What is now proved was once only imagin'd.William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Ask when death metal started and you will get 1983, 1984, 1985, 1987 and 1990, from five people who all know what they are talking about. None of them is wrong. They are reading five different clocks, and nobody says out loud which clock they are using, which is the entire reason this question has no settled answer after forty years.
So here are the clocks. There is the word, which starts running first. There is the playing, which starts a year later. There is the pressing, which is the only clock with a receipt attached. There is the market, which is the last to move and the one every encyclopedia quotes. Line them up and the disagreement stops being a disagreement. The narrative version of all this, with the bands and the studios in it, is chapter one of our history.
Five dates, and each one is defensible
| Date | What happened | What it proves | What it does not |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1983 | The phrase is claimed, written down and attached to a band | The category existed as an intention | Nothing about the music. No recording carries it yet |
| 1984 | Demos in California, Florida and Ohio carry the vocal and the tempo | People were playing it, on three separate clocks | None of it was buyable. Circulation was by post |
| November 1985 | Seven Churches in shops on Combat | The whole apparatus on one record you could own | The rhythm playing underneath is still thrash |
| 1987 | Season of the Dead in February, Scream Bloody Gore in May | The finished method, repeatable by anyone who heard it | Still no market, no section in a shop, almost no press |
| 1989 to 1990 | Earache, Roadrunner and Combat sign the field | An industry now recognises the category and prints it | The music is six years old by then. This is the last clock, not the first |
1983 and 1984: the word runs ahead of the music
The first clock is a label with nothing under it. By 1983 the phrase had been claimed by a teenage bass player in the East Bay who wanted a category that was not already taken, and within a year it was on a cassette, on a song title and in the liner notes of a Swiss band who meant something else by it entirely. All of that happened before a single recording existed that a modern listener would file under the name without hesitation.
The second clock starts in 1984 and it starts three times at once. Mantas posted Death by Metal out of Altamonte Springs that summer with a vocal lower than anything on the West Coast. Possessed put out the three song Death Metal demo in the East Bay. Necrophagia recorded Death Is Fun in Wellsville, Ohio. Three bands, three states, no contact between them, one year. That is not a founding event. That is a genre becoming available to anybody who wanted it.
A genre does not get a birth certificate. It gets a coroner's estimate, and the estimate depends on which part of the body you measure.
1985 and 1987: the only clock with receipts
The pressing clock is the one historians reach for, because a record has a catalogue number and a date and does not argue back. On that clock the answer is 4 November 1985, when Combat put Seven Churches into shops on two continents, followed by February 1987 for Season of the Dead and 25 May 1987 for Scream Bloody Gore. Three albums, sixteen months, and after them the thing is finished and copyable.
The trouble with the pressing clock is that it measures the label's decisions rather than the band's. Paul Speckmann had Master signed to Combat in 1985 and recorded a whole album for them that the label then shelved. It sat in a vault for eighteen years and came out on Displeased in 2003. Every reference work has to file that record somewhere, and wherever it goes it is wrong. As music it belongs beside Seven Churches. As a release it belongs beside records made by people who were not born when it was cut.
1989 and 1990: when the trade agreed it existed
The market clock is the slowest and the loudest. Between 1989 and 1990 the labels arrived all at once: Morbid Angel and Obituary got debut albums out in 1989, Entombed recorded Left Hand Path at Sunlight Studio in Stockholm in December 1989 and Earache released it on 4 June 1990, and within two years there was a shelf in the shop with the words printed on it. If your definition of a genre requires that the trade recognises it, this is your date, and it is five to seven years late.
The market did not finish moving until 1993, when Giant, a Warner subsidiary, put out Covenant and made Morbid Angel the first band in the genre on a major label. It has sold somewhere around 153,000 copies in the United States according to SoundScan. Ten years after a teenager wrote two words down, a corporation with a legal department was selling them.
The start date is different in every country
One more complication, and it is the one that catches people out when they try to answer this for a scene other than the American one. Death metal did not start everywhere at once, so "when" has a different answer in every postcode the tapes reached. Britain got there through hardcore rather than through thrash: Carcass came out of Liverpool in 1985 by way of a D-beat band called Disattack, and Bolt Thrower were assembled in a Coventry pub toilet in September 1986 during a punk gig, recorded a demo in April 1987 and had an album out on Vinyl Solution in 1988.
The Netherlands started in 1986 with Pestilence. Sweden started in 1987, when the teenagers who would become Entombed were still calling themselves Nihilist, and its first album did not land until the middle of 1990. Poland had Vader running from 1983, which is as early as anybody in America, and a debut album seven years later. Say "death metal started in 1984" to somebody who grew up in Stockholm and you are describing a country they had never visited.
So when did death metal start
Give the honest answer in one sentence and it holds up everywhere: death metal was named in 1983, played in 1984, pressed in 1985, finished in 1987 and recognised by the business in 1990. If you are forced to a single year, take 1985, because that is the first year in which somebody could walk into a shop, hand over money and come out holding the thing. That is the earliest date with a receipt behind it rather than a memory.
What you should not do is pick 1990 and call the six years before it a warm up. Everything that mattered had already been decided by then, mostly on cassette, mostly by teenagers, mostly in towns nobody had heard of. The music was finished long before the industry noticed it, which is the ordinary condition of every genre worth arguing about.
Two threads run out of this one. The word came first and behaved oddly for years, which is how Death Metal Got Its Name. And the roll call of who was actually playing this in those first four years is the Early Death Metal Bands That Started the Genre.
