Death 'n' Roll

The growl on wheels

A death metal engine in a hot rod, death 'n' roll keeps the growl, the downtuned guitar and the saturated Swedish tone, and throws the tremolo run and the old ban on groove out onto the hard shoulder. The drums lock into a rock backbeat. Riffs come in pentatonic shapes any hard rock guitarist would recognise, often with a boogie shuffle or a stoner fuzz dragging behind them, and the solos bend notes instead of shredding them. It is still loud. It just moves.

Worked over at Sunlight Studio in Stockholm, where Tomas Skogsberg co-produced Dismember's Massive Killing Capacity in 1995 and Entombed recorded DCLXVI: To Ride, Shoot Straight and Speak the Truth the following year, the Swedish records kept the chainsaw guitar that had made the city's death metal famous and aimed it down a highway instead of through a crypt. The Dutch went further. Gorefest stripped Soul Survivor of almost everything but the growls in 1996.

The lyrics of death 'n' roll followed the music out of the grave. Horror gave ground to the road, the bottle, self-destruction and the devil worn as a jacket patch. The marketing went further than the bands wanted: for one edition of Wolverine Blues, Earache struck a deal with Marvel without Entombed's permission, put the comic book mutant on the cover, slipped a mini comic into the booklet and cut the track Out of Hand. The band made its anger public. The riffs outlived the stunt.

The death 'n' roll highway

The map is short and scattered, a handful of European bands who each drove out of death metal by a different road in the middle of the 1990s. Stockholm supplied Entombed and Dismember, and the Netherlands supplied Gorefest. Finland supplied Convulse, whose Reflections arrived on Relapse in 1994 with softer guitar tones and a jazzy, Sabbath-soaked looseness, before the band split the same year. Liverpool's Carcass closed its first life with Swansong in 1996.

The borders of death 'n' roll run in two directions. On one side stand stoner rock and sludge, with the same fuzz and the same backbeat but a sung or shouted voice. On the other stand d-beat and crust, where Disfear, fronted from 2003 by At the Gates singer Tomas Lindberg until his death in 2025, gave the swagger a punk engine. Groove metal gets confused with it too, though that style hangs its riffs on the mid-paced stomp of thrash, and brutal death metal is the exact opposite exit, the wing that would sooner flatten a groove than ride it.

The idea never died, only went into cold storage. Nicke Andersson, who had played drums on the early Entombed records, came back with Death Breath and Stinking Up the Night in 2006, and part of the original band carried the name forward as Entombed A.D. from 2014. Each revival dropped the old engine into a new frame. It still started first time.

Where to start

Seven death 'n' roll albums from the five years when death metal learned to swing, from the Stockholm original to the Sunlight sequel that drove it all the way into the garage.

• Entombed Wolverine Blues Earache, 1993

  The Stockholm band's third album and the record the whole style is named against, the buzzsaw guitar suddenly riding a hard rock groove.

• Gorefest Erase Nuclear Blast, 1994

  The Dutch band's third album, cut in Gelsenkirchen early in 1994, death metal weight slowed into a heavy, rolling stride.

• Convulse Reflections Relapse, 1994

  The Finnish second album that swapped blast beats for clear production, thrash solos and a jazzy looseness, then went unheard as melodic death metal took the stage.

• Dismember Massive Killing Capacity Nuclear Blast, 1995

  The Stockholm chainsaw at mid tempo, recorded at Sunlight with Tomas Skogsberg, groove and hooks doing the work the tremolo run used to.

• Carcass Swansong Earache, 1996

  The Liverpool band's fifth album, released in June 1996, the grindcore veterans steering straight into rock and roll on their way out the door.

• Gorefest Soul Survivor Nuclear Blast, 1996

  Hard rock with every element of metal stripped out except the growls, and the purest statement of death 'n' roll on record.

• Entombed DCLXVI: To Ride, Shoot Straight and Speak the Truth Threeman Recordings, 1997

  Recorded at Sunlight in 1996, the hardcore and old death metal scraped off in favour of stoner and garage rock, and the style at full throttle.