This is the most influential death metal album that almost nobody bought, and the reason is not that it was ahead of its time. It is that it was finished years before anybody would sell it. Gorguts had ten of these songs written by November 1994, could not find a company willing to put its name on them, went on writing, and did not get the record into a shop until 23 June 1998. Everything else people say about Obscura, that it is difficult, that it took a generation to be understood, that it opened a whole wing of the genre, follows from that gap rather than from the music being obscure. The decade that produced it is the nineties chapter. This is what was in the drawer.
What Roadrunner let go
The band Luc Lemay assembled in Sherbrooke in August 1989 was, for its first two records, a perfectly conventional proposition. Considered Dead came out through Roadrunner in 1991, produced by Scott Burns with guest appearances from Chris Barnes and the guitarist James Murphy, and it is competent Florida-facing death metal made a thousand miles north of Florida. The Erosion of Sanity followed in 1993 and did the same thing better. Then the label let them go, which at the time was a routine commercial decision and turned out to be the most consequential thing anybody did to this band.
What Lemay wrote next was not an escalation of the previous records. It was a different set of assumptions about what a guitar is for. Four of them are audible inside the first minute:
- Chords built out of intervals that refuse to resolve, held open rather than passed through.
- Metres that change inside a phrase rather than between sections, so the ear never gets a bar count to hold onto.
- Atonal passages produced by tapping rather than picking, which gives them a flat, unaccented attack unlike anything else in the genre.
- Notes produced by scraping and by pressure rather than by fretting cleanly, so the instrument keeps sounding like an object as well as a pitch.
Five years of rehearsal did not polish these songs. It set them, so that what finally arrives in 1998 has the finality of something carved rather than something played.
Note what is not on that list. Speed is not on it. This is not a virtuoso record in the sense the technical wing of the genre meant the word in the nineties, where difficulty was measured in notes per second and the point of a passage was that most players could not execute it. Large stretches of this album sit at a middling tempo, and a competent guitarist can play most of the individual parts. The difficulty is harmonic and structural: knowing why one of those unresolved chords follows another, and being able to hold a phrase together when the count underneath it has moved. That is a composer's problem rather than an athlete's, and it is why the record aged into a reference while a great deal of faster music from the same years did not.
Five years in a rehearsal room
Lemay has described the sequence plainly in interviews: the songs were substantially there by late 1994, no company would sign the music, so the band kept writing and kept rehearsing, and the album was recorded four or five years after it was written. That is a very long time to play material nobody has heard in front of nobody, and it accounts for how the finished record sounds. Nothing on it is tentative. Whatever else five years of rehearsal does to a band, it removes every trace of a group working something out on tape.
The session eventually happened at Studio Victor in Montreal with Pierre Rémillard engineering and producing alongside the band, the same room and the same man who had made None So Vile two years earlier. Steeve Hurdle played second guitar and wrote a substantial part of the record, including much of the lyrics, and it is his presence that most accounts credit with pushing the dissonance past the point where it could be mistaken for an effect. Steve Cloutier played bass and Patrick Robert played drums. Olympic Recordings released the finished thing on 23 June 1998, sixty minutes and twenty five seconds long, which is roughly twice the length the genre normally allows itself.
What it sounded like to 1998
Very few people were ready. Lemay has said the audience at the time was small and mostly bewildered, and the reviews that did appear were split between the specialist press, which understood what it was looking at, and everybody else, who heard noise. Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles and Chronicles of Chaos both gave it nine and a half out of ten, Metal.de gave it a perfect score and AllMusic four stars out of five. Pitchfork, arriving late, called it one of the most pungently progressive albums ever made, in or out of metal. In 2025 Loudwire named it the best death metal record of 1998, which is a verdict twenty seven years in the post.
The influence is easier to measure than the sales. Ulcerate built a body of work on what this album did to harmony. Brain Drill took the technical end of it. A German band named itself after the record. Every group currently filed under dissonant death metal, a description that did not exist as a category in 1998, is working inside a vocabulary assembled in a Quebec rehearsal room by four men with no contract.
The lag is the interesting part. Ulcerate formed in Auckland in 2000, two years after the album came out, and took roughly a decade of records to arrive at something that balanced the same harmonic idea against a listener's endurance. A whole category of band therefore exists at one remove: they did not copy the record, they spent years working out what question it had been asking. Very few albums in any genre generate that kind of delayed, deliberate response, and almost none of them do it from a catalogue position as obscure as this one had in 1998.
What happened to the people who made it
From Wisdom to Hate followed in 2001 and pulled some of the strangeness back toward songs. The drummer Steve MacDonald died in 2002. Lemay stopped the band in 2005, saying he was done with music and intended to work as a woodworker full time, and Gorguts existed only as a back catalogue for three years.
What restarted it was a conversation with Steeve Hurdle in 2006 about the band's twentieth anniversary. The reunion happened in 2008 with an entirely new line-up, Colin Marston on bass, Kevin Hufnagel on guitar and John Longstreth on drums, and Hurdle did not play on it. He died on 20 May 2012, aged 41, from complications following surgery.
Colored Sands arrived in 2013 with a string quartet written into the middle of it and picked up a Juno nomination, which is a peculiar destination for a band whose last statement had been the coldest album in the genre. Pleiades' Dust followed in 2016, a single piece of about half an hour built around a historical subject, and it is the clearest sign of where Lemay's writing had gone: away from songs entirely and toward long form composition with an argument running through it.
The music, all the music has been done for a while now. I got my topic I want. So I'm very inspired by it.
Luc Lemay, Blabbermouth, 8 December 2025
He was talking about the next record, which the band expects to begin recording around March 2026 with Michel Belanger on drums, and which he has described as a concept album blending material drawn from every phase of the group's writing. That is the same instinct that produced Obscura, thirty three years after the songs on it were first put together: pick a subject, build the whole record out of it, and let the audience arrive whenever it manages to. Where that instinct has taken the genre as a whole is the business of death Metal Concept Albums.
