Prairie Sun Studios occupies a converted farm building in Cotati, an hour north of San Francisco, and for six days between 30 March and 5 April 1985 it belonged to four teenagers from the East Bay and to a producer, Randy Burns, who had been handed material that did not yet have a name. Two of the four were sixteen years old. Combat Records was paying. What came off that tape was Seven Churches, in shops on 4 November 1985, and it is the reason this page exists.
You came here for a definition, so take it first and let the rest of the article earn it. Death metal is the branch of heavy metal that took thrash, stripped out everything warm in it and put nothing back. The guitars are tuned below standard pitch and played in long tremolo runs rather than in figures you could hum at a bus stop. The drums use the blast beat, a stroke so fast that the ear stops counting it and starts leaning on it. The voice is a growl made low in the throat, deliberately under the pitch at which consonants survive. The songs are assembled in blocks instead of verses and choruses. It began in the middle 1980s in Florida and the San Francisco Bay Area, it has never had a hit single, and it has outlasted almost everything that did.
That is the answer. What follows is how the music got there, what separates it from the genres standing either side of it, and where you should put the needle first. If you would rather skip the theory and go straight to names, the band list is already written.
Where it came from
The four East Bay teenagers who owned the phrase before anyone had built music to go under it, Possessed, printed "death metal" on a demo sleeve in 1984, a full year before Seven Churches reached a shop counter. Jeff Becerra has said since that he wrote the phrase for a school assignment in early 1983 and chose it because the other names in circulation were spoken for. What is on that demo is thrash played by people who cannot yet control it, and that turned out to be exactly the condition the genre needed: the failure to keep the music tidy is the music.
The Florida guitarist who did the remaining work almost entirely alone, Chuck Schuldiner, had formed Mantas in 1983 at the age of sixteen and renamed it Death the following year. In November 1986 he was inside The Music Grinder in Los Angeles with Chris Reifert on drums and nobody else in the room, playing guitars and bass and singing the whole record himself, with the same Randy Burns at the desk. Combat released Scream Bloody Gore on 25 May 1987. What that album does and Seven Churches does not is stop borrowing. No thrash chorus, no clean introduction, no relief anywhere in thirty nine minutes. Kerrang! printed a one star review at the time and a five star reassessment in 2011, which is an honest record of how long the press took to work out what it was holding.
Two years later the shape was fixed for good. Morbid Angel went into Morrisound Recording in Tampa in December 1988 and Earache put out Altars of Madness on 12 May 1989, with Pete Sandoval holding a blast tempo across an entire album for the first time and Trey Azagthoth writing lead lines that go precisely where the ear does not want them to go. From that point the music had a sound of its own, a studio that could deliver it on demand and a queue of bands outside the door.
Death metal is not thrash played angrier. It is thrash with the human elements taken out on purpose, one at a time, until only the machinery is left.
What it is not
Most confusion about this music comes from filing it next to its neighbours and assuming the differences are matters of degree. They are not. Thrash, death metal and black metal want different things and use different equipment to get them, and once you can hear the three rhythmic engines apart you will never mix them up again.
| Thrash | Death metal | Black metal | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tuning | Standard or a semitone down | Two to five semitones down, sometimes further | Usually standard, tone kept thin |
| Rhythmic engine | The galloping downstroke | The blast beat and the double kick | The blast beat played loose, cymbals washing |
| Voice | A shout, pitched, words audible | A guttural growl, words sacrificed | A high shriek, words sacrificed differently |
| Riff shape | Modal figures you can whistle | Chromatic blocks and tremolo runs | Long repeating tremolo chords, little movement |
| Subject matter | Politics, war, the news | The body, mortality, religion under attack | Cold, ritual, the wilderness, blasphemy |
| Home ground, 1985 to 1992 | The Bay Area and Germany | Florida, New York and Stockholm | Norway |
The growl is the part newcomers stall on, so be precise about what it does. A death metal vocal is not a failure to sing. It is a decision to hand the words over to the rhythm section and use the voice as a percussion instrument with a floor under its pitch. Push a voice down far enough and the consonants come off it the way meat comes off a bone, and what is left is attack, length and weight. That is why the good vocalists are unmistakable from one another even when you cannot understand a syllable any of them is saying, and it is why the lyrics are printed inside the sleeve. The band knows you cannot hear them. Nothing is being hidden.
How big it actually is
Small enough to have produced no household names, large enough to have supported thousands of bands for forty years with no radio behind it. The figures are worth having because they set your expectations properly. Cannibal Corpse were handed a plaque by Metal Blade in February 2015 marking sales of more than two million records across thirteen studio albums, which makes them the best selling band this music has produced. Covenant, the Morbid Angel album Giant Records put out in the United States on 22 June 1993, was the first death metal album issued by a major label, and it had sold more than 150,000 copies in the United States by 2003. Those are the ceilings, not the averages.
Then there is the number that says the rest. When Scream Bloody Gore was reissued in 2016 it entered the Billboard 200 at 174, the first appearance on that chart by a band whose leader had been gone for fifteen years and who had defined the genre twenty nine years earlier. Nothing about this music has ever arrived on time.
What it has instead is durability and a working underground: labels that have kept the same rosters for decades, festivals that sell out with no crossover act anywhere on the bill, and a back catalogue that new bands still treat as an instruction manual. If you want that told properly and in order, start with death metal, from the beginning.
Where to put the needle first
Start with Altars of Madness if you want the genre at full power immediately, or with Scream Bloody Gore if you would rather hear it being invented. Play both loud. A quiet death metal record is a contradiction, because the design depends on the low end arriving in your chest rather than in your ears, and at conversation volume the guitars turn to sand and the drums lose their point. Give any album three plays before you decide. The first is noise, the second is structure, the third is music, and that sequence has happened to every single person who has ever ended up loving this.
The question people ask next is the mechanical one: what the instruments are actually doing, tuning by tuning and beat by beat. That is answered in What Is Death Metal Music? A Plain Answer, which takes the machine apart on the bench. If you arrived here instead from an argument about which bands qualify, Is Slayer Death Metal is the version of that argument worth having, because the answer explains what the genre owes to a band that is not part of it.
