Six days, between Christmas and New Year. That is how long four Finns spent in a room in Savonlinna at the end of December 1992 making a record that nobody asked for and nobody could file, and thirty three years later half the bands in this article are still working out what they heard on it. Necropolis released Nespithe on 8 February 1993. Demilich then broke up.
Dissonant death metal is the school that grew out of records like that one. It is the hardest branch of this music to love on first contact and the one that rewards patience most obviously, and if you want to see where it sits against every branch of the genre the map is elsewhere. What follows is what actually happens inside the riff.
What dissonance means here, precisely
Start with the thing it is not. It is not detuning, which any band can do with a wrench and forty seconds. It is not noise, which is an absence of pitch rather than an argument about it. And it is not atonality in the sense a conservatory would recognise, because almost none of these records abandon a tonal centre completely.
What they abandon is resolution. Ordinary metal harmony works on tension and release: a chord leans, and the next chord catches it. Dissonant death metal builds the lean and then excises the catch, and the removal is surgical rather than clumsy, minor seconds and tritones and voicings with two notes a semitone apart, stacked until the ear keeps waiting for a landing the band has decided not to provide.
A chord held open with a retractor, so you can watch it refuse to close.
Do that for four minutes and the effect stops being musical and becomes physical. Your body is running a prediction engine it cannot switch off, and the band is feeding it wrong answers on purpose. That is why the reaction to this music divides so cleanly. Some listeners hear craft. Others feel sick and turn it off, which is also the style working exactly as designed.
Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark what discord follows.
William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida
Three ancestors, none of whom meant it
The Finnish quartet who wrote in shapes nobody else was using came first. Antti Boman sang and played guitar on Nespithe alongside Aki Hytonen, Ville Koistinen and Mikko Virnes, and the record moves through chromatic figures that sit at odd angles to the beat while the voice arrives from somewhere below the floor of the mix. Pitchfork later gave it eight out of ten. At the time it sold almost nothing and the band stopped.
Second came a New York band who had been dropped by their label. Immolation recorded Here in After in July 1995 after Roadrunner let them go, Wayne Dorell engineered and mixed it, and Metal Blade put it out on 13 February 1996, the last record with Craig Smilowski behind the kit. Ross Dolan and Robert Vigna were not chasing dissonance as a theory. They were chasing a mood, and the way they got there was by writing riffs that slide sideways instead of stepping, guitars bending away from each other rather than doubling. AllMusic gave it four out of five. Every band in the second half of this piece has that album somewhere in its bloodline.
Third, and from outside the genre entirely, sits the Quebec influence that everyone here admits to: the science fiction thrash of Voivod, whose guitar voicings taught two generations that a chord could be built out of intervals nobody had put together before and still function inside a riff. What the three of them share is that none of them set out to found a school. They were solving their own problems.
The engineer's room in Queens
Styles are usually credited to bands. This one owes as much to a building. Colin Marston, who took a music technology degree at New York University in 2004 and plays in Krallice, Dysrhythmia and Behold the Arctopus, moved into Menegroth the Thousand Caves in Woodhaven, Queens in 2006 and lived and worked there for eighteen years, until the spring of 2024, when the landlord told him the lease would not be renewed. Groups flew in from Germany and the Philippines to use the room. Jarboe, Oneida, Khanate, Defeated Sanity and Krallice all cut records in it.
His fingerprints are on the two records that turned a handful of oddities into a working practice. When Luc Lemay rebuilt Gorguts, Marston joined on bass alongside Kevin Hufnagel on guitar and John Longstreth on drums, co-produced Colored Sands with Lemay, and Season of Mist released it in August and September 2013 to a Metacritic score of 81 and a Polaris Music Prize longlisting the following year. Five years after that he recorded, mixed, mastered and produced Vile Luxury for Imperial Triumphant, out on Gilead Media on 13 July 2018, fifty six minutes of blackened death metal with trombone, trumpet and tuba written into it. Angry Metal Guy called that one ugly but regal, diseased and extravagant, which is the best four word summary of the whole style anybody has managed.
Where the school stands now
The Auckland band who made the grammar teachable are on their seventh album. Ulcerate recorded Cutting the Throat of God between September and December 2023 with their own drummer Jamie Saint Merat engineering, mixing and painting the sleeve, Magnus Lindberg mastered it, Debemur Morti released it on 14 June 2024, and it reached number 32 on the United Kingdom download chart, which for fifty seven minutes of unresolved harmony is a strange and welcome number. Metal Hammer called it everything death metal should be in 2024. What they solved was structural: how to write an hour with no release in it that still has an arc. Drums carry the melody. Guitars carry the dread.
Alongside them, Ad Nauseam in Italy released Imperative Imperceptible Impulse through Avantgarde Music in February 2021, a record built on polyphony and polyrhythm where every phrase either quotes something earlier or predicts something later. Artificial Brain in New York, Pyrrhon, Altarage in Spain, Convulsing in Australia and Plebeian Grandstand in France all work the same seam with different tools. This is the most active corner of death metal today, and it is the one most likely to produce a record in the next five years that nobody has a name for.
| Record | Year | The specific trick |
|---|---|---|
| Demilich, Nespithe | 1993 | Chromatic riff shapes that never sit square on the beat |
| Immolation, Here in After | 1996 | Guitars that bend away from each other instead of doubling |
| Gorguts, Colored Sands | 2013 | Dissonance written as composition, with a string section between the songs |
| Imperial Triumphant, Vile Luxury | 2018 | Brass and jazz voicings used as an extra source of friction |
| Ulcerate, Cutting the Throat of God | 2024 | An hour with no release in it that still moves somewhere |
How to get into it without giving up
Two warnings, both earned the hard way. Do not start with the hardest record; start with Immolation, which is dissonant and still has a pulse you can find with your foot. And do not treat the discomfort as a problem to be overcome. It is the product. A band in this school that makes you feel comfortable has failed at its one job.
Then there is the border question, which comes up constantly. Dissonance is not the same as technicality, even though the same players often do both. Technical death metal is difficult to play and usually easy to follow. This is often simple to play and extremely hard to follow, and the difference lives in the writing rather than in the hands. Plenty of the records on the Best Death Metal Albums of the 2020s sit on that line and refuse to pick a side.
Give it six weeks. I have watched this happen to people repeatedly and it always runs the same way: three plays of hating it, one play of tolerating it, then a morning where you put on something conventional and find it thin, obvious and a bit polite. There is no route back from that point, and nobody who has made the crossing has ever asked for one.
