The Death Metal Bands You Need to Know

On 4 November 1985 Combat Records put out an album by four young men from the Bay Area whose singer had been using the phrase since 1983. Two of them were sixteen at the sessions. Seven Churches sold badly, confused the press and named a genre, and every band below is downstream of it.

What follows is not a ranking. Ranking works for records and fails for bands, because a record is forty minutes and a band is forty years. So this is a map, arranged by scene and by job: who invented something, who perfected it, who took it somewhere nobody had asked for. One or two lines each, one record to start with, and a verdict where a verdict is owed. If you would rather have the story told in order, start with death metal, from the beginning.

One warning before the map. Death metal has more good bands than any other extreme genre, because for fifteen years the barrier to entry was a four-track, a post office box and a willingness to be poor. You will not finish this article and be done. You will finish it holding twenty more names.

The three that had to invent the language

The four Bay Area kids who had already put the word on a demo sleeve, Possessed, cut Seven Churches at Prairie Sun Studios in Cotati between 30 March and 5 April 1985 with Randy Burns producing, and what came out was thrash with everything warm taken out of it: Jeff Becerra's voice already sitting under the register the genre would settle on, Mike Torrao and Larry LaLonde tuned down and playing slightly faster than either could hold, Mike Sus keeping it upright. Becerra and LaLonde were sixteen. It is not the best record in this article. It is the one the rest needed.

Death did the rest of the work. Chuck Schuldiner formed Mantas in Altamonte Springs in 1983 at the age of sixteen, changed the name a year later, and by November 1986 was in Music Grinder Studios in Los Angeles with Chris Reifert on drums and nobody else in the room, playing guitars, bass and singing the whole record himself. Combat released Scream Bloody Gore on 25 May 1987. An earlier Florida session had been rejected outright by the label. What that album does and Seven Churches does not is stop borrowing: no thrash chorus, no clean introduction, no relief anywhere in thirty-nine minutes. Strip the gore off the lyric sheet and the blueprint is still there underneath.

Schuldiner then spent eleven years refusing to repeat himself, which cost him a stable line-up and bought him four of the best records anyone has made in this music. He died on 13 December 2001 of a brain tumour, at 34.

The Tampa quartet who turned a style into a system, Morbid Angel, went into Morrisound Recording in December 1988 and came out with Altars of Madness, released by Earache on 12 May 1989: Pete Sandoval holding a blast tempo across a whole album for the first time, Trey Azagthoth writing leads that go exactly where the ear does not want them, Richard Brunelle underneath doing the unglamorous half, David Vincent reading the words out like charges at an arraignment. Decibel put it into its Hall of Fame in 2006. Nothing recorded since has made it sound old.

Tampa, and the room that fixed the sound

Almost everything in this section passed through one building. Morrisound Recording in Tampa, with Scott Burns at the desk, took in bands from four continents between 1988 and 1994 and sent them back out sounding like relatives: the same dry kick drum, the same stacked and gated guitars, the same vocal parked flat in the middle of the mix. It was an abattoir with a booking sheet. Bands went in whole and came out portioned, and the same knife did all of it. That is a complaint and a compliment in one sentence, because the standard Burns built is the reason a kid in Belo Horizonte and a kid in Utrecht could hear the same record and know precisely what to aim at.

Obituary were the least technical band in Florida and the heaviest. Formed in Brandon in 1984 under the name Xecutioner, they made Slowly We Rot (Roadrunner, 1989) and then Cause of Death (Roadrunner, 19 September 1990) with James Murphy playing lead guitar for the only time in his life with them, and John Tardy's voice on that record is the entire argument: not a word you can make out, not a technique you can name, and nobody has managed to replace it.

Deicide arrived in 1990 with the shortest fuse in the genre. The self-titled debut, recorded at Morrisound in March with Burns and released by R/C on 26 June 1990, is four men and thirty-three minutes: Steve Asheim doing the work of two drummers, the Hoffman brothers trading solos that sound like an argument, Glen Benton stacking a shriek on top of a guttural low in a way half the genre has borrowed since. Legion (1992) is faster, better written and less memorable, which happens more often than anyone admits. By SoundScan's count only one death metal album has outsold the debut.

