Five thousand dollars. That is what Roadrunner spent putting Suffocation into Morrisound Recording in June 1991, and out of that session came the breakdown in "Liege of Inveracity", which is where two whole subgenres start. Cheapest thing on this page. Biggest consequence on it too.
Influence is not quality and the two lists do not match. An album can be perfect and leave nothing behind. An album can be clumsy, badly recorded and half finished and still put ten thousand bands to work. This is the second kind of list, and if you want the story that runs underneath it, every chapter of the death metal story is written out in order.
Influence is a count, not a feeling
Here is the test, and it is arithmetic rather than taste. Point at the record. Then point at the bands who would sound different if it did not exist, and keep pointing until you run out. If the second list is short, the album is not influential, it is merely admired. That is not an insult. Half the best records ever made are merely admired.
Consequence is also what the records to own measures, so the two pieces share a method and split on the outcome. That chapter is picking a canon and will argue an album out of it for being a consequence of somebody else's idea. This one counts consequences and does not care whose idea came first. Which is why two records that chapter deliberately keeps out of the canon sit near the top here.
The five that wrote the language
Death, Scream Bloody Gore, Combat, 25 May 1987. Two people in Music Grinder in Los Angeles, thirty nine minutes, and the first album with nothing in it that is not this music. No thrash chorus, no clean introduction, no half speed section put there to let you breathe. Everything after 1987 is a variation on that subtraction, which is why the album sits at the head of the count even though nobody would call it the best record its own band made.
Morbid Angel, Altars of Madness, Earache, 12 May 1989, cut at Morrisound in December 1988 with Tom Morris engineering. Pete Sandoval held a blast beat across a whole album and set a floor underneath the genre that has never been lowered since. After 1989 you could not write slowly and call it a decision. You had to answer for it.
Entombed, Left Hand Path, Earache, 4 June 1990. Boss built the HM-2 Heavy Metal pedal from October 1983 until October 1991 and then stopped, and this is the record that turned a discontinued distortion box into a national identity: four controls, all of them at maximum, guitars tuned to B, Sunlight Studio in Stockholm, Tomas Skogsberg at the desk. What makes it the most consequential piece of equipment in this music is the second wave of imitation rather than the first. Swedish death metal copied it for a decade. Then hardcore, crust and the whole modern d-beat trade picked it up thirty years later and are still using it.
Suffocation, Effigy of the Forgotten, Roadrunner, 22 October 1991, with Frank Mullen singing and Mike Smith playing drums. Ninety seconds at full speed, then half time, then a weight laid on your chest that nobody in the genre had thought to apply. Slam death metal descends from that one passage. So does most of what deathcore does with a breakdown, and so does the entire brutal wing that came up out of New York in the decade after.
Carcass, Reek of Putrefaction, Earache, 28 July 1988, recorded in four days at Rich Bitch Studios in Birmingham between December 1987 and March 1988 and mixed in whatever hours were left before the deadline. Bill Steer has said plainly that the engineer ruined it. John Peel then told The Observer it was his favourite album of the year, which is how a record its own guitarist disowns ended up founding goregrind, supplying the lyrical method for a thousand bands and putting a medical dictionary into hands that had never opened one.
An album can be perfect and leave nothing behind. An album can be half finished and put ten thousand bands to work. Only one of those is influence.
The five whose consequences arrived late
At the Gates, Slaughter of the Soul, Earache, 14 November 1995, cut at Studio Fredman in Gothenburg with Fredrik Nordstrom. The chapter above argues this album out of the canon on the grounds that it is canonised for what it caused rather than for what it contains, and that argument holds. It also makes the record unbeatable on this page. American metalcore took its riff writing wholesale, an entire commercial genre was built on it between 1998 and 2006, and the number of bands downstream of it is larger than for anything else in this article by a distance that is not close.
Cannibal Corpse, Tomb of the Mutilated, recorded at Morrisound between 1 and 15 June 1992 and released by Metal Blade on 22 September. Kept out of the canon deliberately, and here for exactly the reason it was kept out: what this record changed was the size of the audience. Germany and Russia have both barred the band from playing or barred the sale and display of the original sleeves. Metal Blade issued a censored cover. And "Hammer Smashed Face" ended up in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective in 1994, with the band on camera, because Jim Carrey asked for them himself. Every band in this genre who has ever sold a record to somebody who was not already looking for one is working in ground this album cleared.
Incantation, Onward to Golgotha, Relapse, 5 May 1992. Nothing much happened for fifteen years. Then the entire cavernous revival arrived at once, and every one of those bands, the smeared guitars, the tempo falling into a crawl, the vocal coming up from beneath the floor, took its instructions from this and not from Florida. Influence with a long fuse still counts.
Death, Human, Relativity, 22 October 1991, and Necrophagist, Epitaph, Relapse, 3 August 2004. One pair, one consequence. The first made technique the subject and gave every band permission to be judged on composition. The second turned that permission into an arms race, written in notation software, and the guitar standard it set is the reason a competent modern death metal band plays material that would have been unplayable in 1991. Whether that was good for the music is a real argument. That it happened is not.
The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
| Album | Year | What descends from it | Where you hear it in 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Death, Scream Bloody Gore | 1987 | The form itself | Every record on this page |
| Carcass, Reek of Putrefaction | 1988 | Goregrind, the lyrical method | Grind and gore, worldwide |
| Morbid Angel, Altars of Madness | 1989 | The blast beat as a standard | The floor under the whole genre |
| Entombed, Left Hand Path | 1990 | The buzzsaw tone | Crust, d-beat, modern hardcore |
| Death, Human | 1991 | Technique as the subject | The technical wing |
| Suffocation, Effigy of the Forgotten | 1991 | Slam, brutal death | Slam, deathcore breakdowns |
| Incantation, Onward to Golgotha | 1992 | The cavernous school | The whole underground revival |
| Cannibal Corpse, Tomb of the Mutilated | 1992 | The audience | Every band that sells outside the scene |
| At the Gates, Slaughter of the Soul | 1995 | Melodic riff writing for export | Metalcore, twenty five years of it |
| Necrophagist, Epitaph | 2004 | The guitar arms race | The modern technical standard |
What influence is not
Three records that people put on lists like this one do not belong on it. Seven Churches came first in 1985 and almost nobody built on it directly, because the bands who mattered were building on Scream Bloody Gore two years later. Obscura is the most imitated album of the last twenty years in one narrow wing and has changed nothing outside it. And Covenant was the first death metal album issued through a major label in 1993, which changed the business and left the music exactly where it found it.
Being early is not influence. Being admired is not influence. Selling is not influence either, except in the one case above where the selling was the thing that changed. Keep the counts separate and the arguments get shorter. Next in this run is the Best Death Metal Debut Albums, which asks a third question again: not what a record caused and not how good it is, but how many bands turned up already finished.
