There are riffs you learn, and there are riffs that quietly rearrange your relationship with counting. Meshuggah's "In Death Is Life" is firmly the second kind: a low, palm-muted seven-string monster that sounds like a broken machine, right up until you realize the machine is running perfectly and it's your foot that's wrong.
This is a raw, no-safety-net 7-string cover of "In Death Is Life" — djent mode fully engaged, tone set to "structural damage." No click hidden in the mix, no editing to smooth over the hard parts. Just the riff, a seventh string, and the very specific joy of playing something your hands are convinced is impossible.
How this djent riff actually works
Here's the trick behind almost every Meshuggah riff, "In Death Is Life" included: the underlying pulse stays a boring, honest 4/4, but the guitar phrase is a different length than the bar. So a chunky palm-muted figure keeps starting on a different beat each time, drifting against the pulse and only lining back up after several bars — this is "cross-rhythm," or rhythmic displacement, not some exotic time signature. If you want the theory scaffolding under it, my breakdown of time signatures is the sober companion to this chaos.
The concrete, useful takeaway: don't count the riff — count the pulse. Keep your foot on a steady 4/4 quarter note and let the low, muted 7th string slam wherever it slams. Tight palm muting is what turns this from mush into machinery: mute hard, pick with confident downstrokes, and treat the metronome as non-negotiable. The riff becomes playable the second you stop trying to feel it and start trusting the grid instead.
Yes, you'll count out loud like a lunatic in your practice room, and yes, your neighbours will worry. Worth it. If you want the PDF and Guitar Pro file so you can suffer with precision, it's all on my Patreon.