Stockholm, 1993. Same studio, same producer, same pedal, same band. Tomas Skogsberg has the desk at Sunlight, Entombed are cutting their third album, and somewhere in the writing the drummer stops playing a blast and starts playing a backbeat. That is the entire invention. Everything anybody has ever said about death and roll, for and against, comes out of one decision about where the snare goes.
Earache and Columbia put Wolverine Blues out on 31 August 1993. The guitars are still the Swedish guitars, saturated and rotted through, and the voice has not moved an inch. What moved is the floor underneath. You can nod your head to it, which is not a sentence that had ever been true of a Swedish death metal record before.
What actually changed
Take the checklist apart and the surprise is how little was given up. Tuning: unchanged. Guitar tone: unchanged, the same distortion setting that had made Left Hand Path sound like a building collapsing. Vocal: unchanged, below pitch and staying there. What changed is rhythm and shape.
The tempo settles into the middle, where a riff has room to swing rather than merely to arrive, and the drums move from the blast to a rock beat with the snare landing where a rock snare lands. The riffs pick up bends and pentatonic shapes borrowed from hard rock made twenty years earlier. The songs get shorter and start repeating a section you could call a chorus, whether or not the band would call it that. And the groove that Pantera had spent 1990 to 1992 forcing on every metal band in the world is sitting there in the middle of it, because nobody in extreme metal was working in a vacuum that decade.
Put the record on and the join is audible in about four bars. "Eyemaster" is a rock and roll figure played with a death metal tone, the drums swinging it rather than driving it, and the voice on top doing precisely what it had done on Clandestine two years before. "Rotten Soil" runs the same trick slower and dirtier. The title track is the one that got the video and the comic book, and it is also the one where nobody sounds like they are attempting anything: it simply walks. That is the whole style in a word. It walks, where death metal until then had only ever sprinted or crawled.
Everything anybody has ever said about death and roll comes out of one decision about where the snare goes.
The cover the band did not ask for
Here is the part that tells you what was really going on. Earache did a deal with Marvel Comics to put the character Wolverine on alternative pressings of the sleeve, over the band's objection, and the video for the title track was built out of the same artwork. The aim was to sell a death metal record to people who did not buy death metal records. The title has nothing to do with the character at all: it comes from James Ellroy's crime novel The Big Nowhere, in which a killer identifies himself with the animal. Early pressings also carried film samples lifted without clearance, which were quietly removed once the lawyers arrived.
Nobody in the band coined the phrase either. The music press did, and it stuck to Entombed for the next thirty years like a nickname given at school. Petrov's public position on it was a shrug: it is Entombed music, and if other people want another name for it they can have one. Frank Harthoorn of Gorefest was blunter and said it was just metal, plain and simple. Genre names are almost never issued by the people who have to live under them.
It was not only Sweden, and it was not only Entombed
The Swedish historian Daniel Ekeroth traces the sound back past Wolverine Blues to Furbowl, which is the sort of correction that matters, because it means the style was in the air rather than invented in one room. In the Netherlands, Gorefest went there deliberately on Erase in 1994 and kept going through Soul Survivor in 1996, and they swing harder than the Swedes ever did. In Finland, Xysma and Convulse had already been moving out of grindcore toward rock and roll and got almost no credit for arriving first. Dismember loosened up on Massive Killing Capacity in 1995. Carcass made Swansong in 1996, then broke up. Six Feet Under took the mid tempo and made a career of it from Warpath in 1997 onward.
| Band | Album | Year | What it contributed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entombed | Wolverine Blues | 1993 | The backbeat, and the name it never wanted |
| Gorefest | Erase | 1994 | The swing, played by people who meant it |
| Dismember | Massive Killing Capacity | 1995 | Melody in the leads without losing the tone |
| Carcass | Swansong | 1996 | The experiment that cost a band its life |
| Six Feet Under | Warpath | 1997 | The American reading, slower and simpler |
Why the purists hated it, and where they were half right
The charge was selling out, and it was made loudly. It is worth answering seriously rather than waving away, because the people making it were not idiots. By 1993 Swedish death metal had produced two perfect records and about forty that sounded like them, the Sunlight tone had gone from a signature to a default, and a band arriving at their third album had two options: make Left Hand Path again, or move. Entombed moved, and the direction they moved in happened to be the direction the market was also moving, which is what made the accusation stick.
Where the purists were right is Swansong. Carcass had rebuilt themselves twice already and the third rebuild took the thing that made them frightening and replaced it with competence, and the band did not survive the record. That is the honest example of the failure mode, and it belongs in any account of the style written by somebody not selling it. Where the purists were wrong is everything else, because the good death and roll records are still played and the forty imitations of the Sunlight sound are not. The rest of the family, branch by branch, is laid out in the chapter above.
What it left behind
The style stopped being a movement around 1998 and became a component. Listen to almost any death metal album made since and there is a mid tempo section in it where the drums go to a rock beat and the riff starts to swing, and that section is the direct inheritance of what happened at Sunlight in 1993. Entombed carried it themselves for another two decades, latterly as Entombed A.D. Lars-Goran Petrov, who sang every one of those records, died on 7 March 2021 at the age of 49 after being diagnosed with bile duct cancer.
Entombed did not treat the move as a detour, either, which is the part their critics tend to skip. DCLXVI: To Ride, Shoot Straight and Speak the Truth arrived in 1997 and pushed further into rock than Wolverine Blues had dared, tempos looser, songs shorter, the growl now sitting on top of arrangements a bar band could follow. They spent the rest of the decade being told they had wrecked themselves, mostly by people who owned the record.
Start with Wolverine Blues and then go straight to Erase, in that order, because the second one makes the first make sense. If you want the branch of the family that took the opposite turn, away from anything you could nod your head to and toward a doctrinal fight nobody expected, that is christian Death Metal.
