South Glens Falls, upstate New York, 1998. A five piece who had been going six years, a label called United Guttural that existed to press records nobody else would touch, a run small enough that a modern band would call it a bad afternoon, and an album going out by post one padded envelope at a time. That record was Progression Towards Evil. The following year the same label pressed a debut by a band from Dallas, and between the two of them the form had its foundation documents and no distribution whatsoever.
Slam grew in that economy and it shows in the roster. Almost nobody on this list has ever had a booking agent worth the name, and half of them have outlived labels, scenes and formats. What follows is the working roll call, geographically rather than by rank, because the story of this music is a story about where it landed next. The room it came out of is brutality and slam.
Long Island wrote the rules and then mostly stopped
Internal Bleeding are first because they named the thing. Formed on Long Island in 1991 around the guitarist Chris Pervelis, they spent three years arguing about vocabulary and then made Voracious Contempt for Pavement Records in 1995, followed it with The Extinction of Benevolence in 1997 and Driven to Conquer in 1999, stopped in 2005, came back in 2011 and have kept going through the death of the drummer who had insisted on the word in the first place. Bill Tolley died on 20 April 2017 in a fire, working as a firefighter in Queens. The band has released two albums since.
Pyrexia, formed in New York in 1990, got there first on record. Sermon of Mockery arrived in 1993, two years ahead of Internal Bleeding's debut, and it is the earliest album that reads as slam rather than as brutal death metal with slow parts. Skinless, from South Glens Falls and formed in 1992 by Ryan Wade and Noah Carpenter, brought comedy and end of the world cynicism to a form that badly needed both, and their run from Progression Towards Evil in 1998 through Foreshadowing Our Demise in 2001 is the most listenable thing the first wave produced. They broke up in 2011, reformed in 2013 with the original line-up and have since made two more records.
Three bands, four square miles, and a genre that now has scenes on five continents.
Dallas takes the floor out
Devourment formed in 1995 in Dallas, out of the wreckage of a local band called Necrocide, and did the thing every subsequent slam band has had to reckon with: they removed the last traces of anything that was not the drop. Molesting the Decapitated came out in 1999 through United Guttural, the songs move at the speed of a loading bay and the vocal has abandoned pitch entirely, and the record has been the argument's centre of gravity ever since. Three break-ups later the band is still working, with the drummer Brad Fincher the surviving original, and the catalogue runs through Butcher the Weak in 2005 and Unleash the Carnivore in 2009 to Conceived in Sewage in 2013 and Obscene Majesty in 2019, the last two on Relapse.
Cephalotripsy belong in the same paragraph and rarely get there, a first wave American band whose one album is quoted by every European group that followed. Afterbirth, from New York, sat in the same bracket and then vanished for two decades before coming back. That pattern, one record, a long silence and a reissue somebody else pays for, is more typical of this genre than any career arc you could draw.
Moscow, and a revival that happened on a message board
The form should not have survived the collapse of mail order. What saved it was a generation with cheap recording software and nothing to lose, and the two bands who proved it both came out of the same city. Abominable Putridity formed in Moscow in 2003 and released In the End of Human Existence through the Czech label Lacerated Enemy on 20 December 2007, a record made with production values the first wave could only have dreamed about and a low end that arrives before the band does.
Katalepsy started in Moscow in the same year, put the Musick Brings Injuries EP out in 2007 and then took their time: the first album, Autopsychosis, did not appear until 2013, on Unique Leader, followed by Gravenous Hour in 2016 and Terra Mortuus Est in 2020. Their trajectory is the one the genre took as a whole, from slam toward a heavier and more technical hybrid that keeps the drop and puts the riff arithmetic back in.
Manchester, Durban, Lisbon, Brisbane
Ingested formed in Manchester in May 2006 and made Surpassing the Boundaries of Human Suffering in 2009, and the northern English scene around them became dense enough that the press stopped treating it as an outpost. Their later run, from The Level Above Human in 2018 through Where Only Gods May Tread in 2020, Ashes Lie Still in 2022 and The Tide of Death and Fractured Dreams in 2024, is the clearest evidence that a slam band can grow without abandoning the riff that defines it.
Vulvodynia started in Durban in early 2014 when Luke Haarhoff was sixteen and Duncan Bentley nineteen, released Cognizant Castigation the same year and have since built the most successful career the genre has produced outside the United States. Analepsy came together in Lisbon in late 2013 around Ricardo Proença and Marco Martins, put Dehumanization by Supremacy out on 1 May 2015 and refined the form rather than extending it. Disentomb, formed in Brisbane in early 2009, went the other way entirely and dragged slam into something closer to a cave, with a guitar sound that sits somewhere below the point where notes stop being identifiable.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Six records, and what each one is for
| Record | Year | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Pyrexia, Sermon of Mockery | 1993 | The earliest album that is slam rather than brutal death metal with slow parts |
| Internal Bleeding, Voracious Contempt | 1995 | The design document, blunt on purpose |
| Skinless, Progression Towards Evil | 1998 | The first wave at its most playable |
| Devourment, Molesting the Decapitated | 1999 | The floor, and proof the floor holds |
| Abominable Putridity, In the End of Human Existence | 2007 | The revival, with a budget |
| Ingested, The Level Above Human | 2018 | The modern version, still recognisable as the same music |
Two warnings before you go. The first is that a great deal of what gets tagged slam on streaming services is deathcore with a low tuning, which is a different music with different intentions and a different audience, and the tags are worse than useless. The second is that half the bands above will be described as brutal death metal by their own labels, because the two words have been welded together in the trade for twenty years and nobody selling records has any incentive to take them apart. Where that welding happened, and what it costs, is the subject of brutal Slam. If you would rather widen out instead, go back to the top.
