In the first week of April 1985, four musicians from the north end of the Bay Area went into Prairie Sun Studios in Cotati with Randy Burns. Two of them were sixteen. Combat released the results on 4 November as Seven Churches, and that is the earliest album anyone can point at and call the start of this.
Then almost nothing happened for two years. The 1980s produced the genre and produced hardly any records of it, and that gap is the whole story of the decade. What follows is a portrait of a scene that lived on cassettes and had to wait for the album format to catch up with it.
A decade with almost no albums in it
Count the death metal albums released before 1989 that a listener would still put on today and you will not need both hands. There were four or five, depending on how strict you are about where thrash stops. Meanwhile the demo economy was enormous: hundreds of bands, tape trading networks running through the post across three continents, and a circulation system in which the important recordings were the ones you could not buy in a shop.
The reasons are practical rather than romantic. Labels with money would not touch this music, the labels that would touch it were run out of bedrooms with no distribution, and a studio session cost more than a band earned in a year of local shows. So the first albums arrive late, they arrive in a rush, and they arrive already carrying three years of material that everybody in the scene had heard on tape. If you want the whole shape of that story rather than the shortlist, where to start listening covers it record by record.
1985 to 1988, the scarce years
Possessed opened it and then lost the thread, and Seven Churches remains half a thrash record with a vocal that nobody had committed to for a full album before. Sepultura made Morbid Visions for Cogumelo in November 1986 with barely any equipment and it sounds like it, which is not a criticism of what they were reaching for. Death then did the decisive thing twice: Scream Bloody Gore, cut at Music Grinder in Los Angeles in November 1986 with two people playing everything and released by Combat on 25 May 1987, then Leprosy in 1988, which is the first album in the genre where the writing is as strong as the concept.
Britain arrived through grind rather than through death metal proper. Napalm Death recorded the two halves of Scum nine months apart at Rich Bitch in Birmingham with almost no line-up in common between the sides, and Earache pressed two thousand copies in June 1987. Carcass followed on 28 July 1988 with Reek of Putrefaction, four days of recording and a mix squeezed into whatever hours the deadline left, and John Peel told The Observer it was his favourite album of the year.
The important recordings of this decade were the ones you could not buy in a shop. That is not nostalgia, it is distribution.
Two records from these years were made in the middle of the decade and did not reach anybody until the end of it. Repulsion recorded Horrified in June 1986 in a basement studio belonging to the engineer Larry Hennessy, in three or four days, for three hundred dollars. No label wanted it, the band broke up that September, and the tape circulated for three years under the title Slaughter of the Innocent before Necrosis, a sublabel of Earache run by Bill Steer and Jeff Walker of Carcass, put it out properly in July 1989. Morbid Angel recorded a whole album in 1986 with Mike Browning drumming and singing, shelved it when he left the band, and let Earache release it as Abominations of Desolation only in September 1991.
1989, which carries the whole decade
Then one year does more work than the eight before it put together. Autopsy opened it with Severed Survival on 24 April, cut at Starlight Sound in Richmond in January with Steve Di Giorgio on session bass, and Peaceville had to commission a second sleeve because the shops would not stock the first one. Morbid Angel released Altars of Madness through Earache on 12 May, recorded at Morrisound the previous December, with Pete Sandoval holding a blast beat across a whole album for the first time in the genre's life. Obituary followed four days later with Slowly We Rot on R/C, produced by Scott Burns in a manner he never repeated, most of it recorded in 1988, and John Tardy singing in a way that has no words in it at all.
Europe answered inside the same twelve months. Bolt Thrower recorded Realm of Chaos at Loco Studios in April, mixed it in July and Earache released it on 28 October with a Games Workshop sleeve. Pestilence made Consuming Impulse at Music Lab in Berlin with Harris Johns and Martin van Drunen singing on it for the last time, drier and more paranoid than anything Florida had. And Terrorizer, a band that barely existed, went into Morrisound in May with David Vincent producing and Scott Burns engineering, cut and mixed the entire thing in two days according to AllMusic's account, and Earache issued World Downfall on 13 November with Jesse Pintado on guitar and Pete Sandoval playing drums on his second landmark of the year.
Six albums in seven months, three of them out of the same studio, one of them recorded in two days. Nothing in the following decade is a bigger year than 1989, and the reason is simply that the backlog finally got funded. The bands had been ready since 1986.
| Year | Album | Label | Recorded |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1985 | Possessed, Seven Churches | Combat | April 1985, Cotati |
| 1986 | Sepultura, Morbid Visions | Cogumelo | 1986, Belo Horizonte |
| 1987 | Death, Scream Bloody Gore | Combat | November 1986, Los Angeles |
| 1987 | Napalm Death, Scum | Earache | August 1986 and May 1987, Birmingham |
| 1988 | Carcass, Reek of Putrefaction | Earache | Winter 1987 to March 1988, Birmingham |
| 1988 | Death, Leprosy | Combat | 1988, Tampa |
| 1989 | Autopsy, Severed Survival | Peaceville | January 1989, Richmond |
| 1989 | Morbid Angel, Altars of Madness | Earache | December 1988, Tampa |
| 1989 | Obituary, Slowly We Rot | R/C | 1988 to March 1989, Tampa |
| 1989 | Repulsion, Horrified | Necrosis | June 1986, Flint |
| 1989 | Bolt Thrower, Realm of Chaos | Earache | April 1989, Loco Studios |
| 1989 | Terrorizer, World Downfall | Earache | May 1989, Tampa |
| 1989 | Pestilence, Consuming Impulse | Roadrunner | 1989, Berlin |
Read the last two columns against each other and the argument of the decade is right there in the dates. Three of those thirteen albums were on tape years before they were on a shelf, and one of them, the Repulsion record, is three years older than the year printed on it. Any list of the best 1980s death metal albums is really a list of what finally got pressed, which is a different thing from what the decade actually contained.
What the decade sounds like now
Two things. The first is that these records are dry. The 1980s had no low end available to it, so the heaviness in this music is all attack and menace rather than mass, and anybody arriving from a modern record will find them thin for about a quarter of an hour and then stop noticing. The second is that they are short. Nobody had learned to pad yet.
The other quality worth naming is that almost every album here sounds like a band that expected nobody to hear it. That produces a particular kind of recklessness, and it is the thing the next decade would slowly sell off in exchange for competence and a proper budget, which is exactly the argument running through the Best Death Metal Albums of the 1990s.