The rest of the state runs deeper than its reputation. Massacre had been going since 1984 and only got From Beyond out on 1 July 1991, on Earache, cut at Morrisound with Colin Richardson producing and Burns engineering, by which point Kam Lee's voice was already the most imitated in the state. Malevolent Creation made The Ten Commandments (Roadrunner, 9 April 1991), which is faster than anything Deicide managed that year. Monstrosity gave the genre George Fisher on Imperial Doom (Nuclear Blast, 1992) and then handed him to Cannibal Corpse. Nocturnus put a keyboard player into a death metal band on The Key (Earache, October 1990), recorded at Morrisound like almost everything else in this section, and were mocked for roughly two decades before everybody quietly agreed they had been right.

Stockholm, and the pedal that did half the work

The Swedes solved a problem the Americans did not know they had. Florida bought studio time. Stockholm bought a distortion pedal.

Florida bought studio time. Stockholm bought a distortion pedal.

The Stockholm teenagers who had been trading tapes as Nihilist since 1987, Entombed, recorded Left Hand Path at Sunlight Studio in December 1989 with Tomas Skogsberg, and Earache released it on 4 June 1990: guitars tuned to B, a Boss HM-2 pedal with every control turned to maximum, Nicke Andersson playing drums like somebody who learned them off hardcore records, Lars-Göran Petrov's voice arriving through all of it without ever raising itself. The buzz on that record is not an effect on a guitar. It is the guitar. Every Swedish death metal band since has had to decide whether to use it, and the decision is audible in the first bar.

Dismember did the same thing with better songs. Like an Ever Flowing Stream (Nuclear Blast, 28 May 1991) was cut at Sunlight with Skogsberg and drummer Fred Estby, and it got the band charged with obscenity in Britain over a track called "Skin Her Alive". They defended it and won. Grave were the slowest and most rotted of the three, Into the Grave (Century Media, 1 August 1991) being the one to own. Unleashed are the most disciplined, which is why they have never made a bad album and never quite made a great one.

Then Gothenburg took the same country in the opposite direction, and the export figures went with it. At the Gates had made three jagged, difficult records before Slaughter of the Soul (Earache, 14 November 1995), recorded at Studio Fredman with Fredrik Nordström: thirty-four minutes of deliberate simplification, and its influence is the strongest thing anyone can hold against it, because a good half of American metalcore is a misreading of this one album. Dark Tranquillity were the better writers and are still working. In Flames made The Jester Race (Nuclear Blast, 1996) and then spent twenty-five years arguing with the people who loved it. Edge of Sanity put one forty-minute song on Crimson (Black Mark, April 1996), Dan Swanö producing himself at Unisound with Mikael Åkerfeldt guesting, which should not work and does. Hypocrisy, The Crown and Amon Amarth take up the rest of the Swedish shelf and none of them is filler.

New York, and the men who got heavier by slowing down

Suffocation came off Long Island and wrote the genre's second grammar. Effigy of the Forgotten was recorded at Morrisound with Scott Burns and released by Roadrunner on 22 October 1991, and the breakdown in "Liege of Inveracity" is generally taken as the first slam riff put on a record: the band runs at maximum speed for ninety seconds, then drops to half time and puts its weight on your chest. Brutal death metal starts in that bar. So, whether it wants the parentage or not, does most of deathcore. Terrance Hobbs and Doug Cerrito wrote it, Mike Smith played it, and Frank Mullen delivered the words with his hand in the air like a man being sworn in.

Suffocation are also the reason the New York scene sounds nothing like the Florida one despite recording in the same building. The bands there grew up next to hardcore matinees rather than next to a metal club, and the result is music built around the moment the tempo drops instead of the moment it lifts. Florida wrote for the front of the room. New York wrote for the floor.

