OSDM stands for old school death metal. That is the whole of the literal answer and it takes four words, so the rest of this piece is about the part that actually causes trouble: the label does not mean death metal that is old. It means death metal made now, deliberately, to a specification that was fixed around 1990 and then abandoned by almost everybody who helped fix it.
Read that twice, because it inverts the obvious reading. A record from 1991 is not usually called OSDM by the people who use the term seriously. A record from last month can be. The word old in the acronym describes the method, not the date on the sleeve, which is why the tag is attached to bands whose members were born after the albums they are working from.
The scene that produced the label, its labels and cassettes and festivals, is the chapter on the old school death metal revival. This piece is about the word itself, because a term that gets used ten thousand times a week to sell records is worth taking apart. The whole genealogy behind it sits in the KaosMetal history of death metal.
The term arrived long after the music did
Nobody in 1990 called Entombed old school. They could not have. Old school is a comparison, and in 1990 there was nothing to compare the music to except itself. The term only becomes possible once a second generation exists to be measured against a first, which in practice means the early 2000s, roughly a decade after the records it points at were made.
Retroactive naming is the norm rather than the exception, and it always distorts what it names. A label invented afterwards is built out of whatever survived, so it describes the records that stayed in print and quietly loses the ones that did not. That is worth remembering every time somebody tells you what the old school sounded like: what they are describing is a filtered sample, and the filter was the reissue market.
An acronym is a shop aisle
Here is the part that gets left out of every explanation of this term. OSDM is not primarily a critical category. It is a retail instruction, and it works because it is short enough to type into a search box.
Every place these records change hands is organised by tags. A Bandcamp page carries them under the player, a distro sorts its list by them, an entry in an online encyclopaedia records a genre field that other people argue about in the comments, and every one of those tags is a route by which a buyer with twelve dollars finds a band with no press behind it. Four letters that a stranger will type unprompted are worth more to a small label than any review. That is not cynicism about the scene, it is the mechanism the scene runs on, and it has been the mechanism since the flyer and the mail order list did the same job by post.
Four letters that a stranger will type unprompted are worth more to a small label than any review.
The consequence is that the term has drifted the way a commercially useful word always drifts. It gets attached to anything with a low vocal and a painted sleeve, because attaching it costs nothing and might sell a tape. Precision was never the point of the label. Findability was.
The borders, which are all disputed
Four arguments break out at the edges of this word, and none of them has been settled.
The first is about the bands who never stopped. Incantation have been making records to roughly one specification since 1992 without a break, and Autopsy came back and carried on where they left off. Calling either of them a revival band is nonsense, since they are the thing being revived, but their new records sit in the same racks as the revivalists and get the same tag. Continuity does not fit inside a word built on a gap.
The second is about the originals. Is Mental Funeral OSDM, or is it simply death metal? The purist answer is that it cannot be old school because it had no old school to be schooled by, and the practical answer is that everybody tags it that way regardless. Both are right, which is a sign that the word is doing two jobs at once.
The third is about which old school. There are at least four, and they do not sound alike: the Stockholm buzzsaw of Dismember and Grave, the Florida house sound of Obituary and Deicide, the Finnish records with their odd tunings and stranger writing, and the New York school of Suffocation and Immolation, who made the whole thing denser and lower. A tag that covers all four covers most of the genre, and a tag that covers most of the genre is not telling you very much.
The fourth is about the descendants. Cavernous bands and the dissonant wing both grew out of the same soil and both get the tag by association, even though neither is reproducing anything from 1990. Where each of them actually sits is on the subgenre map, which is a more honest instrument than any four letter label.
| Tag | What it really tells you |
|---|---|
| OSDM | Production values and song shapes from around 1990, on a record made later |
| Swedeath, HM-2 | One specific distortion pedal, at maximum, in a low tuning |
| Finnish death metal | Odd tunings, unorthodox writing, a strain that never sounded American |
| Cavernous | Reverb used structurally, the vocal buried beneath the guitars |
| Brutal, slam | Density and the half time collapse, descended from New York |
| Technical | Information per bar, which is a different argument entirely |
What the word is good for
Strip the arguments away and a usable answer survives. OSDM tells you almost nothing about the quality of a record and a great deal about how it was made: that the drums were played rather than assembled, that the guitar tone is thick rather than sharp, that the songs will have four or five parts instead of fourteen, that the singer will stay in one register for the whole record, and that the physical object will probably cost you less than a cinema ticket.
That is a real service. It is a promise about the format, not about the songs, and anybody who tells you the tag guarantees a good album is selling something. Good bands and dull ones work to identical specifications, which has been true of every form of music ever given a name. Who is actually good at it right now, and which of them have built catalogues worth following, is modern death metal bands.
