I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete must for that very reason infallibly be faulty.Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Every argument about what counts as death metal is really an argument about four variables, and once you can hear all four you never need anyone to tell you what a record is again. Tempo, and what the band does with the space when they slow down. Riff construction, which means where the notes come from and whether they resolve. Production, which in this genre is not decoration but content. And the vocal register, which is the least useful of the four despite being the one everybody uses first.
The growl tells you almost nothing. A record with a growl on it can be a Gothenburg pop song with harmonised leads, a forty minute funeral, a machine gridded to a click, or half an hour of dissonance that never once lands on a chord you can name. Two records with the same voice can share nothing else at all. That is the actual state of the death metal story after forty years, and the reason a map is worth having.
What follows is that map. Each of these is a real practice with its own records, its own audience and its own borders, and the borders are the part that matters, because a subgenre is only useful as a description if you can say what it is not. A term that covers everything describes nothing. There are also plenty of bands who sit on a line and refuse to move, and those get said out loud rather than filed by force.
Melodic death metal
The Gothenburg three who rewired the genre out of a small Swedish studio did it in nine weeks. At the Gates recorded Slaughter of the Soul between May and July 1995 at Studio Fredman with Fredrik Nordstrom producing, and Earache put it out on 14 November of that year, thirty four minutes long and built almost entirely from harmonised twin guitar lines lifted out of the British metal of 1981 and played at death metal speed with a death metal voice on top. Dark Tranquillity had done the groundwork on The Gallery earlier the same year and In Flames confirmed it with The Jester Race in 1996.
The English precedent is older and rarely credited properly. Carcass came out of goregrind and made Heartwork for Earache in 1993, with Michael Amott writing leads that sing, and there is a straight line from that record to everything the Swedes did two years later. The border here is simple and people get it wrong constantly: melodic death metal is defined by the riff, not by a clean chorus. When the band drops the growl for a sung hook and the guitars start playing chords rather than lines, you have crossed into metalcore, which is a different family with different parents. The vocal is not the test. The riff is.
Technical and progressive, which are not the same thing
These two get used as synonyms by people who should know better, and they mean opposite things. Technical death metal puts the difficulty inside the riff: the notes are hard to play, the metres change under you, and the point of the arrangement is the arrangement. Death opened the door with Human in 1991 at Morrisound in Tampa with Scott Burns engineering, bringing in players from outside the genre and writing songs that needed them. Atheist released Unquestionable Presence through Active in August 1991 with jazz harmony and Latin rhythm sitting inside the riffs. Cynic finished the thought on Focus, out on Roadrunner on 14 September 1993, with fretless bass and vocoder on a death metal record, which in 1993 was close to an act of vandalism.
The lineage from there is a straight run of escalating difficulty. Necrophagist released Onset of Putrefaction on 14 September 1999, recorded almost entirely by Muhammed Suicmez alone with programmed drums because no human he knew could play them, and a generation of guitarists learned the record note for note. Origin and Archspire took the same road to its end, where the metric became words per minute and beats per second. It is a genuine sport and it is played at a very high level.
Technical death metal puts the difficulty inside the riff. Progressive death metal lets the song leave the genre and come back.
Progressive death metal does something else entirely. The song leaves. Opeth built Blackwater Park with Steven Wilson in 2001 out of acoustic passages, clean singing and death metal sections that share a key rather than a mood. Edge of Sanity had already done the extreme version on Crimson for Black Mark in 1996, a single forty minute track with a story in it. Rivers of Nihil put a saxophone on Where Owls Know My Name, released by Metal Blade on 16 March 2018, and it entered the American chart at number 61 on 2,750 copies, which tells you both that it worked and how small this world remains. A technical band makes you count. A progressive band makes you wait.
Brutal, slam, and the line between them
The Long Island five who invented two styles at once did it on a budget you could not shoot a music video with today. Suffocation recorded Effigy of the Forgotten at Morrisound in Tampa in June 1991 with Scott Burns for about five thousand dollars, and Roadrunner released it on 22 October. Brutal death metal starts there: the tuning drops, the riffs stack into density rather than melody, the blast is continuous, and the songs are engineered to feel like weight rather than speed. Cannibal Corpse, Dying Fetus and Cryptopsy built out from it, and None So Vile, released by Wrong Again on 3 July 1996, does the whole job in thirty two minutes.