Immolation, from Yonkers, do the opposite with the same tools. Ross Dolan sings under everything while Robert Vigna writes guitar parts that refuse to resolve, and Close to a World Below (Metal Blade, 2000) is the record where a decade of that finally lands in one place. Incantation went lower and slower again: Onward to Golgotha, recorded at Trax East in South River across the autumn of 1991 and released by Relapse on 5 May 1992, is the founding document of the cavernous school, and John McEntee has named Seven Churches as the reason he picked up a guitar at all.

And then there is the band your parents have heard of. Cannibal Corpse formed in Buffalo in 1988, moved to Florida, and have sold more records than anyone else in this article by doing one thing with total consistency for thirty-eight years. Tomb of the Mutilated (Metal Blade, 1992) is the peak of the Chris Barnes era. Vile (1996) is the first with George Fisher and the better band. They are not the most interesting group named here, and they are the reason a lot of you are reading this at all.

Cannibals? who is not a cannibal?

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

The rest of the map, from Birmingham to Belo Horizonte

Napalm Death are not a death metal band and death metal does not exist without them. Scum (Earache, 1987) has a different line-up on each side of the record and invented grindcore between them; Harmony Corruption (1990) was then cut at Morrisound with Scott Burns and Barney Greenway singing, which is the moment the two genres formally shook hands. They have made fifteen more studio albums since and are still, at their worst, better than most bands at their best.

Carcass came out of Liverpool with a medical dictionary and no engineer worth the name. Reek of Putrefaction (Earache, 28 July 1988) sounds as though it was recorded through a wall, which is roughly what happened, and Bill Steer has said plainly that the band were unhappy with it; John Peel made it his favourite album of that year regardless. Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious (Earache, 30 October 1991), recorded at Amazon Studios with Michael Amott added on second guitar and Colin Richardson producing, is the one that matters and the one the canon undersells.

Bolt Thrower refused speed on principle. Five people from Coventry with a Warhammer sleeve licensed from Games Workshop, they built a catalogue on mid-tempo riffing that nobody else could make work at that weight, from Realm of Chaos (Earache, 1989) through The IVth Crusade (1992) to Those Once Loyal (Metal Blade, 11 November 2005), and then stopped writing because they had decided nothing new was as good. Martin Kearns died on 14 September 2015, at 38. The band ended a year later rather than replace him. Benediction and Cancer fill out the British column and are each worth an evening.

Across the North Sea, Pestilence recorded Consuming Impulse at Music Lab in Berlin with Harris Johns producing and Martin van Drunen singing on it for the last time, and Roadrunner put it out at the end of 1989. Van Drunen then joined Asphyx and made The Rack (Century Media, 1991), slower, uglier and arguably better. Gorefest are the next Dutch name on that shelf and Germany's Morgoth the one after, with Cursed (Century Media, 24 April 1991) cut at Woodhouse Studios in Hagen with Randy Burns producing, which means the man who recorded Seven Churches was still in the room six years and one continent later.

The Polish bands had to assemble the whole thing out of imports and hand-copied tapes. Vader formed in Olsztyn in 1983 and had been circulating demos for the better part of a decade before Earache released The Ultimate Incantation in 1992, and Piotr Wiwczarek has held the band at the same tempo and the same standard ever since. Behemoth began as a black metal band and turned into the largest extreme metal act in Europe, with Demigod (2004) as the turn and The Satanist (Nuclear Blast, 2014) as the peak. Decapitated were teenagers from Krosno when they made Nihility (Earache, 2002); their drummer, Witold Kiełtyka, died on 2 November 2007 at 23 from injuries received in a tour bus crash five days earlier, and the band that eventually came back is a different and heavier proposition.

Brazil got there before almost everybody. Sepultura made Morbid Visions (Cogumelo, 1986) with no money and less technique, and whatever the band became afterwards, that one is a death metal record. Sarcófago's I.N.R.I. (Cogumelo, 1987) is barely playable and was studied very closely in Norway a few years later. Krisiun are three brothers who have played at one speed since 1990 and made Conquerors of Armageddon (Century Media, 2000). Finland contributed Demilich, who made one album, Nespithe, recorded in Savonlinna in the last week of December 1992 and released by Necropolis in February 1993, with a vocal nobody has successfully imitated in the thirty-three years since.

