Here is the verdict before the argument. The growl is not a sound effect and it is not a failure to sing. It is a distortion pedal fitted to the human voice, and it arrived roughly forty years after the guitar got one. Everything strange about it stops being strange the moment you file it under distortion rather than under singing.
Guitarists worked out in the late fifties that a signal pushed past the point where the equipment can carry it cleanly does not become useless. It becomes a different instrument, with more harmonic content, more sustain and more menace. Metal spent the next three decades building on that discovery and left the singer standing in front of it doing what singers had always done. Then a handful of people, none of whom were working together, did the same thing to the voice. If you want the ground under all of this first, start from the beginning.
It did not come from one person
The paternity argument here is even messier than the one about the first death metal album, and for a good reason: several people arrived at the same place from different directions inside about three years.
Conrad Lant put a corroded shout on the Venom records at the start of the eighties, which is the ancestor rather than the thing itself. Tom Gabriel Fischer went further with Hellhammer and then Celtic Frost, with harsh vocals on the 1983 demo, the Apocalyptic Raids EP the following year and Morbid Tales in 1984, and he added the clipped grunt that half the genre borrowed without ever crediting it. Kam Lee, singing in the earliest version of Death, took the phonetic side of that and pushed it lower, and he has said in interviews since that he worked the style out by imitating dogs.
The one usually named as the first proper death metal voice belongs to Jeff Becerra of Possessed, on a record cut in 1985 by a band whose singer was sixteen. What is worth noticing is that he was not executing a known technique. There was no known technique. He was pushing as hard as a throat can push and the result was more urgent and less controlled than what came after it, which is exactly why it still sounds frightening and why the polished version does not always. By the time Chuck Schuldiner made Scream Bloody Gore in 1987 the setting was fixed, and it has barely moved since.
What it removes, which is the whole point
Strip out the pitch and three things happen to the band, all of them useful.
The first is spectral. A sung vocal occupies the same harmonic space as the guitars and has to be given room, which is why rock mixes are built around a hole in the middle for the singer to stand in. A growl does not need that hole. It sits underneath and across the guitars rather than inside them, which is precisely why death metal guitars could keep tuning down and stacking up without the vocal ever losing its place. The voice stopped competing for the frequency band, so the guitars took all of it.
It is a distortion pedal fitted to the human voice, and it arrived about forty years after the guitar got one.
The second is structural. No pitch means no melodic hook, which means no chorus in the sense that rock uses the word. A death metal song therefore has to be held together by riff architecture rather than by a returning tune, and that single constraint explains most of what the genre does: the block construction, the tempo switches, the sections that stop dead. Take the growl off and half the songwriting decisions on any of these records become inexplicable.
The third is that the words stop arriving through the speakers and start arriving on paper, which is why the lyric sheets in this genre are so much longer and stranger than anything a band with an audible singer would risk printing.
What it adds, and why it works on people who hate it
The technical word for what the growl has that a shout does not is roughness, and it is the same acoustic property that makes a scream, an animal alarm call and a distressed cry cut through everything else in a room. Researchers working on music with violent themes have described death metal vocals precisely this way, in terms of nonlinear acoustic behaviour, low average pitch and a signal shaped like a biological threat.
That is why this one element of the genre gets a reaction from people who have never heard a single record. Everything else about death metal has to be learned. The voice does not: it lands on a much older system that was built to notice a scream, and it lands on it whether the listener consents or not. A study published in Royal Society Open Science in 2019, comparing how fans and non-fans process music with violent themes, used a Bloodbath track as its sample for exactly that reason. The interesting result was not that non-fans found it unpleasant. It was how completely the fans did not.
Why fans hear words where everyone else hears noise
This is the part outsiders refuse to believe, and it has been measured. Kirk Olsen, Bill Thompson and Iain Giblin published work in Music Perception in June 2018 in which they cut individual words out of a Cannibal Corpse song and asked people to identify them. Fans got significantly more of them right than non-fans, and trained musicians did better than non-musicians whether or not they liked the music at all.
Which is the honest answer to the question everybody asks. You cannot understand the words yet, and the reason is not that the words are absent. The signal is doing something your ear has not been trained to decode, in the same way that a foreign accent is impenetrable for a fortnight and then simply is not. The other physical education this music gives you happens in front of the stage rather than in your ears, and that is mosh Pits, Circle Pits and the Wall of Death.
The paradox at the end of it
A growl erases most of what makes a singing voice identifiable. The vibrato, the accent, the range, the little cracks that make you recognise somebody in two words on the radio: gone. On paper that should make every death metal singer interchangeable, and it does have one real consequence, which is that this genre survives a change of vocalist far better than a rock band ever does.
And yet. Play four seconds of the right record to somebody who has been listening for twenty years and they will name the singer. Whatever the distortion removes, it does not remove everything, and the residue left over is enough to build a career on. Who those voices belong to, and what each of them actually changed, is death Metal Singers. The wider world this voice grew up in, the tapes and the artwork and the arguments, is the chapter this belongs to.
