Christian black metal. Wait... black metal?
  • Also known as White metal...
    • Formerly known as Unblack metal, a term now used mostly perjoratively by true black metal fans and artists. Just to drive home how out of place it really is: In the early 90's, church burnings were considered an acceptable way to earn respect in the Norwegian black metal scene. Murder, suicide, spikey shin guards and absurd facepaint all happened as well. To go along with that, the lyrics are frequently generally anti-religious and misanthropic, specifically anti-Christian, Satanic, nihilistic, atheistic, and pro-neopaganist. For most of this and more distilled into one band, read up on Mayhem.
• Flamenco jazz.
• "Mathcore" takes two things that seem by very nature to be contradictory Hardcore and Progressive/Avantgarde metal. Throw in some Jazz Fusion and Blues influence as well as maybe some electronic bits and you've got an noisy, spastic and downright crazed sound of music.
• Stoner metal is a fusion of doom metal, psychedelic rock, and grunge.
  • Grunge itself began as a fusion of early doom metal, hardcore punk, and glam rock illustrated with bands like Green River, Malfunkshun and Skin Yard. Later bands would incorporate indie, psychedelic, and post-punk influences as well.
• Electronic music in general lives and breathes this, due to having a huge variety of subgenres with only small differences, and having a wide variety of individual styles, and thousands of different synthesizers and different drumsounds that can be used.
• Post-avant jazzcore is better than progressive dreamfunk.
• Musica Mestiza is this taken to the extreme: a mix of Salsa, Punk, Reggae, Ska, Hiphop, Flamenco, Raï, African Rhythms and any other genre that seems like a good idea to add to the mix. Manu Chao is probably the most popular artist is this genre.
• Avant-Garde Metal thrives on this trope. Bands either combine lots of genres, or combine a few genres and have a really odd way of putting it all together. And no, this isn't limited to musical genres, as non-music genres are also are used, particularly in more novetly bands. They also often abruptly switch between styles.
• J-Pop is characterized by sounding perky and glittery, while mixing techno/electronica, hard/soft rock, and another random genre with nonstandard, but still poppy, chord progressions.
• Electro Swing combines swing and house music. And sometimes techno.
• Digital Hardcore combines hardcore punk with jungle, hardcore techno, industrial, and occasionally hip-hop.
• Afrobeat started when Fela Kuti mixed American funk and jazz with Ghanian highlife music (which itself is a hybrid genre) and Nigerian tribal chants.
• No Wave is Punk Rock mixed with Jazz, Funk, avant-garde classical, and Sensory Abuse.
  • Similarly Post-Punk is Punk Rock mixed with Krautrock, Dub, Jazz, Funk, and ... abstract art.
  • Finally Noise Rock is a fusion of no wave, Post-Punk, and Hard Rock.
• Moombahton takes the melodic elements of House Music, slows them down to 110 BPM and adds a Reggaeton beat.
  • Moombahcore is a fusion of Moombahton with modern, aggressive Dubstep.
• Dark Psytrance = Psychedelic trance + industrial + hardcore techno.
• Since Steampunk originated from a literary genre (rather than from a musical style, like goth), it has no specific musical style of its own. Hence, steampunk musicians tend to mix old and new styles in various ways.
• Chillwave is a new genre termed to describe a recent crop of musicians who make retraux 80's-inspired synthpop but with lo-fi/shoegaze/psychedelic production values. Possibly the closest we will get to a sonic embodiment of the nostalgia filter, as the genre deliberately attempts to sound like old, warped cassette tapes one might randomly find in the house or car. Lyrical themes include drugs, the beach, and just chilling out in general.
• Vaporwave, during its early days, could be described as Chopped & Screwed edits (more or less) of Pop/R&B/Smooth Jazz music from The '80s and '90s, sometimes mixed with Shoegaze. These days, it has spawned many different styles (or sub-genres if you wish to call them as such) that could all have descriptions here. Vaportrap, for example is a mix of Ambient music and Trap Music.
• Hair Metal was born from mixing equal amounts of Rock, Pop, Punk and Heavy Metal and somehow making it work. Needless to say, it's generally very upbeat.
