On 22 October 1991, about two minutes into the first song on Suffocation's debut, the tempo halves and the band lands on a figure with almost nothing in it. The passage lasts a handful of bars. Rolling Stone has since credited it as the first slam riff in death metal, and everything in this piece comes out of those few seconds.
Slam death metal is what happens when a band decides that passage is not the payoff but the song. Not a contrast, not a release, not the reward for two minutes of blasting: the material itself, repeated until it becomes the structure. The story of the room that produced both ideas is in brutality and slam. What that room produced, mechanically, is four decisions, and every one of them runs the opposite way to the music it came out of.
The riff is written to be repeated, and the notes barely matter
A slam riff is a rhythm played on palm-muted low strings, syncopated against the kick drum so that the guitar lands a beat late or a beat early and the two instruments pull against each other in a way the body can follow. It sits somewhere between ninety and a hundred and sixty beats a minute. It is built out of two or three note figures with the pitch chosen for weight rather than for interval, and it is written to be played four, eight or sixteen times without alteration.
That last part is the whole difference. Brutal death metal stacks six or seven distinct riffs inside four minutes and uses each of them once. Slam takes one figure and runs it until the repetition stops being a repetition and becomes a state, which is a technique older than metal and older than recording, and it works for the same reason a work song works. Get it right and a room of four hundred people moves as one animal. Get it wrong and you have written the same bar eight times for no reason, which is the risk the form runs every single night.
Brutal writes seven riffs and uses each once. Slam writes one and runs it until repetition turns into a state.
The word was an argument about another word
Internal Bleeding formed on Long Island in 1991 around the guitarist Chris Pervelis, and by their own account the name for what they were doing was settled in the autumn of 1992 after a rehearsal in Huntington, over food, between Pervelis, the bassist Anthony Miola and the drummer Bill Tolley. Until that night they had been describing themselves with a phrase too long to fit on a flyer. Tolley wanted one word, and he did not want the one the hardcore rooms were already using, because mosh belonged to thrash bands and to a crowd he thought was there for a different reason. What he wanted was slam. A band flyer from late 1993 is the earliest paper the band can point to.
Mosh is for thrash bands. Mosh is weak. One slam riff after another after another. Our music is all groove.
Bill Tolley, in Internal Bleeding's own account of the autumn of 1992
Three years later the band put Voracious Contempt out through Pavement Records, and the record does exactly what the argument promised: the blasting is gone, the technical riff writing is gone, the bass is pushed forward until you can feel it in the sternum, and the tempo changes are deliberately blunt rather than clever. It is not a diluted brutal death metal album. It is a different design working from the same parts, which is why it belongs on the subgenre map as its own territory rather than as a footnote to somebody else's.
The voice goes past the point brutal will follow
The second decision is the one that loses people. A brutal death metal growl is produced from the chest, phrased in time and still recognisably a man shouting. The slam vocal keeps going down past that floor into a wet, inhaled, pitchless register with no breath support behind it and no syllable line left to track, and at that point the voice has stopped being a voice at all. It is a low frequency percussion instrument that happens to be made of a person.
Musicians outside the form treat this as the joke and the point of entry for every argument about whether slam is music. It is neither. The register exists because a song built from one repeated figure has no melodic information in it whatsoever, and a legible vocal line would put information back in and break the effect. If you want the words to matter, you are in the wrong genre, and the bands know it better than their critics do.
The mix turns upside down
Third decision, and the one you can hear from another room. Brutal death metal is recorded dry and mid-forward so that complexity stays legible. Slam inverts every one of those choices: guitars tuned lower still, often to A or below, the low end left in rather than filtered out, the bass guitar audible as a separate instrument instead of glued under the rhythm parts, and a snare tuned high and left ringing so that there is one bright thing cutting through a mix which is otherwise all weight. Blast beats survive, but only as accents, thrown in for four bars to reset the ear before the next drop.
The result is a record whose whole information content is where the impact lands, which is why the form survived the jump to cheap home recording better than almost anything else in metal. A slam album made on a laptop in 2011 does not sound worse than one made in a studio in 1998. It frequently sounds heavier, and that is not a compliment everybody in the genre enjoys hearing.
How a genre with no radio ambition went worldwide
Slam should have died in the late nineties along with the mail order economy that carried it. What saved it was the internet, and specifically the fact that the form is cheap to record, obvious to identify and easy to trade. The revival came in the middle of the 2000s, pulled along by deathcore's popularity and driven by bands like Abominable Putridity and Infected Malignity, with better production than anything the first wave could afford. Devourment reformed. A Facebook group called Slam Worldwide did more for the genre's distribution than any label ever had.
Then it stopped being American. Belarus, Taiwan, Germany, the Philippines and South Africa all built scenes, and the northern English cities produced enough bands that Distorted Sound started calling Manchester by another name entirely, on the strength of Ingested and their neighbours. Slam also went back where the idea came from: the riff shape is now standard equipment in beatdown hardcore and deathcore, played nightly by musicians who have never heard Voracious Contempt. That circle, from a hardcore mosh part to a death metal breakdown to a slam riff and back to hardcore again, is one of the few genuinely closed loops in the whole of heavy music, and it is worth reading against the big picture.
None of which tells you what to put on. For that, the roll call runs from the Long Island founders through the Texas floor and out to Manchester and Minsk, and it is in slam Death Metal Bands.
