Death Metal

Down to the bone

The abattoir's lowest room, death metal, is built from the bottom string upward, and the quickest way in is to follow the weight down. Tuned to D or C and often lower, the guitars switch between two attacks all song long, palm-muted chugging that lands like a closed fist on bone and tremolo picking so fast that it saws a chord apart into a grinding surface. Under them the drummer runs double kick almost without pause and drops into blast beats, snare and kick and cymbal clubbing the pulse flat. The growl sits inside the riff. Never above it.

The harmony runs on minor keys and chromatic lines chosen for friction instead of resolution, and a song changes tempo and metre without warning. Hardened out of thrash in the middle of the 1980s and pushed through studios that learned how to give a kick drum at full gallop its own space in the mix, the genre wants every riff heard landing, like a cleaver that frightens because each stroke arrives separate and exact and goes clean through to the block. Speed alone does not make it. Neither does darkness.

Lyrically the death metal bands went straight to the morgue, exhuming horror film gore, disease and the dissecting table, before they forced the doors of the church, the battlefield, the history book and eventually deep space. Much of it is hard to follow without the lyric sheet. Nobody has ever seemed to mind.

Death metal's cutting rooms

The map looks less like a family tree than one slaughterhouse with a different cutting room in every city, each crew working the same carcass with its own blade. Tampa took speed played clean. Stockholm took a saturated roar that swallowed the edges of every note. Gothenburg took the harmonised lead guitar, New York dropped the half time riff like a cleaver onto a single beat, and Quebec brought in odd metres and dissonant chords. Every argument inside the genre is about where one room ends.

Downward lies brutal death metal, which keeps the speed, sinks the voice lower still, scrapes away nearly everything that could pass for melody and makes the palm-muted riff the entire argument. Slam lives inside it. Built for a floor full of moving bodies and carried from New York down to Texas, the slow, lurching figure found the record it still measures itself against when the Dallas crew of Devourment recorded Molesting the Decapitated in 1999.

Sideways lies death 'n' roll, the growl and the downtuned guitar dragged by the hair onto the groove of seventies hard rock. The press nailed the name to Entombed when Wolverine Blues came out on Earache in 1993, then to Gorefest with Erase in 1994 and Carcass with Swansong in 1996. Most of the bands shrugged. The riffs kept swinging anyway.

Black metal shares the blast beat and the tremolo pick and still stands across a hard line, drawn in public by Darkthrone. After one death metal album, Soulside Journey, for Peaceville in 1991, the Norwegian band came back in February 1992 with A Blaze in the Northern Sky, a record that ripped the low end out, raised the voice to a shriek and let the production freeze over, and the label hesitated before putting it out. The line held.

Grindcore grew from hardcore punk and measures its songs in seconds, and Carcass started there, on Reek of Putrefaction in 1988, before crossing over in stages. Arriving in the middle of the 2000s with Suicide Silence and Whitechapel, deathcore takes the growl and the blast and builds the whole song toward a metalcore breakdown that drops like a carcass off the hook onto the killing floor. Melodic death metal gets mistaken for metalcore for the simplest reason there is. Metalcore learned its harmonised leads from it.

Where to start

The canon every history names first, from Seven Churches to Altars of Madness, is laid out in the full story, told in order. These eight death metal albums sit one row along, each one opening a different cutting room.

• Obituary Cause of Death Roadrunner, 1990

  The Tampa five crawling through Morrisound, John Tardy's growl smeared across the riffs like offal on tile, a voice the singer has called closer to noise than words.

• Dismember Like an Ever Flowing Stream Nuclear Blast, 1991

  The Stockholm chainsaw at full strength in barely 31 minutes, with Entombed's drummer Nicke Andersson carving out most of the lead guitar.

• Autopsy Mental Funeral Peaceville, 1991

  Tempos sunk into the grave of doom and, by the band's own account, barely mixed at all, a foundation stone of death doom still reeking of the pit.

• Incantation Onward to Golgotha Relapse, 1992

  The New York debut dredged up from a cave, low, echoing and blasphemous, and the grave the cavernous revival bands of the 2010s went back to exhume.

• Carcass Heartwork Earache, 1993

  Grindcore veterans honing melody to a scalpel's edge under an H. R. Giger sculpture, the album Decibel called the defining statement of melodic death metal.

• Death Symbolic Roadrunner, 1995

  The band that helped draw up the template opening its own chest to clean tones and long melodic lines, over about six weeks at Morrisound.

• Cryptopsy None So Vile Wrong Again, 1996

  The Montreal wrecking crew at full tilt, technical and brutal inside the same bar, grinding bone to meal, and a record the brutal wing still studies.

• Immolation Close to a World Below Metal Blade, 2000

  Dissonant chords hanging like smoke over a charnel house at doom pace, four and a half stars from AllMusic, and a bridge to the dissonant wing that followed.