• Nu Metal is a melting pot of Metal, Rock, Hip-hop, Funk, Alternative, Punk, Electronics, and whatever else they can think of.
• Take a look at Wikipedia's list of stylistic origins of Witch House. Bear in mind that the list has been dramatically cut down over time as well. While the genre tends to be a highly variegated Mind Screw-y hodgepodge of influences in general, Salem's King Night (arguably one of the better-known releases within the genre) exemplifies what we're dealing with pretty accurately: the first three tracks consist of dark, hazy, dramatic electronic music, with reverb-heavy synth soundscapes and distant vocals seeming to simultaneously take influence from Shoegaze, Trance and Industrial music, backed by skipping, somewhat arrhythmic beats with heavy Hip-Hop and Dubstep influence. Think that's an unusual melting pot of influences? By track four, "Sick," we get Dirty South-influenced rapping over ominous soft synths and operatic vocal inflections. The album only gets weirder from there, with two straight up Hip-Hop tracks, slightly more stripped down Synth-Pop/Shoegaze numbers, fuzzed-out power chords and just about everything else in between. Other artists purported as examples of Witch House range from ethereal dub to Hip-Hop beats with a nihilistic edge and noisy, cracked-out pop. The only constants among these bands seem to be a dark (sometimes intentionally campy) quasi-occult aesthetic, vocals processed to the point of being incomprehensible, loving spoonfuls of reverb, and this trope.
• Indie Pop separates itself from vanilla, label-controlled Pop music by letting the artist have full creative control over their material. As such, it often sees pop-style music mixed with a wide variety of genres such as synthpop, R&B and Alternative R&B), trip-hop, punk, folk, dream pop, baroque pop, electronica... and whatever else the artist can think of.
• Alternative R&B is Contemporary R&B plus Hip-Hop, EDM, UK garage, Dream Pop, Rock... whatever the artist wants.
• Deep house was born out of a mix of Chicago house with jazz-funk and soul.
  • There's also future house. Which is deep house combined with EDM.
• The whole point of classical crossover music, where classical arrangements are used to combine with pop, rock, electronica, metal...
• K-Pop was born out a fusion of dance, electronica, pop, hip-hop, and R&B with a high sense of fashion. To say the least, it's very bubbly.
• New Jack Swing is a fusion of R&B, Hip Hop, Disco and Funk that came to life in 1986 with Janet Jackson's album Control, produced by Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, and further spearheaded by Teddy Riley and Bernard Belle during the late Eighties to mid-Nineties. Using hip hop drum machines and mixing them with Gospel-influenced R&B melodies, new jack swing redefined the sound of contemporary R&B for many years.

Examples from Genre-Busting not yet sorted:

Music

• The Damned: Late 70s British Punk band turned Progressive Rock/ProtoGothic (before it was even known as "gothic") in the early to mid-80s, with use of early electronic instruments. Cites influence from many different genres, and has a singer who dresses like a vampire and sings like a pub crooner.
• Blondie: Starting off in the Punk Rock and Garage Rock movement but their discography gradually covered pop, hard rock, new wave disco, rap reggae, calypso, motown and electronica. Most critics either call them a punk band with pop tendencies or a pop band with punk tendencies, but the band would admit that they don't belong to any classification. They not only brought a lot of variety to pop music, but they also challenged punk's ethos of being anti-disco and helped to create new wave in the process.
• The Residents are, um, avant-garde classical punk psychedelic synth-pop... usually.
• Bands like Mr. Bungle, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Estradasphere, Iwrestledabearonce and uneXpect take this so far that they can only be vaguely classified as experimental metal.
• Rip Rig & Panic (featuring a young Neneh Cherry on vocals) were a post-punk, jazz, rock, funk, soul, dance-pop, rock, classical... you name it... band. Their collaborators include everybody from Don Cherry (Neneh's father) to Ari Up of The Slits, to Nico.
• Speaking of gorillas... Gorillaz also blends rock, hiphop, reggae, pop and other influences together.
• They Might Be Giants: The only way to place them within a genre is to a slap a big fat "Alternative" sticker on every song they write. The best example is the album "Mink Car", which basically has a song from every single genre of music they could think of. The best example within a single song is Fingertips from the album Apollo 18 which basically consists of a few bars each of no fewer than 21 other songs, across a variety of styles, speeds and genres.
