Five thousand dollars. That is what Suffocation had to spend at Morrisound Recording in June 1991, and what came out of it was Effigy of the Forgotten, thirty seven minutes of music that Roadrunner released on 22 October that year with Frank Mullen shouting, Terrance Hobbs and Doug Cerrito on guitars, Josh Barohn on bass and Mike Smith inventing most of what a death metal drummer has done since. The breakdown in "Liege of Inveracity" is generally treated as the first slam riff anyone put on a record. Five thousand dollars.
Money is the honest way into this list, because almost nobody named below made any. Technical death metal is a trade rather than a market: a set of tools handed from one workshop to the next, each generation obliged to build the tools before it can use them. What the tools are and how they cut is set out in the subgenres explained. What follows is the roll of the people who did the cutting.
Florida, and the two years when everything arrived
Atheist were first and were punished for it. Four teenagers who had called themselves Oblivion and then R.A.V.A.G.E. before settling on the name in 1987, they cut Piece of Time at Morrisound in November and December 1988 with Scott Burns, watched their label go bankrupt, and finally got the record out through Active in August 1989 and through Metal Blade in the United States in November 1990. Two years between the tape and the American shops. By the time anyone in Florida could buy it, the band who made it had already moved past it.
Then the worst thing that can happen to a band happened to them. Roger Patterson, who wrote the bass parts that made Atheist what they were, died on 12 February 1991 in a van crash in rural Louisiana. He was 22. The band recorded Unquestionable Presence that year with Tony Choy playing Patterson's written lines, Kelly Shaefer having said since that Choy was the only other player they knew who could physically get through the material. It is the most admired record of the early technical wing and it exists because a dead man's notation was still on the page.
Pestilence came at it from the Netherlands and went further out than anyone expected. Patrick Mameli took a band that had made two competent death metal albums and turned Testimony of the Ancients in 1991 into something with instrumental interludes and jazz chords in it, then produced Spheres in 1993 with guitar synthesisers all over it, which lost the band most of its audience and now gets cited by musicians who were twelve when it came out. Death and Cynic did their part in the same window, and both of them belong as much to the wing described in the whole thing, start to finish.
Montreal sets a standard nobody asked for
The Quebec band who raised the bar out of everyone's reach recorded None So Vile at Studio Victor between December 1995 and January 1996, with Pierre Remillard engineering, and Wrong Again Records put it out on 3 July that year. Thirty two minutes and three seconds. Lord Worm on vocals, Jon Levasseur on guitar, Eric Langlois on bass and Flo Mounier on drums, and it is Mounier who changed the job description: blast beats, ride patterns and fills that do not keep time so much as strip it off the song and leave the frame standing. Decibel put the record tenth in its hundred greatest death metal albums. Cryptopsy then spent two decades being measured against it, which is what happens when a band gets it right at 22.
Their neighbours Gorguts went the other way, into dissonance and slowness, and stayed there. Luc Lemay brought the band back in 2013 with an entirely new line-up and Colored Sands, a record with a string quartet on it, which is a thing very few people expected from a band whose last statement had been the coldest album in the genre.
Almost nobody on this list made any money. The instrument gets handed down anyway, because there has never been a shortage of people willing to spend three years learning something eight hundred people will hear.
The trade goes professional
The generation that followed treated all this as a curriculum rather than an experiment. Nile, out of South Carolina, worked out that Egyptology, baritone tunings and choral chanting could sit on top of a technical death metal chassis, and by Annihilation of the Wicked in 2005 they were selling to people who had never heard of Atheist. Origin in Kansas went the other direction and removed everything except speed, which is a legitimate position and a hard one to hold for twenty five years.
The Polish contribution was three brothers-in-arms who were children. Decapitated formed in 1996 with Waclaw Kieltyka on guitar at 15 and his brother Witold on drums at 12, and their debut Winds of Creation came out on Earache's Wicked World imprint in April 2000, played with a precision that professional bands twice their age could not match. Witold Kieltyka died on 2 November 2007 of injuries from a road collision near Gomel five days earlier; he was 23. The singer, Adrian Kowanek, survived with brain injuries and has not returned to the band. Waclaw Kieltyka restarted Decapitated in 2009 and has kept it going since.
One of Poland's, and even Europe's, finest exponents of ultra-technical death metal.
AllMusic, on Winds of Creation
The German school and the modern crop
Germany produced the most disciplined wing of the lot. Obscura, named after the Gorguts album, released Cosmogenesis through Relapse on 17 February 2009 with a line-up that reads like a squad sheet: Steffen Kummerer on guitar and vocals, Christian Muenzner on guitar, Jeroen Paul Thesseling on fretless bass and Hannes Grossmann on drums, recorded at Woodshed Studios in Landshut with V. Santura at the desk. It reached number 71 on the American Heatseekers chart, which for this music counts as a chart position. Defeated Sanity, meanwhile, built the brutal end of the trade into something with harmony in it, a band whose first drummer was the guitarist's father.
Sweden gave the trade Spawn of Possession, formed in 1997, who managed three albums in twenty years, Cabinet in 2003, Noctambulant in 2006 and Incurso in 2012, and then announced in August 2017 that they simply did not have time to finish another one properly. Three records in two decades is not laziness. It is what this material costs when the people making it also have jobs. Canada's Beyond Creation and the current North American crop inherited the whole toolkit and the same arithmetic.
| Band | Country | The record | What it added |
|---|---|---|---|
| Atheist | United States | Unquestionable Presence (1991) | Jazz harmony and Latin rhythm inside death metal |
| Suffocation | United States | Effigy of the Forgotten (1991) | Weight and the breakdown, technique without losing the floor |
| Pestilence | Netherlands | Spheres (1993) | Guitar synthesiser, and the willingness to lose the audience |
| Cryptopsy | Canada | None So Vile (1996) | The modern extreme drum vocabulary |
| Nile | United States | Annihilation of the Wicked (2005) | Baritone tunings, choral layers, subject matter with a library behind it |
| Decapitated | Poland | Winds of Creation (2000) | Precision as the point, at an age when nobody has it |
| Obscura | Germany | Cosmogenesis (2009) | Fretless bass and clean composition as a house style |
| Spawn of Possession | Sweden | Incurso (2012) | Counterpoint written like chamber music |
Read the table and the shape of the thing shows up. Every band on it added a tool, none of them added a market, and the ones who lasted did so by treating the music as a craft with standards rather than a career with a ladder. The wing that took the same skills and spent them on song shape instead of on the bar is a separate argument, and a good one, which is progressive Death Metal.
