The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Every genre has a ceiling. Death metal is the only one that found its own by running headlong into it, and the interesting part of the story is not the running. It is what the bands did in the twenty minutes after they hit it.
The question here is not whether this music is extreme. It plainly is, by every measure anybody could propose. The question is why it kept getting more so between roughly 1985 and 1993, why that stopped, and what the escalation was actually for, because "they were angry young men" explains nothing at all and is contradicted by almost everyone who was there.
Escalation was how a band got heard
Understand the distribution first and the rest follows. There was no radio play, no television, no press outside a few hundred photocopied fanzines, and in most countries no shop that would stock the records. A band's audience was reached one padded envelope at a time, and a demo posted to a trader landed in a box with two or three hundred other demos in it.
In that situation there is exactly one variable a band controls. Being good is not enough, because a lot of the box is good. Being different in a direction nobody can quantify is worthless, because the trader has forty minutes and a Walkman. Being further along one measurable axis than anything else in the box gets the tape played first. Faster. Lower. Uglier. More.
A demo posted to a trader landed in a box with two or three hundred other demos in it, and there was exactly one variable a band controlled.
None of that requires anybody to be unusually violent or unusually disturbed. It requires them to want to be heard inside a system with no other way of sorting anything, and the system rewarded exactly one behaviour for about eight years. The rest of the machinery around this, the zines and the artwork and the arguments with distributors, is the wider story.
What it was measuring itself against
The second engine was thrash, and specifically thrash succeeding. By 1986 the biggest bands in that genre had major label money, videos in rotation and arena tours, which meant the thing that had been underground four years earlier was now on a television in every house in the country.
The underground's answer was to build a floor that a signed band could not stand on. Every parameter got pushed to a place where a record company with a promotion department would refuse to follow: a vocal nobody could sell to radio, a tempo nobody could dance to, artwork no chain store would rack, subject matter no television network would touch. That was not an accident of taste. It was a specification with a purpose, and the purpose was to be unfollowable.
The four things that got pushed, and where each one stopped
Tempo went first, from thrash speed to the sustained blast, and it hit a wall that is physical rather than musical: past a certain rate the individual strokes stop being events and become a texture, so playing faster buys nothing a listener can hear. Tuning went next, and it hit a wall too, because below a certain point the note stops reading as a pitch and starts reading as a thud. The voice went down until it could go no further without ceasing to be a voice. And the subject matter escalated until it arrived at total physical destruction, which is a dead end for the simple reason that there is nothing past it. Once a lyric sheet has described a body being taken completely apart, the next record cannot describe it more.
All four ceilings were reached at roughly the same time, somewhere between 1991 and 1993. Cryptopsy made None So Vile in Montreal and Wrong Again released it on 3 July 1996, and it is about as far along all four axes at once as anything anybody has managed since. Thirty years of trying have not moved the line.
A qualification is owed here, because the escalation story is only two thirds true. A large group of bands never entered the speed race at all and got extreme along an entirely different axis. Obituary slowed down and got heavier. Autopsy went slower still and let everything rot. Incantation buried the band in murk until the instruments stopped being separable, and Bolt Thrower spent thirty years at mid tempo sounding like ordnance rather than like machinery. Each of those was a refusal rather than an inability, and each produced records that have outlasted the fastest thing in the box that year. Weight is a kind of extremity too, and unlike speed it has no obvious ceiling.
It also matters that the arms race ran exactly as long as the tape network did. When distribution got cheap, first through compact discs and mail order catalogues and later through everything else, being the most extreme record in the box stopped being the only way to be found, and the incentive that had driven eight years of escalation quietly disappeared.
What happened when the ceiling arrived
This is the part that gets left out, and it is the whole answer to the question. Faced with a competition it could no longer win, the genre changed the competition. From about 1993 the interesting bands stopped trying to be more extreme and started trying to be stranger, harder to play, more dissonant, more atmospheric, better written.
Gorguts are the clearest case. Luc Lemay had Obscura essentially written by the end of 1993, a record built out of intervals that do not resolve and guitar parts that sound like a building being taken apart from the inside, and no label would touch it. Olympic finally put it out on 23 June 1998, five years late, and it is now one of the most influential records in the genre. The escalation had stopped being about volume of violence and started being about difficulty, and the market took half a decade to catch up.
What the extremity is and is not
It is representational. A death metal record is about violence in the same way that a war film is about war and a crime novel is about murder, which is to say that the subject and the intention are separate things, and the genre has spent forty years being read as though they were the same thing. That misreading produced two government inquiries, a German register of banned records and a great many shop policies, and it produced almost no evidence.
What the extremity is for, in the end, is a door. A door only works if some people cannot get through it, and this music built one on purpose and then kept the key. Everybody inside knows exactly what that filtering produced: an audience that turns up, buys the record, keeps the band alive for thirty years and does not move on when the next thing arrives. Extremity was the cost of entry, and the people who paid it got a scene that has outlasted almost every genre that was easier to like.
The last piece of that door is the one you see before you hear anything, which is why Death Metal Album Art Is So Graphic.
