The Dillinger Escape Plan's music is rooted in extreme metal, metalcore and post-hardcore, and draws heavily from progressive rock, electronic music and jazz fusion. They have been characterized as mathcore, metalcore, progressive metal, experimental metal, noise metal, noisecore, and jazzcore. Several reviewers have described their early albums as grindcore performed from a technical approach. John Adamian of the "Hartford Courant" classified Dillinger as "a kind of knotted, complex, abrasive math rock", as well as "prog metal that embraces an avant-garde level of coiled and meshed intricacies."AllMusic writer Ryan Downey describes the group as "maniacally intense", "crushingly metallic", "displaying rigorous physical endurance," while at the same time notes their "precise musicianship" and "meticulously thought-out" compositions. John Adamian commented: "Listening to Dillinger Escape Plan sometimes feels like being ground between a system of elaborate gears. Chromatic turns and cycling patterns notch all the pieces together. The guitars are often dissonant, shifting into double and triple time, with vocals that deliver a blow-torch scorch." After "Calculating Infinity", they constantly incorporated new sounds and other styles, "even commercial ones", as Andrew Earles of "Spin" said, and their albums became "packed with the sometimes brutal, sometimes beautiful music only they play" that "skids from grindcore to progressive jazz and beyond". Some reviewers have compared them with jazz-grindcore project Naked City and progressive metal band Meshuggah. When asked to define The Dillinger Escape Plan's music, bassist Liam Wilson said: "I usually tell my parents' generation that we sound like what might happen if you took the sophistication of King Crimson and cross-bred us with the snottiness of the Sex Pistols... or 'punk jazz' which is how Jaco Pastorius once described his sound."