Slam is the child of one riff on that Suffocation record. The mid paced palm muted breakdown in "Liege of Inveracity" has been credited as the first slam riff in the genre, and an entire style was built by taking that eight bars and making it the main event instead of the release. Internal Bleeding codified it in New York in the middle of the nineties and Devourment took it to its logical extreme in Texas with Molesting the Decapitated on United Guttural in 1999. The border is a matter of proportion. Brutal death metal uses the slow part as punctuation; slam makes the slow part the sentence, and the fast parts exist to set it up.
The grind border
Grindcore and death metal were the same scene before they were two, and the crossing point has a date. Napalm Death recorded Harmony Corruption at Morrisound in 1990 with Scott Burns and released it on Earache, and what came back was a grind band playing death metal riffs with a death metal guitar sound. Terrorizer had made World Downfall for Earache in 1989 with members of both worlds in the room. Carcass arrived from the other side entirely, and Symphonies of Sickness in 1989 is the record that gave goregrind its subject matter and its vocabulary.
The working border is song length and riff economy, not lyrics. Grind writes to the blast and gets out, often in under ninety seconds, with a riff that exists to be destroyed. Death metal writes to the riff and gives it room to be heard twice. Deathgrind is the honest middle, and Cattle Decapitation and Misery Index live there permanently and make no apology for it. Goregrind and pornogrind are defined by subject matter and by the pitch shifted vocal, which is a production choice rather than a musical one, and that is genuinely all that separates them from the deathgrind next door.
The slow end: death-doom
Slow the tempo far enough and the growl stops sounding violent and starts sounding bereaved. Winter got there first from New York with Into Darkness in 1990. Autopsy arrived from the Florida side, dragging Mental Funeral down to walking pace for Peaceville in 1991. The English wing turned it into a school: Paradise Lost with Gothic in 1991, My Dying Bride with Turn Loose the Swans in 1993 and its violin, Anathema with Serenades the same year. The Australians who made one album and vanished left the strangest of them all, and diSEMBOWELMENT's Transcendence into the Peripheral, released by Relapse in 1993, is still being copied thirty years later.
The border with doom metal proper is the vocal and the riff shape, since a doom band plays blues derived chords and a death-doom band plays death metal riffs at a quarter of the speed. Below this again sits funeral doom, which is slower still and which usually drops the riff entirely in favour of a chord and a decay, and it belongs to the doom family rather than to this one.
Blackened death, war metal and the cavern
Three styles sit on the black metal border and they are not interchangeable. Blackened death metal keeps death metal's architecture, its riffs and its production, and imports tremolo picking, a shrieked upper register and the imagery. Behemoth made the case permanently with Demigod in 2004, and Belphegor, Angelcorpse and Akercocke each found their own way to the same border post. These are songs. You can follow them.
War metal abandons that. The Canadians who set the template released Fallen Angel of Doom in 1990, and Blasphemy built a style out of refusing every element that makes music legible: the riffs are gestures, the drums are a wall, the recording is deliberately hostile. Archgoat, Teitanblood and Revenge took it forward. It is the most extreme thing the death metal family produced and it is the least interested in being liked.
Cavernous death metal is the third of these and the newest. Its ancestor is Incantation's Onward to Golgotha, out on Relapse on 5 May 1992, where the tempo drags until the riff smears and reverb becomes a structural element rather than a finish. Portal in Australia and Dead Congregation in Greece turned that into a method with rules of its own. You are not meant to be able to locate the riff. That is the effect, not a failure of the mix.
