u/GarageguyEve

I've gone down a music rabbit hole the last couple days trying to figure out what actually makes a band recognizable as that band.

I've been calling it a band's "fingerprint" because I don't really have a better word for it. Not necessarily their genre, a particular guitar tone, or even the singer's voice. Just whatever combination of things makes your brain recognize who's playing before you actually check.

Breaking Benjamin is probably my best example because I've listened to basically their entire catalog. They've evolved, production has changed, and the lineup has changed dramatically, but there's still something that immediately sounds like Breaking Benjamin to me.

Motionless in White's "Masterpiece" is actually what got me thinking about this from the opposite direction. When I first heard it, my brain basically went, "Wait... is this Breaking Benjamin? It sounds like Breaking Benjamin, but something is off."

Obviously it wasn't them. But another band had apparently gotten close enough to whatever my brain associates with Breaking Benjamin that it triggered that recognition anyway.

Then I had almost the opposite experience with Bullet For My Valentine's new song "Social Apocalypse."

I know Bullet's biggest songs pretty well, but I'm not a hardcore fan who's listened to every album and deep cut. If YouTube Music had randomly dropped Social Apocalypse into one of my playlists without me knowing who it was, especially during that instrumental opening, I would've had to pull out my phone and check who was playing. Nothing about it would've immediately made me think "oh, this is Bullet."

I've seen other people say the new song doesn't have that signature Bullet sound, while more dedicated fans say they can absolutely hear Bullet in it, especially similarities to certain eras.

That's where I started wondering if this "fingerprint" doesn't exist entirely in the music. Maybe part of it exists in the listener too.

I've listened to basically everything Breaking Benjamin has released, so my brain has a huge sample of what Breaking Benjamin sounds like. My idea of Bullet comes from a much smaller sample, mostly their biggest songs. Someone who knows every Bullet record might hear connections in Social Apocalypse that I simply don't have the reference points to recognize.

Changing singers makes it even weirder. Killswitch Engage still sounds like Killswitch to me with either Jesse Leach or Howard Jones. Three Days Grace kept a lot of what made them recognizable after Adam Gontier left, but at the same time they had obviously lost one of the most recognizable parts of their sound. And now Linkin Park with Emily Armstrong has me thinking about the same thing. Chester Bennington's voice was a massive part of Linkin Park's identity, but it clearly wasn't the only thing that made Linkin Park sound like Linkin Park.

Then you have Falling in Reverse, where I'm not even sure genre is very useful for identifying the band anymore. "Ronald," "All My Life," "Watch the World Burn," and their version of "Last Resort" go in completely different directions, but somehow there's still an identity connecting them.

Even the whole "djent isn't a genre, it's a technique" argument made me think about this. Historically, sure. But if somebody describes a band as djent, most metal listeners probably imagine a hell of a lot more than one guitar technique. Certain tones, low tunings, rhythms, production styles, extended-range guitars, etc. have all become associated with that word to the point where it describes a recognizable sound whether you want to call it a genre or not.

That seems weirdly similar to what I'm talking about. Our brains take a bunch of individual musical traits and eventually start recognizing the combination as something.

The simplest way I've been able to describe it is:

Genre is the neighborhood a song lives in.

Technique is part of the toolbox used to make it.

A band's fingerprint is whatever makes you recognize who built it.

I'm not claiming "fingerprint" is an actual music theory term or that I've figured any of this out. It's just the best way I've found to describe something I've apparently been doing subconsciously for years.

So I'm curious how other people experience this. What actually creates a band's fingerprint for you? Is it something that's just there in the music, or is part of it something our brains learn from listening to a band over time?

And what are some bands that have changed dramatically but somehow still sound like themselves? Or the opposite, bands that stayed in roughly the same genre but stopped sounding like themselves to you?