Four words and about one second. That is the whole of "You Suffer", the Napalm Death track that opens side one of Scum, and it is on this page because it proves the point every other entry has to argue for: this music works at the scale of the moment, and an album is simply the container the moment travels in.
Everything else in this run has been about records. This one is about seconds. Ranking songs is a different job from ranking albums, and the results barely overlap, because a song can be carried by six bars that nobody would build a whole record on.
What a great one has to do
Three things, and it needs all three. It has to have a moment, a specific place in the running time where the thing you came for actually happens, and you should be able to say roughly when it arrives. It has to be recognisable in under ten seconds, which is a higher bar in this genre than in almost any other, since so much of it is deliberately built out of the same materials. And it has to survive being separated from its album, which is where most of the great ones on the great records fall down.
That last test knocks out a surprising amount of the canon. Plenty of the best albums in the chapter this belongs to are made of tracks that only work in sequence, and there is no criticism in that at all. It is simply a different craft.
The moments
- Entombed, "Left Hand Path". At 3:54 the song stops being a death metal track and interpolates the theme from the 1979 film Phantasm, and it plays that out for the rest of the running time. Nobody had ended a song that way. Half the underground has tried since.
- Suffocation, "Liege of Inveracity". Ninety seconds at full speed, then the drop into half time, and the entire slam wing of this genre comes out of that one transition.
- Death, "Crystal Mountain". The chorus, which is an actual chorus, sung in a growl, on a death metal album, in 1995, without a single note of compromise anywhere near it.
- Morbid Angel, "Chapel of Ghouls". The opening riff, which is the most recognisable eight bars the genre has, and the part where the whole band lands together on the downbeat after Pete Sandoval has been blasting through the section before.
- At the Gates, "Blinded by Fear". The first twelve seconds. No introduction, no build, straight into the harmonised lead, and twenty five years of American bands have opened albums that way because of it.
- Carcass, "Corporal Jigsore Quandary". The point where the twin lead comes in over the main riff, which is the exact moment melodic death metal becomes possible.
- Cannibal Corpse, "Hammer Smashed Face". The bass introduction, alone, before anything else arrives. It is the only bass part in this music that a person who does not listen to this music can recognise.
- Bolt Thrower, "World Eater". The tempo, which never changes, and the moment about halfway through when you realise it is not going to.
- Napalm Death, "You Suffer". One second. Four words.
- Gorguts, "Nostalgia". The clean guitar passage, which arrives on the most hostile album in this article and is the most beautiful thing on any of them.
An album asks for forty minutes. A song has ten seconds to get you and one moment to keep you, and it is a harder craft than the format usually gets credit for.
The ones that carry a whole band
Some songs have done more work for their bands than any album ever did. "Hammer Smashed Face" is the clearest case: released on Tomb of the Mutilated in September 1992, then performed on camera in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective two years later at Jim Carrey's own request, and it has been introducing people to this genre ever since, usually by accident. Cannibal Corpse have written better songs. None of them has had that job.
"Blinded by Fear" did something similar for a style rather than a band. It opens Slaughter of the Soul, released by Earache on 14 November 1995, and the twelve second introduction became a structural template for an entire commercial genre in another country. The band that wrote it had made three stranger albums first and almost nobody went back to check.
Then there are the songs that carry a band in the opposite direction, by being the thing the audience never forgives them for leaving behind. "Zombie Ritual" from Scream Bloody Gore is one. Death spent a decade writing more sophisticated material and a section of the audience wanted that riff back for the whole ten years.
Six more were close and each of them loses on a single point. Obituary's "Chopped in Half" has the best mid tempo riff Trevor Peres ever wrote and no moment you could put a finger on. Deicide's "Dead by Dawn" is thirty five years old and still the most efficient thing on their debut, but it never leaves the level it starts at. Cryptopsy's "Slit Your Guts" is a drum performance with a song attached rather than the other way round. Nile's "Sacrifice Unto Sebek" fails the ten second test purely because the introduction is not the band. Autopsy's "Charred Remains" is superb and inseparable from the record around it. And Demilich open Nespithe with a track whose title runs to fourteen words, which is charming and is not a musical argument.
The other thing this scale reveals is how short everything is. The genre settled early on four to five minutes and has almost never moved, which is why the exceptions carry so much weight when they arrive: an eighteen minute closer on a Blood Incantation record in 2019, a forty minute single track from Edge of Sanity in 1996, one second from Napalm Death in 1987. Between those poles sits the entire working catalogue, written to a length nobody ever agreed on out loud.
Songs are not albums
Notice what is missing. Nothing from Obscura made the moments list except "Nostalgia", because that album works as a single forty minute argument and its individual tracks are paragraphs rather than sentences. Nothing from Onward to Golgotha either, for the same reason in reverse: the record is an atmosphere and the atmosphere needs the full running time to settle on you. Both are better albums than half the records that supplied a song above.
That mismatch is the point of writing this at song scale at all. If you have come through the album lists and want the other view of the same material, the story of death metal, chapter by chapter is the long way round, and it explains why the songs above sound the way they do.
The short way round is to take the records in the order they were made and hear the arguments answering each other in real time, which is what death Metal Albums in Chronological Order is arranged to let you do. Either route ends in the same place. Put on "Left Hand Path", wait for 3:54, and then decide whether you want the whole catalogue.