| Subgenre | The record | What marks the border |
|---|---|---|
| Melodic death metal | At the Gates, Slaughter of the Soul (1995) | Harmonised twin leads in the riff. A sung chorus means you have left |
| Technical death metal | Cynic, Focus (1993) | The difficulty lives inside the riff and the metre |
| Progressive death metal | Opeth, Blackwater Park (2001) | The song leaves the genre and comes back |
| Brutal death metal | Suffocation, Effigy of the Forgotten (1991) | Density and low tuning at speed; weight rather than velocity |
| Slam | Devourment, Molesting the Decapitated (1999) | The mid paced breakdown is the song, not the release |
| Deathgrind | Napalm Death, Harmony Corruption (1990) | Grind song lengths, death metal riffs and guitar sound |
| Death-doom | My Dying Bride, Turn Loose the Swans (1993) | Death metal riffs at a quarter speed, growl kept |
| Blackened death metal | Behemoth, Demigod (2004) | Death metal architecture, black metal register and imagery |
| War metal | Blasphemy, Fallen Angel of Doom (1990) | Legibility abandoned on purpose |
| Cavernous death metal | Incantation, Onward to Golgotha (1992) | Reverb used as structure; the riff is meant to smear |
| Dissonant death metal | Gorguts, Obscura (1998) | Intervals that refuse to resolve, by design |
| Symphonic death metal | Septicflesh, Communion (2008) | Written orchestration, not keyboard pads behind the riff |
| Industrial death metal | Fear Factory, Demanufacture (1995) | The machine sets the grid and the drums obey it |
Dissonant, symphonic, industrial
The Quebec band who made the most unwelcome record of 1998 waited a long time to be right. Gorguts released Obscura through Olympic Recordings on 23 June 1998, written by Luc Lemay and Steeve Hurdle and cut at Studio Victor in Montreal with Pierre Remillard producing, and the guitars are detuned and scraped, the intervals never resolve and whole passages sound like the tape is being bent by hand. Dissonant death metal is the school that grew out of it. Ulcerate in New Zealand built the grammar, Ad Nauseam and Artificial Brain extended it, and the test is straightforward: if a passage makes you physically uneasy rather than excited, that is the style working as intended.
Symphonic death metal is the opposite temperament and demands a different kind of respect. Septicflesh released Communion through Season of Mist on 17 March 2008 with orchestration written by the band's own guitarist Christos Antoniou and recorded by the Prague Filmharmonic Orchestra with eighty players and a choir of thirty two, which is a real score rather than a keyboard patch. Fleshgod Apocalypse went further into it with Agony in 2011. The border is exactly there: an orchestra that was written for and played is a symphonic record, and a synthesiser holding a string pad behind the riff is an atmospheric one, and the difference is audible in five seconds.
Industrial death metal hands the grid to a machine. Fear Factory released Demanufacture on Roadrunner on 13 June 1995, produced with Colin Richardson and Rhys Fulber, and the whole record is built on the idea that a drummer locked to a sequencer is more inhuman than a drummer playing free. Add samples, programmed percussion and a guitar tone processed until it stops sounding like wood, and you have the style: Zyklon, Anaal Nathrakh and Meathook Seed all live there. Quantisation is the point rather than an accident, which is the exact inverse of what the old school school believes.
A genre name is only worth having if you can name the record it excludes.
Andrzej Sawicki, KaosMetal
Death 'n' roll, deathcore, and where the family ends
The Stockholm band who had already invented one sound then walked away from it made the most divisive record in this whole account. Entombed released Wolverine Blues on Earache on 31 August 1993, keeping the buzzsaw guitar and the growl and putting them over riffs that swing, with a beat you could drive to. Death 'n' roll is that and nothing more complicated: the low end and the voice of death metal on rock and roll structures. Gorefest followed with Erase in 1994 and Six Feet Under made a career out of it. Half the audience called it a betrayal at the time. The records have aged better than the argument did.
Deathcore is where the family ends, and it ends there because the parentage is different. It takes the vocal palette and some of the riff vocabulary of death metal and attaches them to metalcore song structures, where the breakdown is the emotional destination rather than a rhythmic device. That is a hardcore inheritance, not a death metal one, which is why bands from the two worlds share festivals and almost never share a sound. It is a large and successful music with its own history and it deserves better than being used as an insult, and it also is not this.
Christian death metal, war metal, goregrind, psychedelic death metal and the growing pile of hybrids all work the same way, which is that they are defined by one variable moved and everything else held still. Once you know which variable a band has moved, the label writes itself and you can stop arguing about it. If you would rather start from the groups than from the categories, death metal bands is the list to work through, and most of the names above are on it.
A subgenre is only useful as a description if you can say what it is not. A term that covers everything describes nothing.
One last thing, and it matters more than the taxonomy. Bands do not know what subgenre they are and mostly do not care. Every one of these categories was applied after the fact by listeners, journalists and mail order catalogues that needed a heading to file things under, and the best records in the genre are the ones that sit awkwardly across two of them. The map is for you, not for them. Use it to find things and then throw it away when a band you like walks straight through the middle of it.
