Picture the live room at Morrisound Recording in Tampa somewhere around 1993. Same walls, same engineer, same drum sound, and a queue of bands outside who have flown in from three continents to get it. Scott Burns had made the sound of the genre available for hire, and for about four years everybody hired it. That decision, taken over and over by different people in different bands, is what shaped the first half of the decade and what wrecked the second half of it.
The 1990s are the only decade in which death metal was briefly a business, then stopped being one, and the best records of the ten years are not where the money was. Two of them come out of the years when the industry had already given up on the music entirely.
1990 to 1993, the boom
Everything arrived at once. Entombed and Dismember gave Stockholm a guitar sound; Obituary, Deicide and Suffocation gave Tampa a template it could sell; Death made Human and turned technique into the subject; Incantation and Autopsy pulled the other way and went underground. Between 1990 and 1993 this music produced more first rate albums than in any other four year stretch, and the reason is unglamorous. Labels were paying. Roadrunner, Earache, Peaceville, Relapse and Nuclear Blast were all funding studio time for bands who had been rehearsing since 1987.
The high point of the business, and the beginning of its collapse, is Morbid Angel's Covenant. It was cut at Morrisound, mixed by Flemming Rasmussen at Sweet Silence in Copenhagen, and released on 1 June 1993 in Britain by Earache and three weeks later in America by Giant, a Warner subsidiary. It got onto MTV. By Nielsen SoundScan's count it has sold over 150,000 copies in the United States, which is more than any other album in the genre. Every label in the business read that as a signal. None of the records they signed afterwards did anything like it.
Death metal was a business for about four years, and its best records are almost all from the years after the money left.
1994 to 1996, the years everyone left
By 1994 the major label experiment was over, the shops had stopped ordering, and a genre that had been the most commercially interesting thing in extreme music was suddenly the least. Bands were dropped. Some split. Others carried on with less money and, in a pattern that repeats too often to be a coincidence, made better records.
Death recorded Symbolic across six weeks at Morrisound in late 1994 with Jim Morris producing and Gene Hoglan playing drums, and Roadrunner released it on 21 March 1995 on a contract that covered exactly one album and nothing after it. Immolation were let go by the same label and made Here in After in July 1995 with Wayne Dorell, which Metal Blade put out on 13 February 1996, and it is a harder, stranger and more assured record than the one that got them signed. Suffocation made Pierced from Within in 1995 and had broken up by 1998.
Two records from these years settle any argument about whether the collapse hurt the music. Cryptopsy made None So Vile at Studio Victor in Montreal for a small Swedish label and released it on 3 July 1996, thirty two minutes that reset what a drummer in this genre was expected to do. And Edge of Sanity recorded Crimson at Unisound between December 1995 and January 1996, produced by Dan Swano with Mikael Akerfeldt of Opeth playing guitar and singing on it, and Black Mark released it on 2 April 1996 as a single continuous forty minute track. Nobody makes a forty minute track in a year when the label expects a hit.
None of this was only American, and the pieces that treat the decade as a Florida story miss half of it. Vader recorded De Profundis at Modern Sound Studio in Gdynia in May 1995, Croon Records put it out on 5 July, and it moved around seventeen thousand copies inside Poland in a fortnight, which for that country in that year is a figure worth stopping on. The Dutch bands, Pestilence, Sinister, Asphyx and Gorefest, ran a scene with its own sound and its own labels. Every one of those countries was building an audience while the American industry was busy losing one.
The middle of that decade is the best evidence we have that this music does its finest work when nobody is watching it and nobody is paying for it.
Gareth Llewellyn, KaosMetal
1997 to 1999, the wilderness
The last three years of the decade are the ones people skip, and they contain two of its most important records. Gorguts had written Obscura between April and December 1993, then spent four years rehearsing it because no label would take the material, until Olympic released it on 23 June 1998. An entire wing of the modern genre comes out of that delay. Death closed the decade with The Sound of Perseverance in 1998 on a third label in four years.
Nile arrived in the same stretch and gave the genre something it had run out of, which is new material to write about. Amongst the Catacombs of Nephren-Ka was recorded at The Sound Lab in Columbia and released by Relapse on 28 April 1998, built out of Lovecraft, Egyptian history and a collection of instruments no death metal band had ever bothered with, thigh bone flutes and Turkish gongs among them. It sounds absurd written down. On the record it works, and the band spent the following decade proving it was not a gimmick.
Meanwhile the attention had gone elsewhere: to Norway, to the nu metal that American labels were signing instead, and to the melodic wing coming out of Sweden that was about to become the most exported thing this genre ever produced. The bands who kept going were doing it on tour income and small label advances, which is exactly the condition under which the music had been made in the first place.
What the decade actually produced
Twelve or thirteen albums that any honest list of the genre has to include, and almost every one of them made in a room where nobody involved expected a return. The 1980s could not get funded. The 1990s got funded, spent the money, lost it, and did its best work on the far side of that. If you want the full ranking rather than the decade portrait, where to start listening puts these records against the ones on either side of them.
One strand of the decade has been left out of this piece on purpose, because it grew into a style of its own with its own audience, its own labels and its own quarrel about authenticity. That is the Gothenburg wing and everything downstream of it, and it gets its own accounting in the Best Melodic Death Metal Albums. Before that, if you want to see where all of this came from, go back to the Best Death Metal Albums of the 1980s and look at how few records the previous ten years managed to press.
