Nineteen eighty three. That is the year the first band on this page formed, the same year a sixteen year old in central Florida started Mantas, and four years before Scream Bloody Gore reached a shop. It has fourteen studio albums. It appears in no canon list anywhere, including ours.
Underrated is the laziest word in music writing, so here it gets a rule with three conditions and no exceptions. The band must have a real catalogue, meaning two records at minimum that hold up on their own without a reissue campaign apologising for them. The band must be absent from the standard lists, which for our purposes means it does not appear in the bands you need to know, the essentials, or the ranked ten. And somebody visible has to have taken something from them, because a band nobody has ever borrowed from is not underrated, it is just quiet. Seven names clear all three.
The band that was there before the genre was
Paul Speckmann started Death Strike in Chicago in 1983, renamed it Master in 1985, signed to Combat and recorded an album that the label then sat on until the deal collapsed. Those sessions did not reach the public until Displeased put them out in 2003 under the flat title Unreleased 1985 Album, by which point every argument about who did what first had been settled without him in the room. The band that finally debuted on Nuclear Blast in 1990 was playing a crude, punk-shaped death metal with no interest in Florida's technique and none at all in its production values, and Speckmann has kept doing it for four decades, joining the Czech band Krabathor in 1999 and then moving to Czechia for good. Fourteen studio albums, the most recent in 2024. No chapter in anybody's history.
A band nobody has ever borrowed from is not underrated. It is just quiet.
Two the European canon walked past
Formed in Oldenzaal in 1987 by Bob Bagchus and Tony Brookhuis, Asphyx spent the whole of the nineties being treated as the band Martin van Drunen joined after Pestilence, which is a bad way to describe a group with ten studio albums and the heaviest mid tempo in continental Europe. The Rack came out in 1991 and Last One on Earth the year after, and van Drunen cut his vocals for the second one alone in the studio without having been told he was already out of the band. They still make records. Necroceros arrived in 2021 and is not a nostalgia exercise.
France produced exactly one death metal band of international quality in the first wave and then buried it. Massacra formed in Franconville in 1986 around guitarists Jean-Marc Tristani and Fred Duval, signed to Shark Records in Germany off two demos and made Final Holocaust in 1990 and Enjoy the Violence in 1991, both of which are faster and better written than most of what Britain was managing in the same eighteen months. They tore up the Shark contract in 1993 and the two albums after it were a different and lesser band. Duval died on 6 June 1997 of cancer. The catalogue has been in and out of print ever since and the country has never produced its equal.
The ones who never stopped and never got a chapter
Sinister are the clearest case of a band punished for consistency. Fourteen albums between Cross the Styx in 1992 and Deformation of the Holy Realm in 2020, a European touring record almost nobody can match, and a rhythmic style that sits between Florida speed and the Dutch weight, and they have never once been fashionable for even the eighteen months this genre normally allows. Vomitory in Sweden did the same job at higher velocity: nine albums, a split in 2013, a return in 2019 and a record in 2023, and their name does not appear in a single overview of Swedish death metal that I have ever read. Cianide have been a Chicago trio since 1988 playing at roughly half the speed of everyone around them, and the modern crawl school owes them more than it has ever said.
The pattern in all three is the same and it is not about quality. It is about narrative. Lists are built out of turning points, and a band that turns nothing, that simply gets up and does the work again in 1996 and 2004 and 2019, gives a writer nothing to hang a paragraph on. That is a defect in the lists, not in the bands.
There is also a mechanism behind the omissions, and it has a date on it. The majors bought into death metal between 1991 and 1993, looked at what the records actually returned and left again, and the labels underneath them spent the middle of the decade cutting rosters. A band whose first album landed in 1990 got reviewed. A band whose second landed in 1994 was competing for column inches in magazines that had already decided the story was over. Massacra tore up their contract in 1993. Sinister put out their strongest run straight into that gap. The canon lists written twenty years later were assembled out of the press that survived, which means they inherited the collapse as if it were a judgement about music. It was a judgement about shelf space.
The two whose influence went sideways
Some bands are missing from the death metal canon because their descendants ended up filed somewhere else. Angelcorpse recorded Hammer of Gods at Chapman Recording in Lenexa between 26 July and 5 August 1996 and Osmose released it on 31 October, and what Pete Helmkamp and Gene Palubicki built out of Morbid Angel riffing at a permanently rising tempo became the foundation of the war metal wing rather than of death metal proper. Four albums between 1996 and 2007, a band wound up for the last time in 2017, and an entire subgenre that reads from them and rarely says so.
The other case runs through one man. Daniel Corchado formed The Chasm in 1993 after leaving Cenotaph, recorded Procreation of the Inner Temple at Fama Studios in Mexico City in July 1994, and then spent 1998 inside Incantation, playing guitar and bass and singing on Diabolical Conquest, which Relapse released on 28 April that year. So the melodic, long form, almost mournful writing that The Chasm had been developing in Mexico went straight into the most cavernous American band of the era for one record, and then left again. Both catalogues are better for it and neither gets counted.
| Band | Formed | Start with | Why the canon skips them |
|---|---|---|---|
| Master | 1983 | Master (1990) | The first record was shelved for eighteen years |
| Asphyx | 1987 | The Rack (1991) | Filed as a footnote to a singer's career |
| Massacra | 1986 | Enjoy the Violence (1991) | France had no scene to carry them |
| Sinister | 1988 | Cross the Styx (1992) | Fourteen albums and no turning point |
| Vomitory | 1989 | Blood Rapture (2002) | Arrived after the Swedish story was written |
| Angelcorpse | 1995 | Hammer of Gods (1996) | Their descendants got filed under war metal |
| The Chasm | 1993 | Procreation of the Inner Temple (1994) | Mexico was outside every map being drawn |
What underrated does not mean
It does not mean obscure. There is a large industry in this genre built on records that were ignored for excellent reasons, and a demo with forty listeners is not a hidden classic simply because it is hard to find. It does not mean early, either: being first is a matter of dates and it is settled elsewhere. And it does not mean a single good album by a band that then vanished, because that is a separate condition with its own causes.
What it means is a working catalogue that the story has no room for. Every one of the seven above kept turning up, kept paying for studio time, and kept being left out of the paragraph. If you would rather start from the safe end before coming back here, good Death Metal Bands to Start With is the shorter and friendlier door, and the ranked argument this page is answering sits in the Best Death Metal Bands of All Time, where not one of these seven appears. That is the point of them.
