Data
Short answer: it depends on the subgenre, and the gap is bigger than you'd think. We measured 127 popular thrash, metalcore and deathcore tracks. Thrash runs long, modern core styles don't.
Typical track length by subgenre
Bar = middle half of all tracks · marker = median
Thrash is the long one. Half of the thrash tracks run over five minutes, and only 7 of 43 stay under four. That's the classic catalogue talking: Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Pantera wrote for albums, with long intros and extended solo sections.
Modern core is compact. 23 of 35 metalcore tracks and 38 of 49 deathcore tracks finish in under four minutes. Only three tracks in each genre go past five.
The biggest ones are short. The three most popular metalcore tracks in the set are Knocked Loose's "Suffocate" (2:44) and thrown's "on the verge" (2:14) and "guilt" (2:36). None of them reaches three minutes.
To find that moment in your own track, the Songbrain AI song analyzer marks where your strongest 15 seconds land and compares your tempo and loudness with your subgenre. Songbrain also has a deeper look at where the hook sits in each genre. (Disclosure: Songbrain is built by the same people behind Smoke-Oh.)
The tracks come from Songbrain's reference set of popular Spotify tracks per subgenre, with lengths taken from Deezer. Duplicates and clearly mislabelled artists (for example Muse and Nickelback in the metalcore bucket) were removed, leaving 43 thrash, 35 metalcore and 49 deathcore tracks. This is a sample of well-known tracks, not every release in each genre, and we don't have release years, so read it as "what popular tracks look like", not as a trend over time.
