Melodic death metal is a guitar technique with a genre grown around it. Two guitars carry one line a third or a sixth apart, at death metal speed, under a voice with no interest in the tune at all. Everything else the style is known for follows from that single decision, and once you have heard the decision properly you never again need anybody to explain a Gothenburg record to you.
So start with the technique and not with a roster, because the bands came second. What a handful of musicians did between 1992 and 1996, working in two countries and in rooms that could not afford each other, was to take the harmonised twin lead British heavy metal had been running since 1980, excise it clean, and graft it onto a body built for nothing but violence. The graft took. It is still taking, thirty years and four continents later. For how death metal arrived at the point where such an operation was even survivable, the long version is where to begin.
The technique, before the scene
The recipe is short enough to write on a cigarette packet. Underneath, a death metal rhythm section: double kick at speed, blast beats used as punctuation rather than as a default setting, tempos mostly between 160 and 220 that drop to half time whenever a chorus needs air. On top, a harsh vocal, guttural or a high rasp, kept deliberately clear of the tune, because the tune belongs to the guitars and the throat is there to carry weight. And in the middle, the riff written as two voices instead of one.
That middle part is the whole difference. In a Florida riff or a Stockholm riff the two guitars usually play the same notes at the same pitch and double each other for mass. In a melodic death metal riff they separate: one carries the line, the other runs it a third above or a sixth below, in a minor key, frequently with the flattened second that gives the style its Phrygian edge. What comes out is a figure you can hum, delivered with a tone that would take the paint off a door. Verse and chorus come back too, because a melody that never returns is not a melody, it is a passage. Of all the death metal subgenres this is the easiest one to write down and among the hardest to play convincingly, since a harmony a few cents out of tune stops being a harmony and turns into a mess.
A melody that never returns is not a melody. It is a passage.
Liverpool, 1993, and the prototype nobody in Sweden made
The band that had spent two albums assembling the most repellent object in Britain turned round and made a record out of harmony. Carcass cut Heartwork at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool between 18 May and 21 June 1993 with Colin Richardson producing, Earache released it on 18 October, and Columbia carried it into American shops on 11 January 1994. Bill Steer and Michael Amott wrote leads that resolve instead of smearing, Jeff Walker kept the rasp exactly where it had always been, Ken Owen kept the double kick, and the sleeve was a Giger sculpture called "Life Support". Nothing about the format changed. Everything about the melodic content did.
Metal Hammer has since put it as the moment melodic death metal became a coherent idea rather than an accident, and the timing carries the argument on its own: October 1993 is a full two years before the three Swedish albums that get the credit. The style was proven in England, by a band from the charnel end of the genre, and then standardised six hundred miles north east by people who had grown up buying that band's records by post.
The three records that fixed the template
Sweden did not invent it. Sweden standardised it, in one studio, inside fourteen months. At the Gates made Slaughter of the Soul with Fredrik Nordstrom at Studio Fredman and Earache released it on 14 November 1995: thirty four minutes, no fat, every riff a hook and every hook harmonised. Dark Tranquillity recorded The Gallery in the same room across April and May of that year, Osmose put it out on 27 November, and it was the first full album with Mikael Stanne at the microphone after years of playing rhythm guitar behind somebody else. In Flames went in that November and Nuclear Blast released The Jester Race on 20 February 1996, with Anders Friden singing his first record for the band and Bjorn Gelotte still behind the drum kit he would later abandon for a guitar.
Three records, one producer, one desk, eight months. That is why the style arrived sounding finished rather than tentative, and it is also why everybody else found it so easy to copy: the sound was a room with a booking sheet, and the booking sheet was open to anyone who could raise the fee.
No recording at the time or since bears resemblance to its power and sophistication.
Decibel, Hall of Fame entry for Dark Tranquillity, April 2010
| Album | Band | Studio | Producer | Label | Released |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heartwork | Carcass | Parr Street, Liverpool | Colin Richardson | Earache | 18 October 1993 |
| Slaughter of the Soul | At the Gates | Fredman, Gothenburg | Fredrik Nordstrom | Earache | 14 November 1995 |
| The Gallery | Dark Tranquillity | Fredman, Gothenburg | Nordstrom, band | Osmose | 27 November 1995 |
| The Jester Race | In Flames | Fredman, Gothenburg | Fredrik Nordstrom | Nuclear Blast | 20 February 1996 |
Where the melody actually came from
Not from death metal, which is the point of the whole thing. It came from the twin lead guitar of British heavy metal, the harmonised third Iron Maiden and Judas Priest had been printing on every record since the turn of the eighties, and behind them from Thin Lizzy, who worked the same trick a decade earlier at half the volume. You do not have to take that on trust. When the 2004 remaster of The Gallery needed bonus material, what the band reached for was covers of Metallica, Iron Maiden and Mercyful Fate, which is a fair statement of where a Gothenburg guitarist's hands had actually learned to move.
The harsh voice is the constant in all of this and the melody is the variable, which is why the style travels so well and why so many bands have slid a long way along it without ever formally changing genre. Push the melody up and the growl down and you arrive at the modern festival version. Push the other way and you are back inside plain death metal with better tunes. The two cities that set the poles of that argument, and the reasons one small country needed both of them, are the subject of the chapter on Stockholm and Gothenburg.
What it is not
It is not metalcore, although metalcore was built out of it. When Killswitch Engage, As I Lay Dying and Darkest Hour picked up the harmonised riff in the early 2000s they bolted a hardcore breakdown underneath it and a clean sung chorus on top, and those two additions are the entire difference. The Gothenburg records have no breakdowns, and no choruses anybody sings.
It is not death metal with a nice bit in it either. Plenty of American death metal from 1991 onward has melodic passages; what it does not have is melody as the load bearing structure of the riff itself. And it is not a nationality. Finland built a colder and slower version of the same idea within a few years, Australia and the United States eventually built their own, and a good share of the strongest records of the last twenty years were not made in Gothenburg at all. If you want the roster rather than the mechanism, melodic Death Metal Bands Worth Your Time goes through them record by record.
The technique is thirty three years old and still working, because it was never a fashion. It was a repair. Death metal in 1993 had run out of places to put a tune, and two guitars playing one line a third apart put the tune back without surrendering a single decibel.