• Movits! is a Swedish swing hip-hop jazz band.
• Happens all the time in electronic music. Sometimes, producers use different artist names/stage names for their different genres/niches.
  • Pendulum, in particular, is one notable example. Two parts band members and one part DJ, they formed together to produce mostly aggressive drum and bass music. Over time, their sound became more commercial and developed into a rock-electronic fusion group with live performances.
• Japan has spawned not one, not two, but a ton of outright weird musical acts:
  • The entire Visual Kei movement. Heavy Metal meets Goth meets Genre Mashup taken up to eleven meets Bishōnen meets Elegant Gothic Lolita meets badass clothing meets Japan. There's no easier way to describe it.
    • The usual VK formula is this: Take a Five-Man Band, make them look like Gothic Anime characters, put them in a recording studio, give them instruments, have them listening to Slayer, Pantera, KISS and Cannibal Corpse all day, everyday, for one whole year, and let them make an album. Epicness is to be expected.
  • Post-Visual Kei metallers Dir en grey are particularly notable for this. They used to be an alternative metal band, nothing too out of the ordinary for a Japanese band. Except for the fact that they were a lot noisier than most bands during their time. Slowly they began to experiment with Metalcore, Nu Metal, Death Metal, folk music, psychedelic, Shoegazing, doom metal, funeral dirge music, symphonic, mathcore and outright weirdness (not that they weren't already a bit odd since the very start), resulting in each album getting progressively weirder and crazier.
    • Lampshaded: The band officially recognizes itself as "uncategorized", even stating in their official website that "it is unnecessary to even classify them in any way". Creates a lot of Mind Screw for critics.
    • Other bands have independently achieved the same level of weirdness (such as Sigh, see below), but very few have achieved considerable success (they are often labeled as one of the most successful cult bands in the modern metal scene). This is the band that took Genre Mashup way too far and eventually set standards for Crazy Is Cool music in the Japanese rock/metal scene.
    • UROBOROS isn't considered by fans as their masterpiece for nothing, as the album features considerably more weirdness than any release before it. Their latest album, Dum Spiro Spero continues the trend, and has gotten compared to Mr. Bungle, Opeth, Meshuggah, SikTh and Slipknot all at the same time.
  • Japanese metal band Sigh have become famous for this as well. They began as fairly straightforward Black Metal and got progressively weirder, peaking with their album Imaginary Sonicscapes, which was equal parts Psychedelic Rock, Jazz, Orchestra, Progressive Rock and Heavy Metal. All of their albums since have been just as weird, thanks to their liberal use of Genre Roulette.
  • High and Mighty Color was also this. Though often classified as alternative metal, they also played straightforward J-pop, hard rock, post-hardcore, punk rock, metalcore, nu metal, and a whole salad of other genres. The Japanese rock scene has yet to give birth to a band that can be considered a successor.
    • J-pop/rock band Dazzle Vision is possibly the most likely to be the said successor. Equal parts J-pop, metalcore, nu metal, electronic and hard rock. Still, they aren't even close to sounding like a proper successor.
  • Blood Stain Child used to be a straightforward Melodic Death Metal band. From Idolator onwards, they've introduced elements of Nu Metal and trance music. Later albums added Industrial Metal, eurobeat, J-pop and catchy, cute, dance-worthy weirdness. The formula works very well.
  • Maximum the Hormone is also notable for this. A self-proclaimed Nu Metal band that cites Korn as an influence. Not your typical Nu Metal band, though, since they're also a pop band, rock band, punk band, funk band...any band, except that they're not any of those. They put on and off genres as if they were clothes.
  • X Japan is well-known for blending Hair Metal and pop ballads with straight-up Thrash Metal, something that totally caught metal purists off-guard in The '80s, a time when metal bands focused on achieving a "pure" sound.
    • The one-song album, Art of Life takes Genre Roulette up to eleven.
    • Anything that Yoshiki Hayashi has ever written would instantly fall under this trope.

