Ask for the most popular death metal bands and somebody hands you a sales chart. Influence is a different quantity and it needs a different instrument. It is descent, and the only honest way to count it is to look at who came afterwards, work out what they took, and ask whether they could have taken it from anyone else. On that measure a band with two hundred thousand copies sold can rank below a band that sold four thousand and taught the next thirty years how to hold a guitar.
What the count turns up is that influence in this genre has five separate shapes, and the bands below are grouped by which shape they cast rather than by how much anybody likes them. One supplied the people. One supplied a tone. One supplied a single bar of music that two subgenres were quarried out of. Two exported the whole method into other genres and were credited for it late. And four of them had no descendants at all for twenty years, then acquired an entire school at once. If you would rather have the field arranged by scene and by job, the death metal bands chapter above this one lays it out that way.
The band that supplied the personnel
The Florida band whose line-up never held still long enough to be photographed twice, Death, is the clearest case in the genre, because their influence can be counted in human beings rather than in riffs. Chuck Schuldiner formed the group in 1983 and worked with a roster that changed on almost every record: Kam Lee and Rick Rozz at the start, Chris Reifert on the first album at nineteen, Terry Butler and James Murphy after him, then Paul Masvidal and Sean Reinert out of Cynic for Human, Steve Di Giorgio and his fretless bass, Gene Hoglan arriving from the wreck of Dark Angel, Andy LaRocque of King Diamond guesting on lead, and finally Shannon Hamm, Scott Clendenin and Richard Christy, who followed him into Control Denied. Nearly every one of those men went out and made records elsewhere. Reifert built Autopsy. Lee and Butler built Massacre. Murphy played on Obituary's Cause of Death and then on records by Cancer and Testament. Masvidal and Reinert took the rhythm section of Human and turned it into Focus.
That is not a discography. That is a bloodline, and it means the writing of one man in Altamonte Springs reached the genre twice, once through his own albums and a second time through the hands of everyone he hired. Schuldiner died on 13 December 2001 at 34. The tree has kept growing without him, which is the whole definition of the thing being measured here. The same mechanism works on a smaller scale for Morbid Angel: Erik Rutan played guitar with them from 1993 to 1996 and again from 1999 to 2002, founded Hate Eternal in the middle of it, then spent two decades producing other people's records at his own studio in Florida, five of them for Cannibal Corpse, and was announced as a full member of that band in February 2021. One apprenticeship, three careers, and a house production sound carried into the biggest catalogue in the music.
The band that supplied a tone
Recorded at Sunlight Studio in Stockholm in December 1989 with Tomas Skogsberg at the desk and released by Earache on 4 June 1990, Left Hand Path did something no other record on this list managed, which is to make its influence audible inside a single bar to anyone who has heard it once. The Boss HM-2, a small orange distortion box with four controls, turned all the way up and fed through two guitar tracks, produces a sound that is not an effect on the instrument so much as a replacement for it. Dismember, Grave, Nihilist and Unleashed took it immediately. Bloodbath and Edge of Sanity took it a decade later on purpose. Then it crossed the Atlantic through Kurt Ballou's productions at GodCity, where Nails, Black Breath and Trap Them ran the same pedal through hardcore records, and it came back into death metal with Gatecreeper and the American revival.
The band that supplied one bar
The Long Island five who wrote the genre's second grammar, Suffocation, cut Effigy of the Forgotten at Morrisound Recording in Tampa with Scott Burns and Roadrunner released it on 22 October 1991. The influential part is not the album. It is a passage in "Liege of Inveracity" where the band runs at full speed, stops, and drops to half the tempo with the full weight of the arrangement still on. Brutal death metal is built out of that bar. So is slam, and so, at one remove and with no permission asked, is most of deathcore. Terrance Hobbs and Doug Cerrito wrote it, Mike Smith played it, Frank Mullen delivered the words over the top of it, and thirty five years later bands who have never heard the record are still using the device.
A band with no imitators for twenty years is not uninfluential. It is early.
