Death Metal: The Complete History, the Bands and the Albums

Death metal is thrash metal with the melodies cut out and the tempo left running. That is true of 1985, and it is the last simple sentence anybody gets to write about this music. Six years later the same word covered a band in Tampa playing diminished arpeggios at a speed no drummer had been asked for before, a band in Stockholm whose guitars left the speakers as one continuous tearing sheet, a quintet on Long Island who had slowed down on purpose so that a riff could land with its whole weight on a single beat, and a band in the English Midlands who had stopped writing songs altogether. One word. Six musics. This is the history of how that happened, and of why the word still fits.

Read this page first, then take the chapters in order. Eleven of them sit underneath it: the break from thrash, the Florida boom and the studio that finally gave the noise a floor to stand on, the two Swedish scenes that never sounded alike, the New York bands who made weight the entire point, a map that reached Poland and Japan before most American labels had noticed, the peak and the collapse of the nineties, the revival that is still running, the subgenres, the bands, the records, and the culture of dubbed tapes, unreadable logos and photocopied paper that carried all of it before a single label was interested. Every band named here has a page in the database. Every record links to its own.

What death metal actually is

Four things. You can hear all four inside the first ten seconds of almost any record in the genre.

The voice comes first, and it is the part outsiders never get past. It is not a scream and it is not singing. It is a guttural roar made low in the throat and pitched underneath the music instead of over it, so the words stop working as words and the vocal turns into a bass instrument with consonants attached. The guitars are tuned down, often to B standard or lower, and played two ways that trade off all night: palm muted chugging on the fat strings, and tremolo picking, one note or chord struck so fast that it stops being a note and becomes texture. The drums carry the blast beat, snare and kick and cymbal alternating at a rate that flattens the pulse into a single sheet. And the writing refuses to settle. Minor keys, or no key at all. Chromatic runs that walk in half steps and never resolve. Tempo and time signature changing without warning halfway through a bar.

Thrash already had most of those parts. What death metal added was intent. Thrash wanted to be exciting, and it wanted you shouting the last line of the chorus back at it. Death metal wanted the opposite. It wanted the chorus gone, the melody gone, the invitation gone, and it wanted the listener to be the one who could not keep up. Everything the genre has done since is a variation on one problem, which is that extremity has no ceiling. Every time a band found the far edge, the next band moved it.

Thrash wanted to be exciting. Death metal wanted to be unbearable, and then it spent forty years finding ways of being unbearable that nobody had thought of yet.

The break from thrash

The break did not happen in one room on one night, whatever anybody tells you. It happened in about four places at once, between 1983 and 1987, among teenagers who were listening to the same three imported records. Venom gave them the nerve and the imagery. Slayer gave them the tritone, the tempo and the idea that a solo could be a mistake made on purpose. Celtic Frost gave them weight and the willingness to be strange. What none of those bands had was the voice.

Two bands supplied it. The five from the Bay Area who titled their 1984 demo Death Metal and named the genre by accident, Possessed, put out Seven Churches on Combat in 1985 with a teenage bass player singing like something dredged out from under a floor, and that record is still the clearest single point where thrash stops and the new thing starts. The other came from Florida, where a guitarist had been trading tapes under the name Mantas since 1983. Chuck Schuldiner renamed the band Death, spent two years moving between Florida, Toronto and California looking for a drummer who could keep up, and in November 1986 recorded Scream Bloody Gore at The Music Grinder in Los Angeles with Chris Reifert on drums and himself on every guitar and bass part on the tape. Combat released it on 25 May 1987. AllMusic later gave it five stars and called it necessary for anybody interested in the genesis of the genre, and the argument over whether it or Seven Churches came first is the oldest argument this music has.

What separates those two records from their thrash parents is not speed. It is the removal of the chorus as a load bearing structure. Once a song no longer had to arrive anywhere, the riff could be anything at all, and the genre spent the next decade proving it. The demos, the name, the tape network and the whole question of who was first are in the origins of death metal, the first chapter of this history.