• Progressive metal band Mastodon sound pretty much like every single band you've listened to, whether it be hard rock, prog, heavy metal, southern rock, experimental, psychedelic, southern rock, alternative, maybe even a little country here and there, and loads of other genres too plentiful to list here, all somehow put together. And it's awesome.
  • Case in point: The song "Megalodon". Opening with a strange jazzy section, then metal, then a country lick out of nowhere, and then different metal. In the first minute and a half of a four minute long song.
• Crotchduster: Unclassifiable death metal band that incorporates over one hundred different genres of music in one album
• Goth-rock legends Bauhaus certainly were the Ur-Example of the genre, but there's no single way to quite describe their sound... Their original single, "Bela Lugosi's Dead", so utterly defied description that "[You'd] find it in one music store under punk, and in another under reggae, and in others as jazz, pop/rock, psychedelic, and pretty much anything else you can imagine," (paraphrasing David J, the band's bassist). The rest of their work was equally so confusing- you could hear reggae ("Exquisite Corpse"), funk ("Watch that Grandad Go"), disco ("Kick in the Eye 2"), glam (they covered David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust"), jazz ("Party in the First Part"), punk (Brian Eno's "Third Uncle"), prog ("Silent Hedges"), Joy Division style post-punk (John Cale's "Rosegarden Funeral of Sores"), and endless other things... and yet, at the same time, all of their songs definitely sounds like them and only them.
• Mindless Self Indulgence have made a career on their odd blend of synth-pop, hip-hop, industrial, and hardcore punk. They've decided to describe themselves as "industrial jungle pussy punk".
• Frank Zappa was doing this as early as 1966. His albums blend rock, doo-wop, jazz, modern classical, humor and satire, studio experimentation, and any number of other elements.
  • His childhood buddy and sometimes-bandmate Captain Beefheart was similar but totally defied all musical convention. To the unaccustomed ear, something like "Ella Guru" from Trout Mask Replica sounds like ear rape, but with time one begins to realize the genius in such works as that.
• Charles Mingus could be argued to be a genre masher. His music combined elements of beebop with dixieland, blues, free improvisation, and later on classical music. Check out his album "Let My Children Hear Music" to hear all of these elements work together.
• Behemoth's second full-length, Grom is utterly unclassifiable. Their prior Black Metal sound is still there, but now there's elements of their later Death Metal sound...as well as Folk, Ambient, Progressive Metal, acoustic, and straight-up guitar rock. There's a reason why it remains one of their most polarizing albums among fans.
• Destrophy blends several different styles each song, and it's still pretty difficult to categorize even if you break down every element they blend in.
• Pink Martini is a weird postmodern classical retro-kitsch international-lounge/Tropicália jazz outfit which they themselves have described as "music for children and dogs."
• Yoko Kanno, but she's more easily placed in the general realm of alt-rock.
• Yuki Kajiura is post-pop neoclassical Buddhist New Age trance-turbofolk world music electronica.
• Beck has done rap, jazz, pop, rock, hip-hop, blues, country, tropicalia, techno, experimental, indie, alternative, folk, anti-folk, dance, funk... Beck has really done a lot.
• Metallica started out as one of the inventors of Thrash Metal. They have since moved to a more Progressive Metal style (Black Album through St. Anger), with stops at Power Ballad ("The Unforgiven"), Irish Folk Music ("Whiskey in the Jar"), Blues ("Low Man's Lyric") and Orchestral Metal (the entire S&M album/concert). For a while, even they weren't sure what they were. As of Death Magnetic, they seem to be a Progressive Thrash Metal band.
• The Beatles: at first their songs were typical love songs, but overtime, they did power ballads, hard rock, blues, psychedelic rock (and oh how much!), folk rock, and, uh, whatever the hell this is.
• Buckethead. Avant-garde, noise rock, jazz fusion, funk, jazz, thrash metal, bluegrass, instrumental rock, hard rock, progressive metal, heavy metal, experimental rock, funk metal, ambient, dark ambient, alternative metal, electronica, country rock, folk rock, experimental... Yes, he plays all of that. And more. Oh yeah, he also incorporates robot dancing, nun-chakus and chicken into his stage performances. It's safer to say that Buckethead is simply Buckethead.
