The Early Death Metal Bands That Started the Genre

Through me the way into the suffering city.Dante, Inferno

Here is the muster roll. Every band on it existed and was recording before Scream Bloody Gore came out in May 1987, which is the cutoff, because after that date the method was finished and anybody could copy it. Before it, you had to work the thing out yourself from tapes that arrived in the post sounding as though they had been recorded underwater.

Eighteen bands, six countries, and between them almost no money at all. Most of them had no record deal in 1987 and several had no album until the nineties. This is the roll call rather than the narrative, and the narrative is chapter one of our history.

The two everybody names

Possessed came out of San Pablo and El Sobrante and had the whole apparatus on record first, in November 1985. Death, which was Mantas until 1984, came out of Altamonte Springs and had the finished method first, in May 1987. Between them they account for about ninety percent of what gets written about this period, and they are both entirely real, and there are sixteen more bands underneath them.

The Americans who were there and were not heard

Necrophagia formed in Wellsville, Ohio in 1983 around Frank Pucci, cut the Death Is Fun demo in 1984 and Rise from the Crypt in 1985, and got the first American album with no thrash architecture in it into shops in February 1987. It sold badly and the band stopped the following year.

Master had been running in Chicago since 1983, first as Death Strike, around Paul Speckmann. They recorded a whole album for Combat in 1985. The label shelved it and it stayed shelved until 2003, which is the single unluckiest thing that happened to anybody in this story.

Repulsion assembled in Flint, Michigan in 1984, went through the names Tempter and Genocide, and lost two members to Death in Florida for a while. What they cut in a basement studio in June 1986 for three hundred dollars is named as a founding text by half the grindcore and death metal bands who came after, and it did not reach a shop until 10 July 1989, by which time most of those bands had already formed.

Eighteen bands, six countries, and between them in 1987 almost no money, no distribution and no press. It worked anyway, because the post office does not check what is in the envelope.

The Tampa cluster, before Tampa meant anything

Morbid Angel started in Tampa in 1983 as Ice, became Heretic, and settled on the good name late that year. Trey Azagthoth and Mike Browning recorded a complete debut in 1986 and then refused to release it, on the grounds that a first album marks you for life and that one was not good enough. Earache put the session out as Abominations of Desolation in 1991, five years late.

Massacre came together in Tampa in 1984 around Mike Borders, Bill Andrews and Allen West, and turned into something else when Kam Lee joined. Two demos in 1986, Aggressive Tyrant and Chamber of Ages, went round the world by post and built a reputation the band did not convert into an album until 1991.

Obituary were four teenagers called Executioner in Tampa from 1984, dropped a letter to become Xecutioner when they found somebody else had the name, and made their vinyl debut in 1987 with two songs on a compilation called Raging Death. Atheist were in Sarasota from 1984, first as Oblivion and then, from 1985, as R.A.V.A.G.E., which stood for Raging Atheists Vowing A Gory End and tells you everything about how seriously anybody was taking themselves.

Outside America, working from the same tapes

Brazil was in early and hard. Sepultura formed in Belo Horizonte in 1984 and had Morbid Visions out on Cogumelo in 1986. Sarcofago formed in the same city in 1985 and put I.N.R.I. out in July 1987, and the corpsepaint and bullet belts on that sleeve went on to matter more in Norway than they ever did at home. Canada had Slaughter in Toronto from August 1984. Poland had Vader running from 1983, as early as anybody in America and seven years from an album.

Britain came at it from hardcore rather than from thrash. Carcass grew out of a D-beat band in Liverpool from 1985, and Bolt Thrower were formed in a Coventry pub toilet in September 1986 during a punk gig and recorded a demo the following April. The Netherlands had Pestilence from 1986. And the last name on the list is American again: Autopsy, formed in California in August 1987 by Chris Reifert and Eric Cutler, months after Reifert finished drumming on the record that closes this period.

What the roster tells you

Two things, and both of them are about lag. The first is that formation dates and album dates are three to seven years apart for almost everybody here. Vader started in 1983 and got an album in 1992. Massacre started in 1984 and got one in 1991. If you judge this period by release dates you will conclude that nothing happened until 1989, and you will be wrong by half a decade.

The second is that the geography was settled before the music was. Six of the eighteen sit within about an hour of each other in Florida. Two more pairs share a city or a country, and everybody else was working alone. That is what the Florida cluster actually bought: not talent, which was distributed evenly, but the ability to hear another band play this music in a room on a Friday. The pillar has the whole story in sequence, from these demos to the present, in everything death metal, in order.

This roll call stops at 1987 on purpose. What the rest of the decade did with it, band by band and year by year, is the 80s Death Metal Bands, Year by Year, and the list gets a great deal longer very quickly.

Sources and notes

• Wikipedia: Morbid Angel
• Wikipedia: Atheist (band)
• Wikipedia: Nasty Savage
• Wikipedia: Obituary (band)
• Wikipedia: Autopsy (band)
• Wikipedia: Horrified (Repulsion album)