28 December 1985, a hall in Santiago, a bill nobody outside the country could have named, and a curfew waiting on the pavement for anybody still out when it started. That was the first concert Pentagram Chile ever played. The country it played in had been under military rule for twelve years and had another four to go.
Two demos came out of that band. One seven inch, pressed in Switzerland. No album. They were finished inside three years.
Fourteen years after they broke up, Napalm Death recorded one of their songs.
The scene with nowhere to put the record
You already know the version of this story where Britain, the Netherlands and Poland got on with it without American money, and the international scenes chapter walks you through how each of them managed. Chile had it worse, and not simply poorer. Poland at least had Jarocin and a national trading circuit inside its own borders. Chile had a state whose only settled opinion about two thousand young men in one room was that it constituted a public order problem.
Count what was missing. No domestic label with reach past the city limits. No plant that would take an extreme metal job once somebody in the office read the lyric sheet. Import duty that turned a foreign LP into a week of wages. And a government, until 1990, with a working curfew and no patience whatsoever.
So Santiago dubbed cassettes, the way every isolated scene did. What makes Chile the hard case is that the dubbing led nowhere. Brazil eventually got distribution and a career path, which is why brazilian Death Metal Bands reads like an industry. Chile got influence and no contract, for twenty five years, and the difference is not talent. It is a border and a customs desk.
Pentagram: two demos and a Swiss seven inch
Assembled in Santiago in 1985 by two teenagers who had heard Venom, Slayer and Possessed and understood immediately what they were being asked to do, the band that became Pentagram Chile ran on Anton Reisenegger on vocals and guitar and Juan Pablo Uribe on the other guitar, with Eduardo Topelberg on drums and Alfredo Pena, known to everybody as El Bey, on bass. Demo I went out in January 1987. Demo II followed in September. Between them they carried three of the ugliest songs anybody on the continent had written, and the tapes went out through the post to Europe, to Brazil, to whoever wrote in.
Then a Swiss label put two of them on vinyl. Chainsaw Murder Records pressed "Fatal Predictions" backed with "Demoniac Possession" as a seven inch in 1987, which made it the only piece of Pentagram vinyl in existence for the next two decades and one of the most bootlegged records the underground has produced. Reisenegger had already been to Brazil and met the Cavalera brothers while Sepultura were cutting Morbid Visions. The connections were all there. The record company was not.
The tapes reached three continents. The band could not reach a record shop forty minutes from the rehearsal room.
They broke up in early 1988 after a show at the Manuel Plaza gymnasium in front of roughly two thousand people, worn down by an audience that did not want it and a business that would not answer. El Bey died in 1990. Reisenegger tried again with a demo called White Hell in 1991, got no permanent line-up out of it, and went off to build Fallout and then Criminal, the band that eventually took him to Europe, to Brujeria and to a seat in Lock Up on Necropolis Transparent in 2011.
The rest of the story is a very long wait. Picoroco Records put the demos on CD in 2000. One reunion concert happened in Providencia on 27 May 2001. A proper reformation arrived in 2009, took the band to Europe and to Wacken, and the name changed to Pentagram Chile in May 2012 to stop the confusion with the American doom band. The debut album, The Malefice, came out in 2013, twenty eight years after that first concert. They signed to Listenable Records in January 2024 and put out Eternal Life of Madness that April.
The ones who did get a record out
Chile was not one band. It was a dozen, and a few of them managed what Pentagram could not.
Necrosis started in 1985 and got serious in 1987, when the brothers Andres and Jose Miguel Nacrur came over from the thrash band Massakre and put the vocalist Andres Marchant in front. Their demo Kingdom of Hate went out in 1987 in fifteen hundred cassettes, a figure that made it a national event, and the album The Search was cut at E and M Studios in Santiago across July and August 1988 with Alvaro Leon engineering. Massakre themselves, built in Santiago around Yanko Tolic out of an obsession with Celtic Frost, had an album out in 1989 and wore corpse paint on a thrash stage years before Norway made it a uniform.
Atomic Aggressor are the purest death metal band of the lot and took the longest to arrive. Started in early 1985 and stable only from 1988, with Enrique Zuniga on guitar, Patricio Leiva on drums, Alejandro Diaz on vocals and bass and Jaime Moya on second guitar, they put out Bloody Ceremonial in 1989, a rehearsal promo in 1990 and Resurrection in 1991, then dissolved in 1992 without ever recording an album. Three demos and a reputation. They came back in 2007, released Rise of the Old Ones the year after, and finally got a proper album out through Hells Headbangers in 2014, twenty nine years after the first rehearsal.
The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial
Totten Korps formed in Santiago in 1989 and did their work in the last months of the dictatorship, taping The King of Hell Reclaims His Throne in 1990 and From the Infernal Resurrection in 1992. Torturer, founded in May 1989 by the bass player and singer Francisco Cautin, turned out to be the one with the endurance: five albums between 1992 and 2016, licensed out to Infest in France, to Apocalyptor in Australia and to Rawforce, and a support slot in front of more than three thousand people when Kreator came through in 1998.
| Band | Started | The record that got out | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pentagram Chile | 1985 | Fatal Predictions 7" (Chainsaw Murder) | 1987 |
| Necrosis | 1985 | Kingdom of Hate, 1,500 cassettes | 1987 |
| Massakre | 1985 | First album | 1989 |
| Atomic Aggressor | 1985 | Bloody Ceremonial demo | 1989 |
| Totten Korps | 1989 | The King of Hell Reclaims His Throne demo | 1990 |
| Torturer | 1989 | First album | 1992 |
The labels, such as they were
Somebody has to press the thing, and in Chile that somebody was usually a man with a job and a spare room. Toxic and Picoroco were the first two names that mattered. Picoroco was run by Eduardo Navarrete, who drummed in Nimrod and whom everybody called Picoroco, and it closed in 2005 when he died. Australis worked out of Santiago, is still going, and put out Jehovirus in 2010 for Nuclear, the Arica band who moved to the capital and have been crossing to European stages ever since. Proselytism came later. None of them had the money to advertise, the distribution to reach a second country or the leverage to get a band on a plane, and all of them kept records in print that would otherwise have vanished entirely.
That is the honest measure of the eighties down there. Not a scene that failed. A scene that was carried for fifteen years by four or five people who were not being paid for it.
What Chile does now, and who pays for it
Here is the good part. The country that could not press a record in 1988 is now one of the most reliable suppliers of filthy, blown out, deliberately archaic death metal on earth, and the foreign labels queue up for it. Force of Darkness, Hades Archer, Unaussprechlichen Kulten and Invocation all work the same seam, and the German label Iron Bonehead, the American Hells Headbangers, Blood Harvest out of Sweden and Unspeakable Axe do the pressing that Santiago never could. Ripper, four teenagers from Talagante who started at the end of 2007 when the oldest of them was fifteen, went the technical route instead and got Experiment of Existence out through Unspeakable Axe in March 2016.
Listen to any of them next to the 1987 demos and the family resemblance is not a style. It is an attitude to fidelity. Chilean death metal has never once sounded like it was recorded in a nice room, and at some point in the last two decades the rest of the world decided that was the point rather than the problem.
Mexico came at the same wall from a different side, with a bigger population, a border with the United States and a scene that had to survive being fashionable at home. That is mexican Death Metal Bands, and it is a very different kind of hard.