• van Canto. You think you've explored all genres of metal and suddenly, A Capella Epic Power Metal outta freaking nowhere.
• The Script is an Irish alternative/soft rock band inspired by American "street" music.
• Cormorant started out as Melodic Death Metal, which is represented in their debut EP. Their next album, though, is a weird mix of Black Metal, Death Metal (in both the melodic and the more traditional style), Doom Metal, Progressive Metal, Heavy Metal and Folk. Fans just started calling them "tiberian ass bastard folk".
• Wintersun. Melodic Death Metal, Power Metal, Folk Metal, Black Metal, Symphonic Metal, and Progressive Metal influences can all be heard in their debut. Frontman/Guitarist/Bassist/Keyboardist Jari Mäenpää has given up on trying to classify and and calls Wintersun "Extreme Majestic Technical Epic Melodic Metal".
• What to call Tangerine Dream? Progressive rock/New Age/World music/Electronic/Trance/God Only Knows? Further proof of how flawed these labels are to begin with.
• Enter Shikari mixes post-hardcore with various electronic genres and in certain songs, rap.
• Opeth is a Progressive Death Metal band with Jazz and Folk influences. Mikael Åkerfeldt has said that he just took elements from every genre he liked and sort of just mashed them together.
• Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine were originally a two-piece whose songs usually consisted of witty punk rock-style vocals and cranked-up rock'n'roll guitars, played over backing tracks that sounded like Stock Aitken Waterman done on the cheap. They eventually got a full band line-up and became a bit more conventional, then broke up because nobody was enjoying it any more.
• Devin Townsend's solo output generally falls under progressive metal, but albums like Terria go off at so many tangents that no one label could do them justice.
• tool: People have tried to classify them as such things as alternative metal, progressive metal, hard rock, but they don't seem to fit into just one genre.
• Dream Theater: Are they progressive, alternate rock with metal elements, pop with metal elements, or downright metal? Not to mention all of the unique sounds in their songs...
• Butthole Surfers: Many of their songs are not even identifiable as "music." They are loud combinations between rock, Avant-Garde Music, Punk Rock, Alternative Rock, Noise Rock and Psychedelic Rock.
• Oingo Boingo: Most pop music historians classify them as "new wave" or "ska", but then there are other critics who claim that they invented pop-punk. But they were heavily influenced by traditional African and Indonesian music, jazz, and classical (and country to a lesser extent). But some of their songs are so solo-driven ("Dead Man's Party," anyone?) that they would fit comfortably on most classic rock stations. Frontman Danny Elfman even said, when asked to sum up his band's ethos: "I wanted to piss everybody off!"
• Kaizers Orchestra. You could, if you had to, classify them as Rock, in it's most broad sense. More specifically, depending on the song, you'll find polka, Eastern European folk music, surf rock, gypsy rock, jazz, whatever the hell Maskineri is, and so forth. They've also been described as a "punk rock Tom Waits", and Tom Waits desribed them as "Norwegian storm-trooping tarantellas with savage rhythms and innovative textures". Whatever that means.
• TNT: Wikipedia classifies them as Heavy Metal, Hard Rock, AOR, and Hair Metal while some of their fans think their earlier albums have touches of Progressive Rock.
• Incubus. While their albums might be similar in terms of style, each album contains songs that are pretty different to any of the others on that album, more so on the earlier albums.
• Coheed and Cambria. Some people call them progressive metal. Some people call them alt-rock. Some call them pop-punk, post-hardcore, alt-metal, hard rock, prog-rock or even emo. In a way, all of them are right....
• Amorphis is a metal band (generally), but no one really knows what the hell they are beyond that. While their early material was pretty straightforward death/doom metal, their later material has been decidedly more oblique, mixing progressive rock, folk metal, melodic death metal, gothic rock, power metal, and jazz fusion to create something that can only really be described as theirs and theirs alone.
• Bone Thugs-n-Harmony: Gangsta Rap, speed rap and Hardcore Hip-Hop fused with barbershop doo-wop harmony.
• To a lesser extent, Disturbed. We know they're rock, that's for sure, but that's as close as anyone can tell. They're too melodic for Death Metal, too consistent to be Alternative Metal, and no mention of Nu Metal will EVER end well. Might have to do with the band explicitly saying "We just play what we want and let the execs figure out which rack to put it on."
