The band Ignite from California is one of the best representatives of this genre and their 2006 release Our Darkest Days is the best plate to start if you are interested in melodic hardcore. It is a pack of fast and melodic songs that still manage to put some ideas in you head. The great thing about Ignite is that the vocals are not traditional for hardcore and you can’t clearly see the influences of these guys. A great record indeed.

They exploded about a year ago. Within few months these English boys became an underground sensation.

A rarely successful experiment of combining some post-hardcore stuff with dance music. Early demos were a sensation and these guys quickly became Kerrang! favorites. They got the idea after an evening when they visited a Dillinger Escape Plan gig and went to a dance party as a result – songs combining complicated hardcore parts with trance keys and breakdowns. Their shows have an immense energy and rapidly change from moshing to dancing in seconds, somehow this is similar to some of the modern breakcore DJs.

Releasing their debut work “Anything Can Happen In The Next Half Hour” in 2007 they really broke into charts and tours. The album is very solid and is like a sci-fi opera with lots of keyboards and kind of a retro futuristic feel. It is raging from drum-and-bass interludes to some almost mathcore parts. Lot of people, including me, hope that 2008 will bring a new awesome album by this guys.