Here is the verdict before the list, because the list is long and the verdict is the reason to read it. The famous Florida bands are five, everybody can name them, and they are not what makes the state interesting. What makes it interesting is that a good third of the roster was not born there. People moved to Florida to play this music, the way musicians moved to Nashville to play another kind, and no other extreme metal scene in the world pulled that trick. A scene you can join by driving to it is a different animal from a scene you have to be born into.
What follows is the working roster, the transplants included, with the dates and the labels attached. The industrial account of how the records got made is in the Florida chapter; this is the personnel file.
The five that get named
Death, formed as Mantas in Altamonte Springs in 1983 and renamed in 1984, is the oldest thread and the one with the most turnover: Chuck Schuldiner ran it as a name rather than a band, hired and released musicians at a rate no other group in the genre matched, and left seven studio albums between 1987 and 1998. Morbid Angel assembled in Tampa in 1983 and took six years to release a debut, which is unusual patience for a genre built on demo tapes. Obituary started in 1984 as Executioner, then Xecutioner, and did not settle on the name they kept until late 1988.
The four who set out to be the most blasphemous band in a state full of them came together in Tampa in 1987 under the name Amon, the Hoffman brothers on guitars, Steve Asheim behind the kit and Glen Benton singing and playing bass at once, and Deicide went from first rehearsal to a signed debut in under three years, which is faster than any band in this account and faster than the industry was built to move. Cannibal Corpse are the fifth name on every list and they are from Buffalo, New York, which is the first crack in the story everybody tells.
The imported half
Two bands did the thing properly and moved. Malevolent Creation formed in Buffalo in 1987 and relocated to Fort Lauderdale the following year, driven by nothing more romantic than a guitarist's family moving south, and released The Ten Commandments on Roadrunner in 1991. Cannibal Corpse spent years flying down to record before finally settling in the state in the mid nineties. Monstrosity were founded in Fort Lauderdale in 1990 by drummer Lee Harrison, bassist Mark Van Erp and a singer named George Fisher, and put out Imperial Doom through Nuclear Blast in 1992.
That last name matters more than the record does. Fisher sang for Monstrosity from 1990 until 1996, and in 1995, weeks before his second album with them appeared, he took the vacant job in Cannibal Corpse and has held it since. One Fort Lauderdale band therefore staffed the biggest death metal group on earth, which is the kind of transfer that only happens where the talent pool is deep and everybody knows everybody's phone number.
A scene you can join by driving to it is a different animal from a scene you have to be born into.
The technical wing, which is the state's real bequest
The brutality is what Florida is remembered for and the musicianship is what it actually exported. Atheist, out of Sarasota from 1984, wrote in time signatures that had no business in this music and recorded Piece of Time in Tampa across November and December 1988, though Active Records did not put it out until August 1989 and American buyers waited until Metal Blade licensed it in November 1990. Cynic, formed in Miami in 1987, spent six years as a session pool for other people's albums before releasing Focus in 1993 and then vanishing for fifteen years.
Then there is the strangest entry in the whole file. Founded in Tampa in 1987 by Mike Browning, who had been the drummer and singer in the first version of Morbid Angel, Nocturnus put a keyboard player in a death metal band in 1990, wrote about time travel and machinery instead of scripture and viscera, and sold something in the region of seventy thousand copies of The Key for Earache. Nobody copied them for a decade. A keyboard in extreme metal is ordinary now, and it was not ordinary then.
The working tier
Underneath the headline acts sits the layer that carries the weight, the bands that never sold in six figures and never stopped working, and the state runs on them. Massacre, whose line-up has been argued over in public for thirty years and who spent two years billed as Gods of Death after a dispute with a former drummer over the name. Six Feet Under, assembled in Tampa in 1993 by Chris Barnes and Obituary's Allen West as a side project, which became Barnes's main job when Cannibal Corpse dismissed him in 1995 and which has since put out more albums than any of its neighbours.
And Hate Eternal, formed in St Petersburg in 1997 by Erik Rutan, who had come down from New Jersey to play in Ripping Corpse, joined Morbid Angel, left in 2002 to concentrate on his own band, and built a recording studio of his own that now takes bookings from half the genre. Rutan is the clearest evidence that the scene did not merely survive the nineties. It reproduced.
| Band | Base | Formed | First album | Label |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasty Savage | Brandon | 1983 | Nasty Savage, 1985 | Metal Blade |
| Death | Altamonte Springs | 1983 | Scream Bloody Gore, 1987 | Combat |
| Morbid Angel | Tampa | 1983 | Altars of Madness, 1989 | Earache |
| Massacre | Tampa | 1984 | From Beyond, 1991 | Earache |
| Obituary | Brandon and Tampa | 1984 | Slowly We Rot, 1989 | R/C |
| Atheist | Sarasota | 1984 | Piece of Time, 1989 | Active |
| Cynic | Miami | 1987 | Focus, 1993 | Roadrunner |
| Nocturnus | Tampa | 1987 | The Key, 1990 | Earache |
| Deicide | Tampa | 1987 | Deicide, 1990 | R/C |
| Malevolent Creation | Buffalo, then Fort Lauderdale | 1987 | The Ten Commandments, 1991 | Roadrunner |
| Monstrosity | Fort Lauderdale | 1990 | Imperial Doom, 1992 | Nuclear Blast |
| Six Feet Under | Tampa | 1993 | Haunted, 1995 | Metal Blade |
| Hate Eternal | St Petersburg | 1997 | Conquering the Throne, 1999 | Earache |
How to read the roster
Three things jump off that table once it is laid out in order. The first is how compressed the founding window was: six of the important bands were formed inside four years, between 1983 and 1987, in an area you can drive across in ninety minutes. The second is the gap between forming and releasing, which runs from three years to seven, and which tells you these were not overnight signings but groups that spent years in rooms before a label came near them. The third is the label column, where a British company appears four times, which is a fact about who was paying attention and it was not America.
What the list does not show is the churn. Half of these names shared members with each other, sometimes twice: a guitarist in Massacre had been in Death, a singer in Six Feet Under had been in Cannibal Corpse, a drummer in Nocturnus had been in Morbid Angel, and the man who founded Hate Eternal had played in Morbid Angel for six years first. The roster is not thirteen separate bands. It is one pool of sixty odd players, decanted from band to band until the labels ran out, which is exactly what a scene is and exactly what an industry is not. The wider view of that music, its history and its records, sits in KaosMetal on death metal.
The last thing worth saying is geographical. Nothing above required Tampa specifically, and yet almost all of it happened within an hour of the same handful of streets, which is a question about the city rather than the state, and it is answered in tampa.
