Two days. That is how long Scott Burns needed to record and mix the album that invented this whole business, at Morrisound in Tampa in May 1989, for a band whose members were all busy in other groups at the time. Earache put World Downfall out on 13 November 1989. Kerrang! gave it five out of five. Somewhere in that fortnight, death metal and grindcore stopped being two things.
Deathgrind is what happens when a grindcore band learns to tune down and a death metal band gets bored of the long bits. It is a stupid word. It is also, annoyingly, the most accurate one anybody has come up with, and it did not come from a magazine or a label. It came out of mail order catalogues, where somebody had to decide which shelf a record went on and gave up trying to choose.
What the word actually promises
Take the two ingredients apart and the recipe is not complicated. From death metal you get the tuning, the growl, the riffs that go somewhere, and enough technique that the guitarist can look smug about it. From grindcore you get the speed, the blast, the total absence of patience, and the willingness to stop a song halfway through because it has run out of things to say.
Dan Lilker, who has spent more of his life inside this argument than almost anyone, has described the style as the technicality of death metal with the intensity of grindcore, which is about as tidy as it gets. Zero Tolerance once called it grindcore and brutal death metal colliding head on. Both are right. Neither tells you the important bit, which is that deathgrind songs are structured. Grindcore proper does not care whether you can follow it. Deathgrind wants you to follow it, and then refuses to slow down enough for you to manage it.
Deathgrind is death metal with the waiting taken out.
The riffs are cut to length with a bandsaw by somebody already late for the bus, bolted back together in an order nobody would have chosen, and played faster than either parent genre would have thought sensible. Two and a half minutes is a long song. Forty seconds is a normal one. Any track that reaches four minutes is either a statement or a mistake, and after thirty years of this you can usually tell which.
Tampa did it twice in fourteen months
The first of the two was recorded by four men who were mostly in other bands at the time. Oscar Garcia sang, Jesse Pintado played guitar, and the rhythm section was David Vincent on bass and Pete Sandoval on drums, both of whom had day jobs in Morbid Angel. Vincent took the production credit. Burns did the actual recording and mixing, in forty eight hours, which is roughly the amount of time a modern band spends deciding on a snare sound. Burns told Tape Op that Earache had no real budget for it and that there was not even money for two inch tape, so the whole thing went down on an eight track machine with the drums triggered and squeezed onto four of them. If anyone had made a mistake, there was nowhere to put the repair.
Then, in April and May 1990, the Birmingham band went to the same studio with the same producer and made Harmony Corruption, which Earache released on 30 July 1990 and Combat put out in America that December. It was the first record with Mark Greenway singing and with Mitch Harris and Pintado on guitars, and the last one with Mick Harris drumming. Greenway did all his vocals in a single day. Glen Benton of Deicide and John Tardy of Obituary turned up to shout on one track.
Everyone had an opinion. Decibel later called it a milestone in extreme music. AllMusic could not see what the fuss was about. It reached number sixty seven in the United Kingdom, which for a band who two years earlier had put a one second song on a record is not nothing. What it actually was, whatever anybody thought of it, was a grindcore band choosing to sound like a death metal band on purpose, in the town where death metal was invented, with the man who recorded most of it. Subtlety was never the plan. The whole story of that town, and what it did to everything downstream, is in the death metal history.
New York gets involved and immediately overdoes it
Brutal Truth was put together in New York in 1990 by Dan Lilker, who had already served time in Anthrax, Nuclear Assault and Stormtroopers of Death and had presumably decided that none of them were fast enough. Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses arrived on Earache in 1992, Need to Control on Relapse in 1994, and the band ran until 1999, came back in 2006, and stopped for good in 2014 when Lilker retired from full time musicianship on his fiftieth birthday.
The scene also produced Assuck, who are the band people name when they want you to know they have done the reading, and who are usually credited as the ones who worked out early that you could keep the grindcore brevity and still write something with a shape. This is the point where the family tree stops being tidy, because half the bands in this part of the history could be filed in two places at once and nobody minded very much.
The modern lot, who are frankly very good at it
The style should have burned out around 1996. It did not, and the reason is that a deathgrind song is an excellent container for anything you want to shout about.
- Cattle Decapitation, formed in San Diego in 1996, eight albums on Metal Blade from 2002 to 2023, and the only band in this article whose lyrics are largely about animal rights and what the species is doing to the planet. Travis Ryan and Josh Elmore have played on all eight without either of them being a founder, which is a trick.
- Aborted, Belgian, with a catalogue deep enough that the entry point changes depending on which of their friends you ask first.
- Rotten Sound, Finnish, and the band most likely to make you check whether your speakers are broken.
- Misery Index, American, and the ones carrying the political half of the grindcore inheritance rather than the anatomical half.
A confession, one per article and no more: I have never once managed to keep a deathgrind record on in the background. The format does not permit it. Put one on while cooking and you will find yourself standing still in the middle of the kitchen ten seconds later with a wooden spoon in your hand, waiting to see whether the song is going to end.
Where the edges are
Two boundaries are worth marking, because the arguments about them never stop and both are settleable in about a minute.
On one side, deathgrind is not grindcore. Grindcore came out of hardcore punk and kept the politics, the shortness and the deliberate refusal of technique. Deathgrind kept the shortness and threw the refusal away. If the guitarist is clearly capable of more and is choosing not to, that is grindcore. If the guitarist is showing off and simply has no time, that is deathgrind.
On the other side, it is not brutal death metal, however much the two overlap on a festival bill. Brutal death slows down for the heavy part. Deathgrind does not believe in the heavy part; it believes in getting to the end. And it is not the gore end of the family either, which is a different argument about subject matter rather than about speed, and which has its own chapter in goregrind and pornogrind.
Start with World Downfall. It was made in two days by four men with other commitments, and thirty seven years later nobody has improved on it. That is either an inspiring story about efficiency or a slightly depressing one about progress, depending on the day.
