Six bands turn up in this argument with a straight face. Two of them are named in every version of it, two more have a case nobody bothers to hear, and the last two are there because somebody once printed a sentence in a fanzine. None of them wins outright, and the reason is not that the history is murky. It is that four different tests are being run at once and almost nobody says which one they are using.
So say it. There are four ways to be first here, they give three different answers, and once you separate them the whole thing takes about ten minutes to settle. The wider fight over the people rather than the bands is the one running through who invented death metal. This piece is narrower and more literal: which group of musicians gets the line on its gravestone.
Four tests, and nobody passes more than two
Test one is the label: which band called itself a death metal band first. Test two is the sound: which band was playing something you would recognise as this music and not as fast thrash. Test three is the tape: which band got that sound onto a recording other people could hold. Test four is the shop: which band had a full length album out with no thrash structure left in it. Four tests, four starting pistols, all fired at slightly different moments between 1983 and 1987.
| Band | Formed | Earliest recording in the style | Debut album | Test it wins |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Possessed | 1982, San Pablo | Death Metal demo, 1984 | Seven Churches, November 1985 | The label, and the album |
| Mantas, then Death | 1983, Altamonte Springs | Death by Metal demo, summer 1984 | Scream Bloody Gore, 1987 | The sound, arguably the tape |
| Necrophagia | 1983, Wellsville | Death Is Fun demo, 1984 | Season of the Dead, February 1987 | The shop, by three months |
| Death Strike, then Master | 1983, Chicago | 1985 Combat sessions | shelved until 2003 | Nothing, through no fault of its own |
| Hellhammer | 1982, Switzerland | Apocalyptic Raids, 1984 | none, became Celtic Frost | Nothing. It is a different genre |
| Slaughter | August 1984, Toronto | Bloody Karnage demo, December 1984 | Strappado, 1987 | Nothing, and it should have been close |
The band that named itself first
Possessed take test one and they take it without an argument. The band had been going in San Pablo and El Sobrante since 1982, the singer arrived in 1983 with a two word label he says he had already settled on, the 1984 demo was called Death Metal, and the album that followed in November 1985 closes with a song of the same name. Nobody else was doing that. By common consent the phrase belonged to them before it belonged to anybody.
They also take test four, which surprises people who have only read the counterargument. Seven Churches is a full length album, out in shops, on a real label, carrying a guttural vocal, tritone runs that never come home and tempo shifts that walk away from the thrash gallop mid song. It arrived a year and a half before anything comparable.
What Possessed do not take is the middle. The name and the record are theirs. The music underneath the record is still Bay Area thrash, and everyone involved has said so.
The band that was already doing it under a different name
Test two goes to Florida, and here the question gets genuinely difficult, because it turns into a question about identity rather than about music. Mantas formed in Altamonte Springs in 1983, posted out Death by Metal in the summer of 1984 with a vocal lower than anything on the West Coast, and then stopped being called Mantas. The band became Death that same year. Is that the same band that released Scream Bloody Gore in 1987, or a different one wearing the pedigree?
Everybody in this argument has the same problem. Death Strike in Chicago became Master. Ice became Heretic became Morbid Angel. Tempter became Genocide became Repulsion. Executioner became Xecutioner became Obituary. Names in this scene came off and went back on like surgical gowns, and any test that runs on the name rather than on the people playing produces nonsense. Run it on the people and Florida was playing this music, under some name, in 1984.
The band that got there first in a shop
Test three and test four have a third answer if you refuse to grade on influence. Necrophagia came out of Wellsville, Ohio in 1983, built by Frank Pucci out of horror films and very little else, recorded at Aircraft Studios in Pittsburgh between September and November 1986, and had Season of the Dead on New Renaissance in February 1987. That is months ahead of Scream Bloody Gore, and the record has no thrash architecture in it at all: it is sepulchral, slow where it wants to be, and completely uninterested in a chorus.
Then it sold nothing, the band stopped, and the next Necrophagia album did not arrive until 1998. So the honest formulation is this. On the calendar, Necrophagia. On the family tree, not even close. Chronology and influence are two separate measurements and this record is the cleanest proof of it in the genre. The full sequence of who arrived when is laid out across death metal, chapter by chapter.
The candidates who get proposed and lose
Hellhammer come up constantly and they should not. The Swiss trio made Apocalyptic Raids in 1984, they used the phrase in their own liner notes, and half the American demos of 1985 were quietly chasing that guitar tone. But the record is not death metal by any working definition. It is slow, it is primitive on purpose, and everything it seeded grew up as black metal instead. Being upstream of a genre is not the same as being the start of it.
Venom lose for the same reason with a bigger flag on. Slayer lose because Hell Awaits, for all the murk on it, is a thrash record made by a thrash band who went the other way entirely on the next one. And Sepultura, whose Bestial Devastation arrived in 1985, lose only on distribution: nothing pressed by a small label in Belo Horizonte reached American shops in time to count, which is an accident of freight rather than a judgement on the band.
The verdict, and it is a split one
Take the four tests separately and the answer is unarguably three names. Possessed named it and released the first album on which the whole apparatus is present at once. Death, under two names, was playing the finished version of the music before anybody else and wrote the rulebook the next three hundred practitioners copied. Necrophagia beat them both into a shop and was ignored for it.
If somebody puts a gun to your head and demands one band, say Possessed, and say why: they are the only candidate that wins two of the four tests. Then say the second half, which is that the music on Seven Churches is not yet the music the genre settled into, and that the band who supplied that was in Florida with a demo box and no record deal.
Which raises the obvious next problem, because those two answers sit two and a half thousand miles apart and the genre is usually described as belonging to one of them. That argument gets its own piece: where Did Death Metal Originate, and the map is messier than either coast likes to admit.
