Languages diverse, horrible dialects, accents of anger, words of agony, and voices high and hoarse.Dante Alighieri, Inferno, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Dante was counting the noises of hell and he stopped at five. The types of metal vocals run to rather more than that, and they sort by anatomy rather than by genre, because what decides a voice here is not the shelf the record sits on but which part of the throat is vibrating, what is narrowing above it and how much of the resulting noise was put there on purpose.
The Florida four whose singer pitched his voice underneath the guitars instead of over them were Death, and on Leprosy, cut for Combat in 1988, Chuck Schuldiner sang a whole record in a register that chews the consonants off the words before they can leave the mouth. Nothing about that was an accident. It was a technique, learned and repeatable, and within five years half of two continents had it.
A fingerprint bureau never asks whose hand a card came from. Every print on the table falls into loops, whorls or arches, two that look identical to the eye go into separate drawers because of where a single ridge turns, and the clerk sorting them works from the pattern alone. Metal voices file the same way, and the drawers have very little to do with the record sleeve.
The types of metal vocals, sorted by what is vibrating
The first division is the plainest. In clean singing the true vocal folds make the pitch and nothing else joins in, so the note arrives with a clear fundamental and an edge that comes from resonance rather than from noise. Everything heavy metal did with the high clean voice, the tenor at full stretch over a riff, belongs to this family, and so does the low end of it, and so does a soprano. That family came first and where it sits in the story is a longer matter of halls, monitors and men shouting over two Marshall stacks.
The Finnish band that put a conservatory trained soprano in front of a metal rhythm section answered to the name Nightwish, and "Nemo", the single taken from Once in 2004, is the clearest case on record of what the operatic method actually buys. A lowered larynx, a covered vowel above the break and the energy gathered into the narrow band of frequencies where the ear is sharpest: that is how one unamplified voice used to ride over eighty players in a pit, and it is how this one rides over two guitars and an orchestra without either of them being turned down.
The high clean tenor got there by refusing exactly that method. The Hamburg band that auditioned an eighteen year old in 1986 and handed him a double kick record to sing over was Helloween, and Michael Kiske took the vowel bright and open into the top of his range where a teacher would have rounded and darkened it, which is the difference, by common consent, between a metal tenor and an opera one.
At the other end of the clean family the air runs out of fashion entirely. The Brooklyn four whose singer worked far below the tenors everyone else was hiring called themselves Type O Negative, and Peter Steele's bass baritone on Bloody Kisses in 1993 proves the point the high voices obscure, which is that metal singing is about carrying, not about altitude. A low voice carries by other means. It takes the weight the guitars leave on the floor.
Grit is a second body, not a damaged one
Just above the true folds sit the ventricular folds, called the false folds by everybody who uses them, and a singer who brings them down into the vibration adds noise to a pitch without putting the pitch itself at risk. That is grit, and it is the oldest harsh sound in the music. Udo Dirkschneider built a career on it while Accept were still a club band in 1979, and every whisky voice in hard rock is a milder setting of the same mechanism.
A dyer's bath is green when the cloth comes out of it and turns blue only once the air gets at it, and the fibre had no colour of its own going in. No throat is born harsh either. The type a singer ends up with is the type the room he sings in asks for, which is why the growl spread through Florida, the shriek through Norway and the flat mid range bark through everywhere with a hardcore club in it.
No throat is born harsh. The type a singer ends up with is the type the room he sings in asks for.
The harsh voices, and how to tell them apart
The death growl is the false folds working at full commitment, low and guttural, with the pitch dragged under the guitars and the vowels flattened past recognition, and "Pull the Plug" is the model every band of the next decade copied. The black metal shriek does the opposite with the same trick. It narrows the tube above the larynx until the tone is thin and lacerating, sits high rather than low, and keeps its edge by refusing every ounce of the growl's weight.
Telling those two apart takes one listen and a single question, which is where the voice sits against the riff. A growl comes from under the guitars and makes the record feel heavier than it is. A shriek rides over the top and strips the warmth out of everything beneath it, so the same pair of Marshalls sounds colder on a Norwegian record than on a Floridian one.
Between the two lives the bark, which thrash and hardcore built their halls on. The Brazilians who cut the melody out of the voice and kept every consonant were Sepultura, and Chaos A.D., released by Roadrunner in 1993, is a clinic in the type: a shouted mid range with grit on it, pitched so the audience can shout it back word for word, which is the one thing neither the growl nor the shriek will ever manage.
The singer who ended the argument about whether the growl had anything to do with the size of the body producing it was Angela Gossow, who joined Arch Enemy in 2000 and made Wages of Sin with them the following year. "Nemesis", from Doomsday Machine in 2005, is a harsh vocal of the ordinary Gothenburg kind and its exponent is a woman, which settled the question by demonstration rather than by argument, and Alissa White-Gluz has held the same job since 2014.
Two younger types complete the list. The fry scream, which metalcore and deathcore run on, is made in the same creaking register a voice drops into at the end of a yawn, amplified by constriction above it and used high, and it is gentler on the folds than it sounds. The inhaled squeal is the outlier: air pulled in rather than pushed out, most of it in slam and brutal death metal, and the least controllable noise a singer can put on a record.
| Type | What is vibrating | Where it sits | A record to hear it on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clean tenor | True folds only | Above the chord | Iron Maiden, The Number of the Beast (1982) |
| Operatic soprano | True folds, covered vowel | Well above the guitars | Nightwish, Once (2004) |
| Bass baritone | True folds, low larynx | Under the bass line | Type O Negative, Bloody Kisses (1993) |
| Rasp | True folds plus false folds | Mid range | Accept, Balls to the Wall (1983) |
| Bark | Shout with grit | Mid range | Sepultura, Chaos A.D. (1993) |
| Death growl | False folds, full weight | Below the guitars | Death, Leprosy (1988) |
| Shriek | False folds, constricted | High and thin | Darkthrone, Transilvanian Hunger (1994) |
| Fry scream | Pulse register plus constriction | High | Killswitch Engage, Alive or Just Breathing (2002) |
| Gang shout | Whole band, no pitch | On the chorus | Anthrax, Among the Living (1987) |
The voices that are not solos
One type on that list has no soloist at all. The gang shout is the rest of the band crowded round a single microphone with the pitch deliberately thrown away, and its job is to hand a hall a part that needs no training, no range and no rehearsal. A crowd cannot copy a growl and will not try a high tenor sober. It can shout four syllables back at a stage until the barrier moves.
Around the gang shout sit the smaller parts: the spoken line dropped into a bridge, the whispered verse that makes the next riff sound twice as loud, the chant with no words in it at all, and the two voice arrangement in which one singer takes the harsh part and another takes the chorus clean. That last one is not a compromise. It is the oldest trick in the trade, a call and a response, with the response handed to whoever in the room can reach the note.
The thing all of them share is direction. Every type on the list is aimed outward at a room that is expected to answer, which is why the audience has a vocabulary of its own, and why the devil horns went up before anybody thought to ask what they meant.
Nine types, one organ and a few hundred thousand attempts at each. Somebody still has to stand in the light and sing.
