You are not meant to find the riff. That is the design, and nearly every argument about cavernous death metal collapses at exactly that point, with somebody complaining that the mix is broken when the mix is the composition.
It is not broken. It is aimed.
The name arrived late and from below. No band put it on a sleeve, no label printed it on a sticker, and nobody in Brisbane or Athens or Helsinki has ever walked on stage and introduced themselves that way. It came out of listeners hunting for a shelf, the way most of these words do, and by August 2017 Bandcamp Daily was using caverncore in print for records built to sound as though they had been tracked forty feet under a churchyard. If you want the full family tree, every branch of the genre is laid out elsewhere. This is the branch that grows in the dark.
What the cavern actually is
Recognised instantly by anyone who has ever tried to mix one, the cavernous record is made by dragging reverb out of the finishing stage and into the writing stage, so that the decay of one chord is still hanging in the room when the next one lands, the bass occupies the same band of frequencies as the low guitars instead of sitting politely underneath them, the voice is placed behind the amplifiers rather than in front of them, and the tempo drags just often enough that a tremolo figure smears into one sustained mass instead of resolving into separate notes.
None of that is an accident of budget. Plenty of demos from 1990 sound subterranean because the band had ninety dollars and a rehearsal room with a carpet on the wall. These records sound subterranean because four people sat in a control room and decided the murk was the work.
The riff is not played at you. It is poured down a shaft, and you stand at the top listening to what comes back.
Here is the practical test and it takes twenty seconds. Put the record on and try to count the beat. If you can hold it, you are listening to old school death metal with a lot of reverb on it. If the pulse keeps sliding out from under your foot and the guitars arrive as pressure rather than as parts, you are in the cavern. The style gets filed under the old school death metal revival for want of a better drawer, and it sits badly in that drawer, because the revival wanted 1990 back and the cavern wanted somewhere nobody had been.
Golgotha, and the decade when nobody followed
The ancestor is not in dispute. The New Jersey four who buried their own singer under the guitars got there first, and they did it on a calendar you can look up: Incantation cut Onward to Golgotha at Trax East Studios in South River between September and November 1991 with Steve Evetts engineering and producing, Dave Shirk mastered it, and Relapse released it on 5 May 1992, forty two minutes on which Craig Pillard's voice is not a lead instrument but a layer of sediment under John McEntee's guitars, with Ronny Deo on bass and Jim Roe on drums. AllMusic gave it three and a half stars and noted that it does not let up one iota.
Intensity was not the achievement. Plenty of records that year were intense. What that one did was make the room a member of the band.
Then almost nothing happened for ten years, and the gap is the reason this counts as a school rather than an influence. Through the nineties the genre chased the opposite virtue: triggered kicks, scooped mids, every note separated and audible, a studio bill you could hear. Incantation kept going through Mortal Throne of Nazarene in 1994 and Diabolical Conquest in 1998 while the rest of the field walked the other way. The cavern needed a generation raised entirely on clean death metal who found it boring.
The Australians, who took it somewhere else
The Brisbane group in executioners' hoods did the most damage, and the useful part of their story is not the murk but the day they switched it off. Profound Lore released Vexovoid on 19 February 2013, and where Decibel had described the production they were retiring as vacuum cleaners and wind tunnels, NPR called this one the clearest sounding Portal album yet, as though stripping the fog away made the thing more frightening rather than less. Seven reviews put it at 76 on Metacritic. A style that survives being made legible was never only a trick of the desk.
Around them stands a whole city working the same seam. Impetuous Ritual, who share players with Portal, went the opposite way and kept going: Relentless Execution of Ceremonial Excrescence, then Unholy Congregation of Hypocritical Ambivalence, then Blight Upon Martyred Sentience on Profound Lore on 16 June 2017, a record that walks out of death metal for minutes at a time into noise and dark ambient and comes back with the dread intact. Grave Upheaval, whose members also turn up in Temple Nightside, refused to name anything at all: an untitled album through Nuclear War Now! on 18 September 2013, a second untitled album on 15 March 2018, a mix washed out until the songs read as tidal rather than rhythmic.
The postmen, not the press
This music has no radio play, no main stage and no press cycle worth the name. It has labels run out of houses. Chris Bruni founded Profound Lore in New Hamburg, Ontario in May 2004 as a hobby among friends and turned it into the imprint that carries Portal, Impetuous Ritual and a good part of the American end of the style. Dark Descent does the same job out of Colorado. Nuclear War Now! prints the section of the catalogue that no shop knows how to file, including two albums with nothing written on them.
The economics are worth stating plainly, because they explain the sound. A cavernous record costs almost nothing to make and sells in the low thousands. Nobody is recouping an advance. Nobody is being asked for a single. What you are hearing is the one school of death metal where the absence of money reads as a creative decision rather than as a limitation.
Every other school in this genre is trying to make you hear something. This one is trying to make you hear a place.
Rafael Quintero, KaosMetal
The second generation, and where the edges are
By the middle of the 2010s the style had rules, which is what happens to everything eventually. Krypts recorded Unending Degradation at their own Kryptomb room across 2012 with Otso Ukkonen tracking and mixing, and Dark Descent released it on 19 February 2013, thirty eight minutes and thirty nine seconds moving at the speed of settling ground and owing as much to the Finnish low end as to New Jersey. Spectral Voice, who share members with Blood Incantation, followed with Eroded Corridors of Unbeing on the same label on 13 October 2017. Around them work Mortiferum out of Olympia, Cerebral Rot in Seattle, Ritual Necromancy, Father Befouled, Encoffination and Chthe'ilist, and the list keeps growing for a reason that has nothing to do with fashion: a young band with a cheap room and one good idea about reverb can make something that sounds enormous.
Three borders get argued about weekly, and all three are settleable. The cavern is not death-doom, because death-doom is slow as a matter of tempo and grief while the cavern uses slowness as one tool among several and will blast when it wants to. It is not war metal either, which abandons legibility as an act of open hostility, where the cavern hides legibility in order to build a room you can walk into.
And it is not dissonant Death Metal, which is the other thing this music grew into after 2008 and the one most often confused with it. Dissonance works on the intervals. The cavern works on the air around them. Play a dissonant record dry and it still makes you uneasy. Play a cavernous record dry and you have an ordinary good old school death metal album with the reverb switched off.
One confession and then you are on your own with it. For two years I told anyone who would listen that these records were badly made, and I was wrong in the most embarrassing way available, which is that I had been listening on headphones at half volume while doing something else. Put one on properly loud in a room with hard walls. The mix stops being a fault and becomes the building.
