Studio Fredman, Gothenburg, autumn 2000. Four Swedes and an Englishman with no interest in death metal are in a small room, and the Englishman is there because a friend had handed him a copy of Still Life. Steven Wilson had never produced a band like this. Opeth had never worked with anyone who thought about a record the way a producer of English art rock thinks about one. They spent August to October in that room, ran out of space, rented a flat belonging to one of the band, and finished Blackwater Park, which Music for Nations put out on 12 March 2001 and which had sold over ninety three thousand copies in the United States by 2008 without ever charting there.
That session is the clearest picture anyone has of what progressive death metal actually is. Not a harder version of the technical wing. A different job entirely. The technical bands sharpened a tool until it would cut anything, and who they were and what they cut is in technical Death Metal Bands. The progressive bands built rooms you have to walk through, in order, from one end to the other, and then closed the door behind you.
What progressive means when it is used honestly
It means the argument has moved from the bar to the record. A progressive death metal song is organised at a scale you cannot hold in your hand: themes that leave and come back changed, movements that contradict each other on purpose, a quiet section that exists so the loud one lands, and a running order that only works in the order it is in. Put on any track from the middle of one of these albums and you have taken a brick out of a wall.
Three things follow from that and they are the three things people notice first. Clean singing, because a growl has one dynamic and a record built on contrast needs more than one. Instruments that had no business being there, acoustic guitars and pianos and, later, violins and saxophones. And silence, used as material. Death metal spent its first decade proving it could fill every second of a tape. This wing worked out that an empty bar is the loudest thing on a record if you have earned it.
None of that is softness, and the bands who got accused of it usually answered with the heaviest thing they had. It is the second of the two roads out of the same crossroads, and how the traffic divided at that junction is in how the genre split.
Focus, and the record that killed its own band
Cynic got there first and paid the full price for it. Focus came out on Roadrunner on 13 September 1993, cut at Morrisound with Scott Burns, and there is not another death metal record from that decade with less regard for what death metal was supposed to sound like: Paul Masvidal singing through a vocoder because he was worried about wrecking his voice, Tony Teegarden brought in to do the growling, Sean Malone playing a fretless Kubicki bass and a twelve string Chapman Stick, Steinberger guitars run through Roland pickups into synthesisers. Decibel has since called it the most significant progressive death metal record ever made.
At the time it emptied rooms. The band toured it with Cannibal Corpse and Masvidal has described a bottle coming out of the crowd, which is a fair summary of how 1993 received a metal band with a robot voice. Cynic broke up in 1994. The record did not go away, and by the time they reformed a decade later half the bands on the bill at any festival owed them something.
Death metal spent its first decade proving it could fill every second of a tape. This wing worked out that an empty bar is the loudest thing on a record, once you have earned it.
Forty minutes, no doors
The Swedish answer went to the opposite extreme. Edge of Sanity recorded Crimson at Unisound and ProMix across December 1995 and January 1996, Dan Swano producing and singing and playing guitars and keyboards, and Black Mark released it on 2 April 1996 as one continuous piece of music forty minutes long, with Mikael Akerfeldt guesting on vocals and lead guitar and Anders Mareby playing cello. The story is a future in which the human race has stopped reproducing, a royal child born into the last generation, and the corruption of everything that follows from that.
Forty minutes without a track break is a hard thing to sell and a harder thing to write, because nothing can be edited out once the whole is the unit. What it proves is the point of the entire wing: at some length the record stops being a container for songs and becomes the composition.
Death, at the end
The man who started all of this ended up here too. Chuck Schuldiner's last three albums move steadily away from the wing he had opened in 1991. Symbolic was recorded at Morrisound over six weeks in late 1994 with Jim Morris producing, released by Roadrunner on 21 March 1995, fifty minutes and thirty six seconds of music with Bobby Koelble on guitar, Kelly Conlon on bass and Gene Hoglan on drums, and it is the most melodic thing the band ever did without giving up an ounce of weight. Hoglan is the reason a lot of it works. He can put the pulse anywhere and he keeps choosing to put it exactly where it helps the song.
Three years later The Sound of Perseverance pushed the vocals higher and the song shapes longer, and then Schuldiner left the band to make Control Denied, a straight progressive metal group with a clean singer, which is where he was heading all along. He died in December 2001. The last thing he built was not a death metal band.
The living wing
The current generation took the licence and spent it in public. Rivers of Nihil put a saxophone on Where Owls Know My Name, played by Zach Strouse, recorded at Atrium Audio with Carson Slovak and Grant McFarland and released by Metal Blade on 16 March 2018, and the record entered the Billboard 200 at 61 on 2,750 copies in its first week, which tells you both that this music now charts and how small the numbers still are. Ne Obliviscaris, formed in Australia in 2003, put a violinist in the band as a full member rather than a guest, Tim Charles handling both the violin and the clean vocals, and then did the least romantic thing a band of this kind has ever done: they built a subscription income so the members could be paid a wage, on the stated grounds that almost every band anyone loves is either in debt or barely holding on.
- Cynic, Focus (1993): the vocoder, the Chapman Stick, and the first proof that the audience would eventually catch up.
- Edge of Sanity, Crimson (1996): one track, forty minutes, no way in except the beginning.
- Opeth, Blackwater Park (2001): acoustic guitars and a growl on the same song, produced by a man from outside the genre.
- Rivers of Nihil, Where Owls Know My Name (2018): the saxophone record, and a Billboard entry to go with it.
What separates these bands from their neighbours is not skill, since both wings have more of it than they can use. It is where the difficulty is aimed, and the argument over that is worth having properly, at technical vs Progressive Death Metal.
