The Child is father of the Man.William Wordsworth, My Heart Leaps Up
Most bands need three records to find out what they are. They put out a debut that sounds like the four records they grew up on, spend a tour learning what does not work, then make the one people remember. That is the ordinary path and there is no shame anywhere in it.
This piece is about the other kind. The band that walks into a studio having already decided everything, comes out forty minutes later with a finished argument, and spends the rest of its career either defending that argument or trying to get back to it. Death metal produced an unusual number of those, partly because the demo circuit made bands rehearse their identity for three years before anybody would pay for a session.
The test
A great debut is not simply a good first album. It has to be a record that could not have been made by a band still working out what it wanted. You can hear the difference in the first thirty seconds: no borrowed chorus, no genre it is hedging towards, no track sitting there because somebody in the room liked a different style. Everything on it agrees with everything else on it.
The second half of the test is harder and it is where most candidates fall over. Did the band ever better it. If the answer is yes, the debut was a promising start rather than a finished statement, and the album belongs in the essentials under whichever record actually did the work. Of the seven below, five were never bettered by the bands who made them, and two of those bands never got the chance to try.
The ones that arrived finished
Immolation, Dawn of Possession, recorded at Musiclab Studios in Berlin with Harris Johns and released by Roadrunner on 16 July 1991. Six of its songs had already been demoed between 1988 and 1989 and the rest were written in the two years after, which is the whole explanation: the band had lived with this material long enough to strip every accident out of it. Robert Vigna's guitar lines bend where you expect a straight line and refuse to land where the ear has already gone looking. Thirty five years on, the New York four have made better produced albums and have never made a more complete one.
Suffocation, Effigy of the Forgotten, Roadrunner, 22 October 1991, five thousand dollars and one month at Morrisound. It invents the slam riff and then, in the same forty minutes, works out what a whole style would do with it. Debuts do not usually get to found a subgenre and demonstrate it at the same time.
Demilich, Nespithe, recorded in Savonlinna between 26 and 31 December 1992 and released by Necropolis on 8 February 1993: thirty nine minutes, and the only album the band ever made. Antti Boman sings in a register so far below the floor of the genre that thirty three years of imitators have all been immediately identifiable as imitators. A debut, a peak and a complete works in one object.
Incantation, Onward to Golgotha, Relapse, 5 May 1992. The tempo drops without warning, the guitars are smeared until you hear mass instead of notes, and Craig Pillard sings from somewhere under the boards. Everything the band has done in the thirty four years since is a return to this.
Autopsy belong here for a different reason. Severed Survival was cut at Starlight Sound in Richmond in January 1989, co produced by John Marshall, and Peaceville released it on 24 April with Steve Di Giorgio playing bass as a session man. Peaceville then had to commission a second sleeve, because the original painting of a man being pulled apart was too much for the shops. What arrives finished on that record is not a style so much as an instruction set: slow down inside the fast part, let the tuning slide, keep the room noise. Everything the death doom wing has done since is written in that hand.
A finished debut is not a promising one. It is a band arriving with the argument already won and nothing left to negotiate.
Deicide, Deicide, cut at Morrisound in March 1990 and released by R/C on 26 June, thirty three minutes, four men, no ornament anywhere on it. And Blood Incantation, Starspawn, recorded at World Famous Studios in Denver with Pete deBoer and released by Dark Descent on 19 August 2016: five tracks, thirty four and a half minutes, and the first modern record to make the underground of 1991 sound like a live option rather than a costume. Albert Mudrian of Decibel called it the death metal album of the year before the year was over.
The famous names whose debut was a starting line
Half the point of a list like this is the bands who do not make it, and there is no criticism in the exclusion. A first album that turns out to be a starting line is the normal outcome and often the healthier one.
- Gorguts, Considered Dead, recorded at Morrisound with Scott Burns and released by Roadrunner on 8 October 1991, with Chris Barnes singing backing vocals on three tracks and James Murphy playing a solo. A fine record of the Tampa house style and no warning whatsoever of Obscura seven years later.
- Cryptopsy, Blasphemy Made Flesh, 1994, which has all the violence of None So Vile and none of its shape.
- Bolt Thrower, In Battle There Is No Law!, Vinyl Solution, 1988, a punk record with the tank still parked outside.
- Carcass, Reek of Putrefaction, 1988, which founded a subgenre and which the band's own guitarist has said the engineer ruined. Influence and quality are separate measurements, as the Most Influential Death Metal Albums spends its whole length demonstrating.
What the pattern tells you
Stockholm is the clearest case of the mechanism at work anywhere in the genre. Between June 1990 and the end of 1991 four bands from one small circle put out first albums that were all complete on arrival: Entombed with Left Hand Path, Dismember with Like an Ever Flowing Stream, Grave with Into the Grave and Unleashed with Where No Life Dwells. They shared members, rehearsal rooms, a studio and a guitar pedal, and they had all been swapping demos for three or four years before a label paid for anything. Nobody in that circle was working out what they wanted while the tape ran.
Look at the dates on the rest of the list and the same window keeps turning up, which is not a coincidence and not nostalgia either. In those years a band could not get near a studio until it had put out two or three demos and toured on them, so the record label was paying for material that had already been tested in rooms full of people. The band arrived with the arguing done. Later, when a first album could be made at home in a bedroom, debuts got better sounding and much less finished.
Play any of the six front to back and you will notice something they share beyond quality, which is that not one of them is trying to be pleasant for a single bar. That is the next question in this run, and it needs a definition before it can be answered, so the Heaviest Death Metal Albums Ever Recorded starts by working out what the word is supposed to mean.