• The Agonist get described variously as Metalcore, Melodic Death Metal, Death Core and Progressive Metal, with most emphasis on the first in their first album, and more emphasis on the last in their later works. Given their notably evolving sound throughout their various albums (and sometimes even within albums) they might qualify for Alternative Metal as well.
• Cognitive definitely feels like this. While unmistakeably death metal, they mix it with brutal death, technical death, mathcore, progressive metal, and deathcore in such a way that it's very, very difficult to find a more detailed genre description that fits.
  • For that matter, there's also their buddies in Hammer Fight, who mix traditional heavy metal with hardcore, thrash metal, death metal, and punk rock in a manner that manages to be unbelievably catchy and fun but also very difficult to classify at all.
• Master blender John Zorn, also fond of the Genre Roulette. Most of the time he blends free jazz, modern classical, metal, even grindcore and klezmer, among others.
• Matisyahu mixes rap and reggae with Jewish (particularly Hasidic) spirituality
• The Beach Boys/ Brian Wilson's legendary unfinished Smile album can be described as a Psychedelic Doo-Wop/ Rock Barbershop Quartet recorded in distinct modules. But you should also add Americana to the mix. And several classical influences, from Bach to Stravinsky and Schoenberg. And some Varèse thrown in at good measure as pertaining to tape experiments. And Phil Spector's production methods (although more nuanced than his Wall of Sound) , folk, classical choir arrangements , circus music, impressionist music, jazz, musique concréte (and in the case of Vega-Tables, this is taken literally), the american-centered compositions of Gershwin, baroque pop, Yodelling and ragtime (along many more), all meant to achieve a "Teenage Symphony to God" that sounds like an ever-flowing painting by a Disney cartoon. One should also mention Smiley Smile, the substitute to the aforementioned album, after its infamous cancelation. Attempting to describe its minimalistic miasma of weirdness and near cynical self-deprecation is almost a disservice to it. Songs like Wind Chimes must be heard to be believed (in stereo is the recomended option).
• Susumu Hirasawa, music nerds continue to fail finding a genre for him. The closest they got was "technopop" but that doesn't explain where the Wagnerian pomp and marches come from.
• Arguably the most famous Breakcore musician, Venetian Snares fuses the genre with a host of other influences, including Classical, IDM, and Dubstep.
• A truly insane example of Breakcore genre-blending is Igorrr's music, which mashes up (to name a but few genre) Breakcore, Baroque, Death/Doom/Black Metal, Polka, Gregorian Chant, Cabaret Music, Swing, Noise, and things less classifiable. And it's even weirder than that description makes it sound.
• Exmortus has combined thrash metal, death metal, power metal, 80s hard rock, and shred into a cohesive package that is still exceedingly difficult to classify. Melodic Death Metal is probably the closest that one can come to finding a conventional label that sticks, but even that is flimsy at best.
• Bethlehem is notoriously hard to classify. Their early work combines elements of Black Metal, Doom Metal, and Death Metal with a very strong atmospheric element, and has come to be known as their own unique style called "Dark Metal" (after their first album). Their later work can really only be adequately described as gothic-tinged Experimental Metal.
• Macabre mixes thrash metal, death metal, grindcore, hardcore, punk rock, and traditional folk songs and nursery rhymes into a bizarre final result that they refer to as "murder metal".
• Deep Purple's Live Album Concerto for Group and Orchestra (1969) is a performance where the rock band collaborated with a classical orchestra. At first they perform one at the time, but as the concert evolves they melt together into one Genre-Busting soundscape.
• Linkin Park has always been a mix of rock, electronic, metal, and hip-hop. Which of these ingredients takes prominence depends on the song.
• Lorde mixes a variety of different sounds that give her equal appeal to both Pop and Alternative audiences. To wit, her music has elements of Dream Pop, Electronica, Synthpop, Minimalism, Ambient, Indie Pop, Art Pop, Dark Wave, Contemporary, and even a few traces of Hip-Hop can be found in the beats. It's not often that a song can top both the Billboard pop and alternative charts, but her Breakthrough Hit "Royals" did just that.
