Now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain.John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
Melodic death metal is the only branch of this music that ever got accused of being pleasant, and the accusation has followed it around for thirty years. It is also the branch with the largest audience by a distance, the one that got death metal riff writing onto mainstream radio playlists, and the one that produced the most durable songwriting anybody in the genre has managed. All of that is true at once.
What follows is the branch judged on its own terms rather than against the abattoir. If you want the wider canon that this sits inside, the album list covers the whole territory and argues about where these records belong in it.
What the style actually is
Take a death metal band and give it two guitars playing harmonised lines in thirds and sixths, the way British heavy metal had been doing since 1980. Keep the growl, keep the tempo, keep the distortion. Change the harmony from tritones and semitones to something with a key in it, and write the leads as melodies you could hum rather than as decoration on top of a riff. That is the whole method, and by 1996 four bands in one city had turned it into a movement.
The city matters and the studio matters more. Studio Fredman in Gothenburg, with Fredrik Nordstrom at the desk, recorded so much of this that the room itself became part of the definition, in the same way Morrisound had been for Florida five years earlier. The difference is that Nordstrom's records sound bright and separated, where Scott Burns had been chasing weight. A whole aesthetic follows from that single choice about a mix.
The records the style is built on
The finest of them is Dark Tranquillity's The Gallery, recorded and mixed at Studio Fredman across April and May 1995 and released by Osmose on 27 November, the first full length with Mikael Stanne singing after four years as the rhythm guitarist. It is the record where the melodies are genuinely strange rather than merely pretty: lines that resolve a step away from where the ear was waiting, an acoustic passage that is not there as relief, and a vocal that sounds like it is arguing with the guitars instead of riding them. Nothing else in the style is this restless.
In Flames made the template three months later. The Jester Race was recorded at Studio Fredman in November 1995 with Fredrik Nordstrom and released by Nuclear Blast on 20 February 1996, the first album with Anders Friden singing and Bjorn Gelotte behind the kit. Where Dark Tranquillity kept the strangeness, In Flames kept the tunes, and the harmonised twin lead on this record is the single most copied device in extreme metal after the buzzsaw guitar tone. Everything the band did afterwards, including the parts of it that annoyed the audience they built, is a consequence of how well this worked.
Change the harmony and keep everything else, and you have a music that can be beautiful without ever once slowing down or asking permission.
At the Gates are the third pillar and the most misunderstood. Slaughter of the Soul, cut at Studio Fredman in 1995 and released by Earache on 14 November, is the album the wider world knows and it is the least interesting record the band made. Go instead to The Red in the Sky Is Ours from 1992, which has a violinist on it and a structure nobody has copied because nobody could, and to With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness and Terminal Spirit Disease, both on Peaceville, which are stranger, less resolved and much closer to what this band was actually for. Slaughter of the Soul is a great record about which too much has been said. The three before it are better and almost nobody plays them.
Finland, and the part that is not Gothenburg
Reduce this style to four Swedish bands and you lose the half of it that has aged best. Amorphis recorded Tales from the Thousand Lakes in September 1993 with Tomas Skogsberg, the man behind the Stockholm buzzsaw, and Relapse released it on 12 July 1994: a concept album drawn from the Finnish national epic, with a keyboard player, clean vocals arriving where nobody expected them, and melodies that come out of folk music rather than out of Iron Maiden. Sentenced got there a year earlier with North from Here, colder and faster and almost forgotten.
Then there is Eucharist, whose A Velvet Creation arrived in 1993 with everything the Gothenburg bands would be praised for two years later, and who never got the audience for it. And Insomnium, working since 1997 and still the most consistent band in the style, whose Above the Weeping World in 2006 proved the form had another twenty years in it. Amon Amarth took the same harmonies somewhere else entirely and built the largest live audience anybody in this music has had.
What the style did next
The export phase begins around 2001 and it is where the audience arrives. Arch Enemy recorded Wages of Sin at Studio Fredman in December 2000 with Fredrik Nordstrom and Michael Amott producing, Century Media put it out in Japan on 25 April 2001 and internationally the following year, and it was the first album with Angela Gossow singing. Amott had already written the twin lead vocabulary once, in Carcass, seven years earlier. Here he built a career on it, and the band went on to tour at a scale nobody in Gothenburg had planned for in 1995.
The consequence nobody planned for happened in America. Between 1998 and 2006 a commercial genre was assembled almost entirely out of Gothenburg riff writing with a different kind of singer on top, and for a while the word melodic death metal was more likely to describe a band from Massachusetts than one from Sweden. The Swedish bands themselves reacted to that by moving away from what they had built, which is why the In Flames catalogue after 2002 divides its audience so sharply. None of that is the fault of the four records at the top of this page.
What has kept the style alive since is the slower, longer end of it. Insomnium built a whole album out of one continuous forty minute piece in 2016. Omnium Gatherum and Be'lakor have spent two decades writing melodic death metal that behaves like progressive rock without ever dropping the growl. The audience for that is smaller than the one In Flames built and it has not shrunk in twenty years.
Where the argument sits now
The complaint about this branch has always been the same: that the melody is a softening, and that a band who writes a chorus has stopped meaning it. Play The Gallery next to almost anything from Tampa in the same year and the complaint does not survive the comparison, because the Swedish record is faster, denser and considerably less interested in comforting you. What it is not is heavy in the physical sense, and that is a genuine difference rather than a failure.
The honest position is that this is a style with an unusually low floor and an unusually high ceiling. The bad melodic death metal albums are worse than the bad brutal ones, because a weak melody is audible in a way that a weak riff is not. The best of them are among the best records this genre has produced in any style. For the opposite end of the same argument, the wing that answered melody with weight and took the whole thing in the other direction, go to the Best Brutal Death Metal Albums.
