A hurdy gurdy, a choir of Tibetan monks, a healing chant recorded in a Xavante community in Mato Grosso, and the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. Four things with no obvious business anywhere near a death metal record, all four paid for out of real recording budgets, and not one of the bands that used them came out of the session having stopped being a death metal band. That is the subject of this page: what the genre has absorbed since 1990, what each graft cost, and which of them changed the host rather than merely decorating it.
Death metal is the one form in extreme music that has never rejected a transplant. Black metal has to argue for weeks about a keyboard. Grindcore cannot survive a second verse. Death metal takes an orchestra, a national epic, an entire dead language, and comes back sounding like itself with something new hanging off it. The full arrangement of the family and the borders between its branches is set out in the longer account; what follows is the record of the things that came in from outside.
The Norse branch, which is the largest by some distance
The first thing to understand about viking death metal is that it is a subject and an iconography rather than a set of musical decisions, and that the two bands who own it arrived at it from opposite directions. Formed in Stockholm in 1989 out of the wreckage of Nihilist and signed to Century Media, Unleashed put Where No Life Dwells out in 1991 as unambiguous Swedish death metal with the Sunlight apparatus intact, and simply pointed the lyrics at Norse material instead of at corpses, which nobody had done in this genre before. Bathory had already supplied the subject on Hammerheart in 1990, though the music there is not death metal at all and never was, and the confusion between the two is the reason this category is argued about at all.
Amon Amarth came together in 1992 out of a band called Scum, signed to Metal Blade and released Once Sent from the Golden Hall in 1998, and what they were playing underneath the sagas was Gothenburg melodic death metal taken off the boil, the harmonised twin guitar line slowed to a walking pace so that a crowd could move to it. That decision has been worth a great deal. Twilight of the Thunder God entered the Billboard 200 at number 50 and the Swedish chart at number 11 in 2008, and Jomsviking reached number 19 in America in 2016 on 21,000 units in its first week, figures no band in this genre had any right to expect. Einherjer in Norway and Manegarm in Sweden work the same ground with smaller returns.
Death metal is the one form in extreme music that has never rejected a transplant.
Folk instruments, and what they actually cost
The graft that worked earliest and best came out of Finland. Amorphis recorded Tales from the Thousand Lakes at Sunlight in September 1993 and Relapse released it on 12 July 1994, with the words taken from the Kalevala, the national epic assembled out of oral poetry in the nineteenth century, and with keyboards carrying melodic figures that owe nothing to any metal record. It has sold in excess of a hundred thousand copies and remains the most commercially successful release in the history of that label, which is a sentence worth reading twice given what else Relapse has put out.
The Swiss took it further and paid for it in logistics. Eluveitie built an eight and nine piece band around hurdy gurdy, bagpipes, tin whistle and fiddle laid over Gothenburg riffing, and had to move that apparatus around Europe in a van for twenty years. Finntroll went the other way and put a Finnish dance rhythm underneath black metal, which is funnier and cheaper. The pattern in all of it is the same: the folk instrument carries the melody the guitars are no longer allowed to carry, and the moment it stops doing that it becomes decoration and the band stops being interesting.
The orchestra, hired by the hour
The Greeks made the strongest case for it. Septicflesh recorded The Great Mass between July and September 2010 at Devasoundz in Greece and The Abyss in Sweden with Peter Tagtgren producing, Christos Antoniou wrote the orchestration, and the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and the International Choir of Prague played it; Season of Mist released the record on 19 April 2011. The distinction that matters is the one between an orchestra placed on top of a finished metal record and an orchestra written into the arrangement from the start, and this is the second thing. Fleshgod Apocalypse have made a career of the same approach from Italy, with a pianist in the touring line-up.
Egypt, Brazil and the wider borrowing
Nile are the deepest of these projects and the most disciplined. Karl Sanders has spent nearly thirty years writing death metal out of Egyptological material, with the note sheets and the source citations printed in the booklets, and the band's riff vocabulary is built on scales that are not the chromatic runs everyone else uses. The result is that a Nile record is identifiable in four bars, which is the only real test of a hybrid.
Sepultura made the loudest crossing and took the heaviest fire for it. Roots was recorded at Indigo Ranch in Malibu between October and December 1995 with Ross Robinson producing, Roadrunner released it on 20 February 1996, and the band travelled to Mato Grosso to record a Xavante healing chant that became the track "Itsari", with Carlinhos Brown arranging the ensemble percussion elsewhere on the album. It reached number 27 in America and number 4 in Britain and has sold more than two million copies. Half the underground has never forgiven it, and the record is still the most listened to thing anybody in this article made.
| What was added | Band | Record | Year | Whether it changed the host |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Norse subject matter | Unleashed | Where No Life Dwells | 1991 | No, the music is unaltered |
| A national epic and keyboards | Amorphis | Tales from the Thousand Lakes | 1994 | Yes, and the band left the genre soon after |
| Indigenous percussion and chant | Sepultura | Roots | 1996 | Yes, permanently |
| Egyptological material and scales | Nile | Amongst the Catacombs of Nephren-Ka | 1998 | Yes, in the riff writing itself |
| A symphony orchestra and choir | Septicflesh | The Great Mass | 2011 | Only in the arrangement |
The one graft that rebuilt the host
All of the above are additions. One absorption went the other way and changed what death metal itself could do, and it came from doom. Autopsy slowed the Florida grammar to a crawl on Mental Funeral in 1991, diSEMBOWELMENT in Australia took it further into silence and dirge on Transcendence into the Peripheral in 1993, and in the north of England three bands on one label, Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride and Anathema, built a form with violins, clean female voices and tempos borrowed from funeral music while keeping the growl. Everything cavernous and everything slow in the modern genre descends from that decade, and none of it reads as a hybrid any more, which is the definition of a successful graft.
Two directions are therefore available to any band arriving now. Add something and remain recognisable, which is what the Norse and folk wings did. Or let the addition rewrite the grammar, which is what doom did and what nobody has managed since. The other route out, deeper into the material rather than wider, belongs to the players who made difficulty itself the subject, and that is technical Death Metal Explained. The branch immediately before this one, where the addition was doctrinal rather than musical, is christian Death Metal.