• Full of Hell feels like this. They mix together metalcore, sludge metal, powerviolence, noise, and industrial in a way that gives one a case for referring to them as any one of these genres; while they all fit, they also paradoxically don't fit. The only way to really describe them is something along the lines of "Trap Them attempting to sound like Man Is the Bastard while covering Throbbing Gristle and Prurient at the same time", but even that really doesn't adequately describe them.
• System of a Down sounds like nothing else. While they are metal, what kind of metal is almost impossible to describe. They're funny, political, and completely unorthodox. At the same time, they're also very approachable for non-metal fans, giving them more listeners than other metal bands can dream of. The term Nu Metal has been used to describe them before, but that's often met with disdain. They often get the tag of Alternative Metal, but they sound completely unlike those acts as well. Avant-Garde Metal and Progressive Metal are sometimes applied to them as well.
• With each album, Rotting Christ has gotten harder and harder to classify. With their current mix of black metal, traditional heavy metal, Greek folk, gothic rock, neofolk, and industrial, they form a sound that really can't be pigeonholed into any existing genres. Gothic Metal is the most common label that people give them as of now, but even that is flawed at best.
• Diablo Swing Orchestra is a Progressive/Avant-Garde Metal band that has elements of Big Band, including a permanent Trombonist and Trumpeter. On top of that, they add elements of Symphonic Metal, including a Cello and operatic lead vocals. And then they'll often throw in other genres when they feel so inclined.
• Issues combines the hard-hitting instruments of metal with the vocals of Top 40 music. The Soprano and Gravel dynamic between the two lead vocalists are like other Metalcore bands, but the R&B singing of Tyler Carter makes him contrast even more with the Harsh Vocals of Michael Bohn. Also, they have a DJ as an official member of the band, making tons of scratches like a Nu Metal band. They also experiment with other genres seemingly at random.
• In part because they played Hardcore Punk when it had still been largely an Unbuilt Trope, Dead Kennedys are an example of this. In some of their songs they display elements of Surf Rock, Rockabilly, Spaghetti Western soundtracks, Psychedelic Rock, and even (occasionally) Progressive Rock. A few later hardcore bands took some of these influences, but very few of them used all of them.
• Evanescence's genre is notoriously hard to pin down. Are the Alternative Metal, Pop, Alternative Rock, Nu Metal, Goth, or Hard Rock? How about all of them? Or... neither? They've even had Christian Rock and Emo tagged on to them, both of which are ridiculous accusations.
• In This Moment's sound is hard to describe, especially their later material. Their music is loud, dirty, and abrasive, but are still able to get airplay on rock radio. Genres like Alternative Metal, Industrial Metal, Metalcore, Electronic Music, Gothic Metal, and Nu Metal come together in a blender, and fuse in such a way that it creates a genre that hasn't been classed. It's to the point where The Other Wiki can't agree on what genre to put them in.
• Hacktivist is known for being very hard to pin down. They're possibly the only band that can fall under separate genres such as Grime, Rap Metal, Djent, and Nu Metal all at once. They also avoid the divisive or outright hated status that's often assigned to bands of the latter three genres, due to the instrumental prowess, the complex rap delivery that completely averts Piss-Take Rap and doesn't feel out of place at all (helped by the fact that they maintain their British accents), and the variety of mature lyrical themes relating to politics, conspiracy theories, corruption, and anarchy.
• The Acacia Strain mixes elements of metalcore, beatdown hardcore, djent, sludge metal, and death metal into a package that, while accessible, doesn't really fit into any easy stylistic categories. While commonly called deathcore (a label vehemently disputed by Vincent Bennett), they don't really fit into that genre either; the easiest thing to do is just call them metalcore and leave it at that.
• Marilyn Manson's general sound fuses Industrial Metal, Glam Rock and Goth Rock, although their music has been considerably more Post-Punk since 2015's The Pale Emperor, an album that also showed a heavy Blues Rock sound influenced by The Doors and Muddy Waters.
• Tejano music is a Texas regional style that blends Western country music with Norteño music, which is in itself a blend of Mexican traditional and polka.

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