The best technical death metal bands are the ones where you cannot pull the technique out of the song without the song collapsing. That is the whole verdict and the rest of this piece defends it, because the alternative measure, which is how hard the parts are to play, produces a list that nobody enjoys and everybody respects.
Both kinds of record are here. They are just not ranked together, because they are not attempting the same thing, and the pretence that they are is how the wing got its reputation for being a sport with a growl on top. For where this fits in the wider genre, the chapter this belongs to puts these albums against everything around them.
The first wave, where technique was composition
Atheist made the finest record in this wing and did it under conditions nobody should have to work in. Roger Patterson had written the bass lines for Unquestionable Presence and died in a touring van accident before the sessions began. Tony Choy learned the parts across eight weeks in a rented apartment, the band cut the album at Morrisound with Scott Burns, and Active Records released it on 30 August 1991. It is the first record in this music with an actual jazz rhythm section inside it rather than a quotation of one, and thirty five years later almost nobody has matched what it does with a time signature.
Death did it twice. Human made technique the subject in 1991, and Individual Thought Patterns, recorded at Morrisound with Scott Burns and released by Relativity on 22 June 1993, is the better album of the two. Andy LaRocque came in on lead guitar, Steve Di Giorgio brought the fretless back, Gene Hoglan took the drum stool, and the record reached number 30 on the American Heatseekers chart while "The Philosopher" got onto MTV. Complexity that ends up on television is complexity in the service of something.
Cynic went furthest and were understood last. Focus was cut at Morrisound with Scott Burns of all people and released by Roadrunner on 13 September 1993, with Sean Malone on fretless bass and Chapman Stick, guitar synthesiser through most of it and a vocoder on the clean vocals. The death metal press of 1993 was not kind. Every progressive extreme metal band working now is downstream of it.
Technique that you can hear as technique has already lost the argument. The best of these records make difficulty inaudible and unavoidable at the same time.
Two more close the wave. Cryptopsy, None So Vile, thirty two minutes out of Studio Victor in Montreal on 3 July 1996, on which Flo Mounier moved the floor under every drummer in the genre and the songs still hold their shape. And Gorguts, Obscura, written in 1993, rehearsed for four years while no label would take it, released by Olympic on 23 June 1998, on which dissonance stops being an ornament and becomes the structural material. Neither album is enjoyable in the ordinary sense. Both are compositions rather than exhibitions.
The second wave, where technique became a sport
From about 2004 the wing changes character, and the change is honest rather than shameful. Necrophagist released Epitaph through Relapse on 3 August 2004, written in notation software by Muhammed Suicmez, and it set a guitar standard the whole scene then chased. Origin pushed speed past the point of legibility on Echoes of Decimation in 2005. Spawn of Possession spent six years on Incurso and released it in 2012. Archspire turned the vocal itself into a technical instrument on Relentless Mutation in 2017, and Beyond Creation put a fretless bass at the front of the mix and built songs around it.
What separates the good ones here from the tedious ones is not speed, it is whether anything is at stake. Incurso works because underneath the arpeggios there are actual melodies with a direction. A great deal of what surrounded it does not work, because a run of notes at 250 beats per minute with no destination is an exercise, and the audience for exercises is other guitarists.
| Album | Year | The device | Serves the song |
|---|---|---|---|
| Atheist, Unquestionable Presence | 1991 | A jazz rhythm section, in earnest | Completely |
| Death, Individual Thought Patterns | 1993 | Fragmented riffs, fretless bass | Completely |
| Cynic, Focus | 1993 | Chapman Stick, guitar synth, vocoder | Completely |
| Cryptopsy, None So Vile | 1996 | Drumming as a lead instrument | Mostly |
| Gorguts, Obscura | 1998 | Dissonance as structure | Completely |
| Necrophagist, Epitaph | 2004 | Written guitar composition | Partly |
| Origin, Echoes of Decimation | 2005 | Speed past legibility | Partly |
| Spawn of Possession, Incurso | 2012 | Arpeggios with a destination | Mostly |
| Ulcerate, Stare Into Death and Be Still | 2020 | Dissonance plus something to hold | Completely |
The third thing, which is neither
A branch has grown out of what Luc Lemay built in 1998 that belongs in neither column. Ulcerate, three musicians from Auckland, took what Luc Lemay did to the guitar and built two decades of work on it, and Stare Into Death and Be Still in 2020 is the album that finally balances the dissonance against something a listener can hold onto. Their playing is as difficult as anything in the second wave and it never once sounds like a demonstration, because the difficulty is in the ensemble rather than in any one pair of hands.
The same is true of the modern dissonant wing generally, and of the German band who took their name directly from the Gorguts album. What that whole family understands is the thing the sport wing keeps forgetting: an audience will forgive an unplayable passage, but it will not forgive being shown one.
Two groups of bands get left out of every list like this one and both deserve better. The first is the technical bands nobody files as technical. Suffocation wrote riff collages on Pierced from Within in 1995 that are harder to play than most of the second wave and got called brutal instead, because the tempo and the tone said brutal and the filing was done by ear rather than by score. Nile spent twenty five years writing in modes nobody else in the genre uses and are shelved under Egyptian rather than under technical.
The second group is the ones the audience never found. Timeghoul left two demos between 1992 and 1994 with writing on them that would not surface again for a decade. Martyr, out of Quebec, made three albums of the most inventive playing in the country that produced Gorguts and Cryptopsy, and remain a name traded between people who already know. Anata did the same in Sweden. None of them sold anything. All of them are better than most of what did.
The other honest observation about this wing is that it is the only part of death metal where the drummer decides the ceiling. Sean Reinert, Flo Mounier, Gene Hoglan, Steve Flynn: in every case the record could not have been written until somebody was capable of playing it, and the bands were assembled around that capability rather than around a scene or a city. That is a completely different way of forming a band from the one the rest of this genre used, and it explains both the achievements and the coldness that people complain about.
Where to start
Start with Individual Thought Patterns, because it is the most immediately musical record in this article and the one that will make the others make sense. Then Unquestionable Presence, then Focus, and only then Obscura, which will sound like nonsense until it suddenly does not.
And if the technical wing has ever felt like homework to you, the cure is to stop listening at album scale and drop down to the individual track, where the whole genre has to make its case inside four minutes and nobody has room to show off for its own sake. That is the scale the Best Death Metal Songs works at, and it is a completely different way of hearing all of this.
For the opposite corner of the genre, the wing where weight replaced dexterity outright and the whole argument about difficulty was answered with a slower riff and a bigger sound, the piece that covers it is the Best Brutal Death Metal Albums.
