A Plea for Purging

The Arc of A Plea for Purging

The pivots — what forced A Plea for Purging to reinvent.

1. 01

   The Sturgis Mathcore Rush

   Dropping out of Tennessee with 2007's Quick Is the Word and A Critique of Mind and Thought, the band aimed straight for jagged, technical chaos. Working early material with Joey Sturgis gave them that punchy late-2000s low end, but Martin packed every track with frantic tapping, odd meters, and erratic stops. It positioned them right alongside the chaotic math-metalcore wave before they realized pure speed was a dead end.

2. 02

   The Heavy-Groove Realignment

   With 2009's Depravity and 2010's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, they stripped away the technical clutter in favor of blunt-force trauma. Atkins refined his low growl while the rhythm section locked into bruising, four-on-the-floor breakdowns and southern-slanted grooves. The humor peaked in their music videos, masking some of the bleakest, heaviest rhythmic beatdowns on the Facedown roster.

3. 03

   The Final Exhaustion

   Tracking 2011's The Life & Death of A Plea for Purging, the band knew the road was eating them alive. They wrote the record as a literal epitaph, stripping back the satire for dark, droning, doom-tinged metalcore that sounded completely fatigued in the best way possible. They ran a farewell tour in 2012 and pulled the plug on their own terms without a drawn-out decline.

Influences

• Pantera — Atkins and Martin consistently cited the Abbott brothers as their foundational blueprint for heavy guitar grooves over technical noodling. You hear it across Depravity where the riffs lean on wide, stomping power grooves rather than European melodic runs. It gave them a southern swagger most sterile metalcore acts lacked entirely.
• Meshuggah — The band leaned heavily on off-kilter polymetric chugs documented throughout their mid-era songwriting interviews. Tracks like 'Malevolence' ride syncopated, mechanical eight-string and drop-tuned patterns directly lifted from the Chaosphere playbook. It kept their breakdowns unpredictable instead of just being basic four-bar stomp patterns.
• Extol — As a cornerstone of heavy, progressive Christian metal, Extol paved the road for bands navigating faith-adjacent spaces without writing sanitized church music. You can hear their technical thrashDNA in the rapid-fire chord transitions on A Critique of Mind and Thought. Extol made it acceptable to play genuinely vicious, progressive heavy music within their subculture.
• Living Sacrifice — Living Sacrifice defined the blueprint for Facedown-style metallic hardcore, and Atkins repeatedly cited them as the gold standard for touring ethics and sonic weight. The relentless mid-tempo drive on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell borrows heavily from The Hammering Process. They showed Purging how to make a breakdown sound industrial and massive without relying on studio gimmicks.
• The Dillinger Escape Plan — Their earliest self-titled EP and debut album channeled the frantic, unpredictable tempo shifts documented in late-90s mathcore. You hear the sharp, dissonant fretboard scraping and sudden stops all over 'Shiver.' It was the chaotic spark that ignited their first run before they settled into straight-ahead grooves.