The laboratory wing

Death metal grew a research department almost at once, and Florida built it. Atheist came out of Sarasota playing a music with a jazz rhythm section inside a death metal shell, which nobody had asked for and everybody has since copied. Their bassist Roger Patterson died on 12 February 1991 in a road crash in rural Louisiana, at 22. Tony Choy played Patterson's written parts on Unquestionable Presence later that year, and it remains the strangest record of the era. Cynic went further still on Focus (Roadrunner, 13 September 1993), cut at Morrisound with Scott Burns: Sean Malone on fretless bass and Chapman Stick, Sean Reinert playing drums nobody in the genre could follow, and a vocoder used because Paul Masvidal was losing his voice. The death metal press of the day hated it. It has outlived almost everything they preferred.

Nobody asked for a jazz rhythm section inside a death metal shell, and everybody has since copied it.

Canada supplied the other half of the laboratory, out of one room. Gorguts wrote Obscura between April and December 1993 and then sat on it for four years while nobody returned Luc Lemay's calls, jamming the same songs and writing nothing else, until Olympic finally released it on 23 June 1998. What that album does to the guitar has been the single largest influence on the dissonant wing ever since. Cryptopsy made None So Vile at the same Montreal studio with the same producer, Pierre Rémillard, and put it out on 3 July 1996: thirty-two minutes, Lord Worm at the microphone, and Flo Mounier resetting what a drummer in this music was expected to be able to do. Germany's Necrophagist released Epitaph (Relapse, 3 August 2004) and taught a generation of guitarists to practise; whether that was good for the genre is a fair question and the answer is not obviously yes.

Nile took the same technical apparatus somewhere nobody expected, building whole records out of Egyptian modes and low brass on Black Seeds of Vengeance (Relapse, 2000). Origin and Defeated Sanity hold the two far ends of the brutal and technical border. Dying Fetus and Misery Index come out of Maryland with hardcore in the rhythm section and no interest in mystique at all.

The bands playing tonight

The revival is real and it is not nostalgia. Blood Incantation recorded Hidden History of the Human Race in Denver in June 2019, Dark Descent released it that November, and four tracks with an eighteen-minute closer took a Metacritic score of 91 and topped Decibel's year-end list, which no death metal record had any business doing. Tomb Mold, from Toronto, write better riffs than anyone currently working. Horrendous took Schuldiner's late writing seriously on Ecdysis (Dark Descent, 2014) and Anareta (2015) and are the most underrated band in this article. Ulcerate, three men from Auckland, have made the hardest music in the genre for a quarter of a century, and Stare Into Death and Be Still (Debemur Morti, 2020) is where to begin.

The brutal end is in better health than at any point since 1994. 200 Stab Wounds came out of Cleveland with Slave to the Scalpel (Maggot Stomp, 2021) and were on Metal Blade three years later. Undeath, from Rochester, are funnier and heavier than that sentence makes them sound. Frozen Soul play Bolt Thrower riffs in Texas heat and are not embarrassed about it. Archspire, from Vancouver, play faster than any band has ever played, and Bleed the Future (Season of Mist, 29 October 2021) runs thirty-one minutes because nobody could survive forty. If you would rather work through records than through bands, the essential death metal albums covers this ground from the other side.

Forty years on from Seven Churches, none of this has ever been fashionable for longer than about eighteen months at a stretch. That is exactly why the names above are still here, and why the list you make after reading this one will be longer than mine.

Sources and notes

• Wikipedia: Seven Churches (album)
• Wikipedia: Scream Bloody Gore
• Wikipedia: Altars of Madness
• Wikipedia: Left Hand Path (album)
• Wikipedia: Effigy of the Forgotten
• Wikipedia: Those Once Loyal