The useful question about the current field is not who is new. It is who has a body of work you can actually follow, because a band with one good album is a promise and a band with four is an argument. Everything below has at least three records behind it, most of them more, and every one of them is still working.
What makes the present moment worth writing about at all is that three generations are on the same bills. A band formed in 1988 and a band formed in 2019 will play the same festival on the same afternoon to the same crowd, and neither is treated as a museum piece or as an apprentice. That has never happened in this genre before, and it happened because of the movement described in the chapter on the old school death metal revival, which flattened the distance between the decades.
If the labels people attach to these bands are the confusing part, what does osdm mean takes that apart tag by tag. The long view sits in our death metal pillar.
The old firms who never handed over
Immolation are the strongest argument in the genre for simply not stopping. Formed in 1988, dropped by their first label, never fashionable for a single year of their existence, and by Acts of God in 2022 they were making music as strange and as heavy as anything by bands a third of their age, built on guitar lines that slide off the beat and refuse to sit where the ear wants them.
Incantation have run more or less continuously since 1989 through a famously unstable line-up, with John McEntee the constant. Cannibal Corpse have never been dropped by anybody and were still releasing records at the same three year interval into the 2020s. Suffocation came back from a split, survived the retirement of their own singer from full time touring, and kept the catalogue moving. Obituary did the same with a slower and dumber and better tuned version of the same riff they have been playing since 1989, which is a compliment.
Outside America the pattern repeats. Vader have been working from Poland since the eighties with no gap worth calling a gap. Krisiun are still three brothers. Cattle Decapitation spent twenty years turning a grindcore project into one of the most ambitious bands in the field, with a vocalist who does something no one else in the genre attempts. None of these are heritage acts. They are simply the ones who were right the first time and never found a reason to stop.
The 2010s generation, now with catalogues
This is the group that has changed most since 2015, because they have stopped being promising and started being load bearing. Horrendous arrived inside the revival specification and walked straight out of it, and by Ontological Mysterium in 2023 they were writing with a melodic and harmonic vocabulary that has more to do with progressive rock than with any death metal record of 1991.
Tomb Mold took four years off after 2019 and returned with The Enduring Spirit, out on 20 Buck Spin on 15 September 2023, their fourth album and the one where the writing opened out into long, drifting, oddly warm passages that nothing in their earlier work predicted. Blood Incantation did the more spectacular version of the same manoeuvre and ended up reviewed by people who own no death metal records at all.
Ulcerate deserve separate billing. Working from New Zealand since 2000, they released Cutting the Throat of God on 14 June 2024, their seventh album, and they remain the clearest example in the genre of a band whose drummer carries the melody and whose guitars carry the dread. Nothing they do is old school and nothing they do is technical in the show off sense. It is its own thing, and by now it has two decades of evidence behind it.
A band with one good album is a promise. A band with four is an argument.
The hardcore door
The single biggest change to the live economy came from bands who arrived through hardcore rather than through a record collection, and it is why the rooms got bigger. Gatecreeper built their whole sound on the Swedish guitar tone and hardcore song shapes, went from Deserted in 2019 to Dark Superstition in 2024, and made the crossover respectable. Necrot did it slower and meaner. 200 Stab Wounds went from a Cleveland practice space to Metal Blade and Manual Manic Procedures on 28 June 2024 in three years.
Undeath, Frozen Soul, Sanguisugabogg and Skeletal Remains arrived on roughly the same schedule and none of them is doing anything a band in 1992 would not recognise. What is different is the audience: young, large, and there for the room rather than for the discography, which is the first time death metal has had that since the early nineties.
The technical wing, and the award nobody expected
Defeated Sanity have spent three decades making brutal death metal that is written rather than assembled, a family band in the literal sense for much of that time. Vitriol play at a level of violence that is genuinely difficult to listen to for a whole record, which is the point of them. Artificial Brain took the dissonant vocabulary somewhere colder and stranger. Cryptopsy, thirty years on from None So Vile, are still releasing records and still faster than the bands imitating them.
The map is wider than the American roster
Read most lists of modern death metal bands and you would think the form had gone home to the United States. It has not. Dead Congregation have made four records out of Greece across two decades, each one arriving slowly and each one better engineered than the last. Undergang sing in Danish over a sound that owes nothing to Tampa or Stockholm. Anatomia have been working in Japan since 2002 at a tempo that would embarrass a funeral. Grave Miasma and Cruciamentum gave England a strain of its own after twenty years of the country being treated as grindcore territory.
The reason the map looks American is distribution rather than quality, and the reason it stays visible at all is that a band in Athens or Copenhagen now reaches a buyer in Ohio without a single intermediary. That is the whole difference between this decade and 1995, and it is worth stating plainly: the music did not become more international, the shipping did.
Where to start with each of them
| Band | Country | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| Immolation | United States | Close to a World Below (2000) |
| Incantation | United States | Onward to Golgotha (1992) |
| Cannibal Corpse | United States | Tomb of the Mutilated (1992) |
| Cattle Decapitation | United States | Monolith of Inhumanity (2012) |
| Ulcerate | New Zealand | Vermis (2013) |
| Horrendous | United States | Anareta (2015) |
| Blood Incantation | United States | Hidden History of the Human Race (2019) |
| Gatecreeper | United States | Deserted (2019) |
| Archspire | Canada | Bleed the Future (2021) |
| Tomb Mold | Canada | The Enduring Spirit (2023) |
| 200 Stab Wounds | United States | Manual Manic Procedures (2024) |
Look at the right hand column and one thing stands out. The recommended entry point for the oldest bands is a record from the nineties and for the newest bands it is a record from the last three years, and both sets are being bought by the same people, in the same shops, at the same time. A thirty year old album and a two year old album are competing on equal terms, which is either the healthiest thing about the modern field or the most alarming, depending on how much you want the genre to change.
One corner of it is changing, and changing hard, and it is the corner where the reverb does the writing. The bands who buried the riff on purpose, and the record from 1992 they are all still arguing with, are in cavernous death metal.
