Hansa Tonstudio in Berlin, summer 2023, a room with a long and entirely unrelated history in it, and a death metal band out of Denver is booked in with Arthur Rizk producing. The record that came out of those sessions runs forty three minutes and thirty nine seconds, was released by Century Media on 4 October 2024, and half of it is not death metal at all. Thirty nine years earlier the same music was being made by four teenagers in northern California with a borrowed studio and no idea what to call it.
Between those two rooms sits a sequence, and the sequence is the point of this page. Most lists of records in this genre are rankings, and a ranking hides the one thing a newcomer actually needs, which is that these albums are replies to each other. Almost every important death metal record was made by people who had just heard the previous one and disagreed with part of it. Play them in order and the argument is audible. Play them in order of quality and it is not. The wider story of why each of them matters is the wider story this chapter hangs under; what follows is the timeline.
1985 to 1989, the alphabet
Start on 4 November 1985 with Possessed and Seven Churches, cut at Prairie Sun Studios in Cotati with Randy Burns producing and put out by Combat. Two of the band were sixteen. It is thrash with the warmth removed rather than a new genre, and that incompleteness is the reason it works as a first listen: you can hear what has not been invented yet. Step two answers it. Death made Scream Bloody Gore in Los Angeles in November 1986 with Chris Reifert on drums and Chuck Schuldiner playing everything else, Combat released it on 25 May 1987, and every escape route the previous record left open is closed. No clean introduction, no thrash chorus, no relief in thirty nine minutes.
Step three comes from outside. Napalm Death put out Scum on Earache in 1987 with a different line-up on each side and set an outer limit on speed and brevity that death metal spent a decade measuring itself against. Then Morbid Angel and Altars of Madness, Earache, 12 May 1989, where Pete Sandoval holds a blast beat across a whole album for the first time and Trey Azagthoth writes leads that refuse to land where the ear expects. Close the decade with Obituary, Slowly We Rot, Roadrunner, 1989, which is the first record to prove that none of the speed was compulsory.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
1990 to 1992, everything at once
Three years carry more of this story than any other stretch, and they are best heard in a run. Entombed and Left Hand Path, Sunlight Studio in December 1989, Earache on 4 June 1990: the first record where the guitar tone is the identity. Deicide, self titled, R/C, 26 June 1990: thirty three minutes, no ideas held back for later. Autopsy, Mental Funeral, Peaceville, 22 April 1991: six days of recording, almost no mixing, and the professional finish taken off the genre deliberately. Dismember, Like an Ever Flowing Stream, Nuclear Blast, 28 May 1991: the Swedish tone with better songs on it.
Then the two records of October 1991 that pull in opposite directions on the same day of the month. Suffocation, Effigy of the Forgotten, Roadrunner, 22 October, drops the tempo to half and puts the weight of the arrangement on your chest, which invents brutal death metal in one bar. Death, Human, Relativity, 22 October, hires two thirds of Cynic and a fretless bassist and moves the music by fragment instead of by repetition. One record goes down, the other goes sideways, and everything since has been made in the space between them. Incantation closes the run with Onward to Golgotha, Relapse, 5 May 1992, which turns the lights off entirely.
Almost every important death metal record was made by people who had just heard the previous one and disagreed with part of it.
1993 to 1998, the fork and the collapse
The middle of the decade is where the genre splits into wings and where the business underneath it fell in. Demilich recorded Nespithe in Savonlinna in the last week of December 1992 and Necropolis released it in February 1993, and nobody has successfully imitated the voice on it in the thirty three years since. Carcass put twin lead harmonies into Heartwork the same year and handed the melodic wing its blueprint. At The Gates finished the job at Studio Fredman in Gothenburg with Slaughter of the Soul, out through Earache on 14 November 1995, whose consequences outside the genre are larger than its consequences inside it.
Against all that, two records made in Montreal say no. Cryptopsy, None So Vile, 3 July 1996, thirty two minutes of drumming that reset the physical standard. Gorguts, Obscura, written between April and December 1993 and left in a drawer for four and a half years because nobody would release it, finally out through Olympic on 23 June 1998. Hear those two after the Gothenburg records and the decade makes sense: half the genre went towards the listener and half of it went in the other direction on purpose.
2000 to 2024, the long tail
The sequence does not stop when the nineties do, and the last quarter of it is where a new listener normally gives up too early. Nile, Black Seeds of Vengeance, Relapse, 2000, builds entire records out of scales and low brass that nothing in the genre had used. Necrophagist, Epitaph, Relapse, 3 August 2004, teaches a generation of guitarists to practise, for better and worse. Ulcerate, Stare Into Death and Be Still, Debemur Morti, 2020, is three men from Auckland writing the hardest music the genre currently contains.
Finish where this page began. Blood Incantation made Hidden History of the Human Race in Denver in June 2019 and Dark Descent released it that November, four songs with an eighteen minute closer, and then went to Berlin and made Absolute Elsewhere, which puts long instrumental passages next to some of the most violent playing of the band's career. Forty years after Cotati, the last record in the sequence is arguing with the first one.
| Year | Album | Label | What it added |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1985 | Possessed, Seven Churches | Combat | The name, and the first attempt |
| 1987 | Death, Scream Bloody Gore | Combat | Removes every thrash escape route |
| 1987 | Napalm Death, Scum | Earache | Sets the outer limit of speed |
| 1989 | Morbid Angel, Altars of Madness | Earache | The sustained blast, and the lead vocabulary |
| 1989 | Obituary, Slowly We Rot | Roadrunner | Proves speed is optional |
| 1990 | Entombed, Left Hand Path | Earache | Makes the tone the identity |
| 1990 | Deicide, Deicide | R/C | The specification met in full, at speed |
| 1991 | Autopsy, Mental Funeral | Peaceville | Takes the professional finish off |
| 1991 | Dismember, Like an Ever Flowing Stream | Nuclear Blast | Songs to go with the Swedish tone |
| 1991 | Suffocation, Effigy of the Forgotten | Roadrunner | The half time drop |
| 1991 | Death, Human | Relativity | Composition, and a fretless bass |
| 1992 | Incantation, Onward to Golgotha | Relapse | Mass instead of notes |
| 1993 | Demilich, Nespithe | Necropolis | A voice nobody has copied since |
| 1993 | Carcass, Heartwork | Earache | Twin leads, and the melodic blueprint |
| 1995 | At the Gates, Slaughter of the Soul | Earache | Melody at speed, exported everywhere |
| 1996 | Cryptopsy, None So Vile | Wrong Again | Resets what a drummer must be able to do |
| 1998 | Gorguts, Obscura | Olympic | Dissonance as material, not effect |
| 2000 | Nile, Black Seeds of Vengeance | Relapse | Scale, and a bibliography |
| 2004 | Necrophagist, Epitaph | Relapse | The technical arms race begins |
| 2020 | Ulcerate, Stare Into Death and Be Still | Debemur Morti | The dissonant wing at full growth |
| 2024 | Blood Incantation, Absolute Elsewhere | Century Media | Argues with the whole sequence above it |
How to use the order
Two records a week and you are through it in three months, which is roughly the pace at which the people who lived through it received the music anyway. Do not skip the early ones because they sound primitive. The primitiveness is information: it tells you what had not been solved yet, and it makes the solutions audible when they arrive. And do not treat the sequence as a quality ranking, because it is emphatically not one, and several of the most important steps here are records I would not put in a top twenty. For that argument, in the order I would actually defend, read the Best Death Metal Albums of All Time afterwards and notice how little the two lists agree.