Morbid Angel's contribution is the same kind of thing measured in tempo rather than in structure. When Altars of Madness came out through Earache on 12 May 1989, Pete Sandoval held a blast beat across a whole album rather than dropping it in as a shock, and in doing so he set the ceiling every drummer in the genre has been working under since. Trey Azagthoth supplied the other half, a lead guitar vocabulary that goes where the ear does not expect and refuses to resolve when it gets there. The genre took both. If you want the argument from the beginning rather than from the descendants, death metal explained runs the history in order.
The two whose influence emigrated
Some influence leaves the country it was born in and never comes home. The Birmingham group who invented an entire genre between two sides of one record, Napalm Death, put out Scum on Earache in 1987 with a different line-up on each side, and what came out of it was grindcore rather than death metal; the two shook hands formally in 1990 when Harmony Corruption was cut at Morrisound with Scott Burns and Barney Greenway singing. Carcass did the same trick twice in opposite directions, siring goregrind with Reek of Putrefaction in 1988 and then, with Heartwork in 1993, handing melodic death metal a template that Michael Amott took straight into Arch Enemy.
The largest export of all was Swedish. At The Gates recorded Slaughter of the Soul at Studio Fredman in Gothenburg with Fredrik Nordstrom and Earache released it on 14 November 1995, and its consequences outside death metal dwarf its consequences inside it. Louder has traced the descent in detail, from the melodic wing that followed at home to the American metalcore of the next decade, naming Children of Bodom and The Black Dahlia Murder on one side and Trivium and Killswitch Engage on the other, and metalcore as a commercial proposition is largely a misreading of thirty four minutes recorded by five men who then broke up.
The influence that arrived twenty years late
The last shape is the strangest, and it belongs to four bands who were ignored while they were working and became compulsory afterwards. Autopsy made Mental Funeral at Different Fur Studios in San Francisco in November 1990, Peaceville released it in April 1991, and for most of the decade that followed it was a cult record; every band in the 2010s revival that plays slower and filthier than its ability suggests is working from it. Incantation tracked Onward to Golgotha at Trax East in New Jersey through the autumn of 1991 and Relapse put it out on 5 May 1992, and the entire cavernous school, Dead Congregation and Grave Miasma and Father Befouled among them, took its instructions from that record rather than from Florida.
Gorguts is the extreme case. Luc Lemay wrote Obscura between April and December 1993, then sat on it for four and a half years because no label would take the call, and Olympic finally released it on 23 June 1998. It came out of the drawer with its influence already grown: what that album does to the guitar is the founding document of the dissonant wing, and Ulcerate, Artificial Brain and Pyrrhon are all reading from it. Demilich made one album, Nespithe, in the last week of December 1992 in Savonlinna, and thirty three years of reissues and imitators have not produced a second voice like it.
| Band | What later bands took | Where you hear it in 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Death | The personnel, and a way of writing that refuses repetition | Autopsy, Massacre, Cynic, Control Denied, Horrendous |
| Morbid Angel | The sustained blast beat, and a lead vocabulary | Every drummer in the genre; Hate Eternal, Cannibal Corpse |
| Entombed | A guitar tone identifiable in one bar | Gatecreeper, Frozen Soul, Nails, Black Breath |
| Suffocation | The half time drop | Brutal death metal, slam, deathcore |
| Napalm Death | Extremity as a compositional limit | Grindcore in full, and the fast wing of death metal |
| Carcass | Goregrind, then melodic death metal | Arch Enemy, Bloodbath, the Gothenburg export trade |
| At The Gates | Melodic riff writing at speed | Metalcore, almost entirely |
| Incantation | Mass instead of notes, and the crawl | Dead Congregation, Grave Miasma, Blood Incantation |
| Gorguts | Dissonance as material rather than as effect | Ulcerate, Artificial Brain, Pyrrhon |
Read the list that way and one thing separates the nine from everybody else. None of them made the record that was wanted at the time. Obscura could not find a label, Mental Funeral was barely mixed, Scum was recorded by two different bands wearing the same name, and the pedal that built Swedish death metal was already being taken off the shelves while Stockholm was buying them. Influence in this music has almost never gone to the bands who were being sensible. Whether any of these are also the best records is a completely different argument, and it gets settled in the Best Death Metal Bands of All Time, where the measurement is quality across a career and the order changes considerably.
