When Bolt Thrower's drummer Martin Kearns died on 14 September 2015 at the age of 38, the band stopped. Karl Willetts announced that there would be no reunion tours and no compromise, and eleven years later there has not been one. Hold that sentence against the question in the title, because it is the answer.
Heaviness in this music is not a volume setting and it is not a tempo. It is a set of refusals, made record by record, about what you will not put in. Every band below is heavy by a different mechanism, and what they share is a list of things they decided to do without. If you want the scene where most of these mechanisms were worked out, it is chapter four.
Four mechanisms, and none of them is distortion
Start by throwing out the obvious answers. Distortion does not make a record heavy, or the loudest guitar sound ever committed to tape would be the heaviest thing anyone had ever heard, and it is not. Speed does not do it either, because past a certain tempo the ear stops hearing individual impacts and starts hearing texture, which is the opposite of weight. What actually produces heaviness is contrast, low frequency energy, space and refusal, in roughly that order, and the four mechanisms that follow are four ways of arranging them.
The march
The first mechanism is the one that works on people who do not like death metal, which is why it travelled furthest. Bolt Thrower formed in Coventry in September 1986, spent three sessions in the late eighties and 1990 recording for John Peel at the BBC, and built eight albums on a mid-paced advance that never accelerates and never resolves. Jo Bench's bass sits where a rhythm guitar would sit in any other band. The tempo is the tempo of something large moving across ground it intends to keep. In 2005 they made Those Once Loyal, decided it was the album they had been trying to write since 1986, and never recorded another one.
Four thousand miles away, the same idea had been worked out in a hotter climate. Obituary came together in Tampa in 1984 as Executioner, became Xecutioner, and took the name everybody knows in 1988. What they did with it was refuse to go fast. Slowly We Rot in 1989 and Cause of Death in 1990 run on chugging half time figures borrowed as much from doom as from thrash, with John Tardy singing in a register that carries no words at all and does not need to. They stopped in 1998 out of exhaustion and label trouble, came back in 2003 and have not stopped since.
Heaviness is not a volume setting. It is a list of things you decided to do without.
The crawl
The second mechanism goes past the march into something with no forward motion at all. Incantation formed in August 1989 in Fair Lawn, New Jersey around the guitarist John McEntee, and Onward to Golgotha in 1992 does the thing nobody had risked: it drops whole passages below the tempo of any doom band working at the time, buries the vocal underneath the guitars instead of putting it on top, and lets the harmony stay unresolved for minutes at a stretch. Thirty-three years and twelve albums later, up to Unholy Deification in 2023, the method has not changed and has not needed to.
Autopsy got to a related place from a different direction. Formed in August 1987 in Contra Costa County, California by Chris Reifert, who had just come out of Death, and Eric Cutler, they alternated fast passages with slow ones and recorded the result filthy on purpose. Mental Funeral in 1991 is the reference: an album that sounds like it was made in a room with something rotting in the corner, and which several generations of Swedish and American bands have quietly copied.
The wrongness
Third mechanism, and the one musicians rate highest. Immolation, from Yonkers since 1986, produce weight out of harmonic discomfort rather than out of low frequencies: Robert Vigna writes two guitar parts that refuse to agree with each other, slides chords instead of fretting them cleanly, and lets the drums sit at an angle to the riff so that nothing quite lands where the ear expects. The physical effect is the same as mass. The method has nothing to do with mass at all.
No light, but rather darkness visible.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
The Australian band Portal took that idea past the point of legibility in the following decade, and the argument about whether the result is heavy or simply obscure has been running ever since. Both answers are defensible. What is not defensible is calling it easy.
The floor
Fourth mechanism, and the newest. Devourment, formed in Dallas in 1995, worked out that if you tune far enough down, remove everything that is not the drop and let the low end run without filtering, a four minute song can operate almost entirely below the range where notes are identifiable. Molesting the Decapitated in 1999 is the proof and half the slam roster is the consequence. Disentomb, formed in Brisbane in early 2009, took the same approach into a darker and less rhythmic place, and their later records are among the few things in modern death metal that genuinely frighten people on first listen.
Eight bands, eight mechanisms
| Band | Mechanism | Where to hear it |
|---|---|---|
| Bolt Thrower | The advance that never accelerates | Those Once Loyal, 2005 |
| Obituary | Half time refusal, doom tempo in a death metal band | Cause of Death, 1990 |
| Incantation | Below doom, vocal buried, harmony unresolved | Onward to Golgotha, 1992 |
| Autopsy | Filth as a production decision | Mental Funeral, 1991 |
| Immolation | Harmonic wrongness instead of mass | Close to a World Below, 2000 |
| Suffocation | Impact, the whole band landing as one object | Effigy of the Forgotten, 1991 |
| Devourment | Everything below the range of identifiable notes | Molesting the Decapitated, 1999 |
| Disentomb | The floor, without the groove to soften it | The Decaying Light, 2019 |
The band that is not on the list
You will have noticed the omission. The group most people outside the genre would name first, the one two governments banned and the one that has sold more records than anybody else in this music, is not in the table, and it is not an oversight. Consistency is not the same as weight, mainstream recognition is not the same as extremity, and a band can be the most famous thing in a genre while three of the eight above are doing something heavier every night of the week.
That is an argument rather than a verdict, and it deserves the space to be made properly rather than a line at the end of somebody else's list. It is here: is Cannibal Corpse Death Metal, or Something Else by Now.
