Every Nile album since 2000, with one exception, has shipped with sleeve notes explaining song by song where the words came from: which text, which translation, which piece of Egyptian or Mesopotamian material. Karl Sanders has had to tell interviewers more than once that he is not an Egyptologist, because enough people assumed he was. University staff have posted him source material unprompted.
That is a citation apparatus, on a death metal record. Hold it next to the received idea that this music is a list of injuries shouted at speed, and the received idea does not survive the collision.
The lyrics you cannot hear are the point
Start with the obvious objection, because it is the interesting one. On a death metal record the words are largely inaudible as language. A guttural voice is a rhythm instrument with consonants in it, and the vocal is mixed as one more layer of attack rather than as a message. So why write anything careful at all?
Because the words were never meant to arrive through the speaker. They arrive on paper. A lyric sheet is the only part of a death metal record that speaks at normal volume, and it is read in silence, alone, with the record playing, which is a completely different act from hearing a chorus. The band gets your full attention twice: once for the noise, once for the text.
That also explains the vocabulary. Where a rock lyric has to be singable, a death metal lyric has to be readable, so it can carry Latinate medical terms, campaign chronology, transliterated god names and multi clause sentences that would strangle any singer trying to hold a melody through them. The constraint that normally limits what a song can say was simply removed.
A lyric sheet is the only part of a death metal record that speaks at normal volume.
Anatomy, which is the one everybody knows
The pathology strand is the one that made the reputation, and it is also the most misread. Carcass recorded Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious at Amazon Studios in Simonswood, Lancashire in 1991 with Colin Richardson producing, and Earache released it on 30 October that year, with Michael Amott on the record as a new second guitarist. Several of its songs are, on their face, about efficient methods of disposing of a body.
Read the sheet, though, and the register is not horror. It is bureaucratic. The words are chosen the way a surgeon chooses instruments, for what they can cut rather than for what they mean, and the effect of running clinical Latin over a blast beat is closer to comedy than to menace. Bill Steer has been steady on this point for thirty years: there was thought behind it, there was a joke inside it, and being disgusting for its own sake was never the aim. Everyone who copied the vocabulary without the joke produced something much worse.
War, empire and the ancient world
Coventry's most disciplined export never wrote about a body on a slab at all. Bolt Thrower ran from 1986 to 2016 on one subject, war, taken first out of the tabletop world of Warhammer 40,000 and then increasingly out of real campaign history, and they did it without ever writing a line that celebrates it. Karl Willetts sang about the men in the mud rather than the flags above them. Realm of Chaos in 1989, War Master in 1991, The IVth Crusade in 1992 and finally Those Once Loyal on Metal Blade in 2005, after which they stopped, and after drummer Martin Kearns died in September 2015 they dissolved on the anniversary of it rather than replace him.
Nile went further back and did the reading. Sanders builds the songs out of Egyptian and Near Eastern religion, funerary text and dynastic history, then annotates them, which is the opposite of the mystique most bands cultivate. It also produced the strangest fact in this whole subject: a death metal band whose sleeve notes are used by listeners as a reading list.
Cyborgs, physics and mortality
The science fiction strand arrived early and has never gone away. Nocturnus put out The Key on Earache on 1 October 1990, recorded that June at Morrisound with Tom Morris engineering and co-producing, and it is a full concept record: a cyborg is sent back through time to kill Christ, Christianity never happens, and a different empire rises in its place. Keyboards, in 1990, in this music. Nobody was doing any of it.
Then the philosophical line, which is where the genre's best writing sits. Death moved from zombies to religion, addiction, memory and self knowledge across Human in 1991, Individual Thought Patterns in 1993 and Symbolic in 1995, and did it without softening a single element of the music. Atheist and Gorguts pushed the same door from different sides, the first with Unquestionable Presence in 1991 and the second with Obscura in 1998, a record whose words are as dislocated as its guitars. Mortality is the constant. What changes is whether it is being described from the outside, as an event on a table, or from the inside, as the thing waiting for the person writing.
Politics, ecology and the real crimes
The political line runs from the beginning. Napalm Death came out of anarcho punk and never left it, and the corporate logos worked into the skulls on the front of Scum in 1987 were an accurate description of the contents. Obituary turned outward on World Demise, released by Roadrunner on 6 September 1994 and cut at Morrisound with Scott Burns, slower and heavier and pointed at the world rather than at the graveyard.
Cattle Decapitation built a whole career on one reversal: the species is livestock and the abattoir is coming for it. To Serve Man in 2002 states the argument in its title, and the band have spent twenty years working out the consequences of it. Whatever anybody thinks of the delivery, that is a thesis, and it is more coherently held than most protest songwriting.
Then there is the corner that makes people uncomfortable for good reasons. Macabre, formed in Chicago in 1985 and unchanged in line-up ever since, write about real murderers, in detail, with black comedy and nursery rhyme melodies mixed into thrash and grindcore. Their 2000 album Dahmer is a full biography of one killer. It is documentary rather than admiring, and it is still the only significant band in the genre whose subject is real crime rather than invented horror, which tells you how rare that actually is.
What all of it has in common
Six strands, and one thing underneath them.
Death metal writes about mortality as a material fact rather than an emotional one. Rock treats death as loss, blues treats it as fate, and this music treats it as physics: bodies decay, empires fall, species are consumed, the crusade ends in the mud, the cyborg fails, the mind goes before the body does. That is why the pathology vocabulary and the campaign history and the funerary text all fit inside one genre without any of them feeling out of place. They are the same argument at different scales.
It also explains why the gore records that are only gore wear out so fast. A list of injuries is not a subject, it is a texture, and once you have read one sheet of it you have read them all. The records people are still arguing about thirty years later are the ones where somebody had something to say and used the only medium that would let them say it at that volume. The economy that carried those sheets from hand to hand, in envelopes and stapled magazines, is set out in tapes, zines and covers, and the whole story, KaosMetal's death metal history, is built on the same evidence.
One question is left over, and it is the one that gets asked more than all the others put together: whether any of this is meant. Whether the inverted crosses and the blasphemy are a position or a costume. That has a real answer, it varies by band, and it is dealt with in is Death Metal Satanic.