Florida: the room with the air conditioning

Everybody knows the Florida story and almost nobody tells the interesting half of it. The interesting half is a building. Morrisound Recording opened in Tampa in 1981, built by two brothers, Jim and Tom Morris, who were cutting jingles and country sessions and had no particular interest in this music at all. What they did have was early expertise in drum triggering and in wiring computers into a control room, which turned out to be exactly what a genre with no low end discipline and a drummer playing at two hundred beats per minute needed. Then a local engineer named Scott Burns started taking the sessions nobody else wanted, and between 1987 and 1997 he put his name on records by Death, Obituary, Deicide, Cannibal Corpse, Sepultura, Atheist and Cynic, before leaving the industry for a career in computing. In May 2025 Hillsborough County put a historical marker on the building.

That is why bands moved to Tampa. Not the weather, the room. Before Morrisound, extreme metal sounded like a rehearsal recorded through a wall. After it, the kick drum had definition, the guitars had separation and the growl sat exactly where it was meant to sit, which meant a listener could finally hear how much of this was musicianship rather than accident. The band that proved the point formed in Tampa in 1983 around a guitarist who called himself Trey Azagthoth. Morbid Angel released Altars of Madness on Earache on 12 May 1989, and the record does something no death metal album had managed before: it plays fast, atonal, unrelenting material with visible precision, in tune and in time, with solos that behave like weather. Obituary went the other way and made a virtue of slowness and rot. Deicide went for blasphemy at volume. The scene was never a single sound, it was a workshop, and all of it, the studio, the labels, the bands and the boom that followed, is in florida death metal.

That the play is the tragedy, "Man," and its hero the Conqueror Worm.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Conqueror Worm, 1843

Sweden: one pedal, two cities

Sweden did not imitate Florida. Sweden found a shortcut. In a small room in Stockholm called Sunlight Studio, opened in the middle of the 1980s by Tomas Skogsberg to record his own punk bands, a group of teenagers worked out that a Boss HM-2 distortion pedal with every knob turned to its stop, fed by a detuned guitar, produced something no amplifier could produce on its own: a wide, saturated, subterranean roar with no clean edge anywhere in it. Guitar World has compared it to a swarm of bees. Everybody else has compared it to a chainsaw. Nobody has ever mistaken it for anything else.

The band that carried it out of that room had been called Nihilist and became Entombed. They cut Left Hand Path at Sunlight in December 1989 in less than a week, with Lars-Göran Petrov singing, Alex Hellid and Uffe Cederlund on guitars and Nicke Andersson on drums, and Earache released it on 4 June 1990 behind a Dan Seagrave painting of a graveyard staircase. The title track quotes the theme from the 1979 horror film Phantasm at the three minute mark and gets away with it. Rolling Stone later placed the album at number 82 in its hundred greatest metal albums, Metal Hammer put it ninth among death metal records specifically, and Decibel inducted it into its Hall of Fame in August 2005 as the first proper Swedish death metal album. Dismember, Grave and Unleashed completed the Stockholm four, and every one of them ran the pedal.

Down the coast, a different set of teenagers reached the opposite conclusion. Gothenburg kept the growl and the blast beat and put the melody back, harmonised in thirds off the back of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and the results were At the Gates, Dark Tranquillity and In Flames. At the Gates recorded Slaughter of the Soul at Studio Fredman with Fredrik Nordström between May and July 1995, Earache issued it on 14 November, and the band broke up inside a year. AllMusic gave it five stars, Rolling Stone placed it 79th in the same list, and Rock Hard, unimpressed, complained that the band had become interchangeable with its own imitators. All three verdicts are defensible. The record then went on to be the most copied death metal album of the following decade, largely by American bands who had never heard the Stockholm four at all. Two cities, one country, no shared sound: the full account is in swedish death metal.

New York, weight, and the riff you stand still for

New York had hardcore, and hardcore taught it something Florida never learned: the heaviest moment in a song is often the one where the band stops playing fast. The quintet from Long Island who worked that out were Suffocation. They took five thousand dollars from Roadrunner down to Morrisound in June 1991, had Scott Burns record them, and on 22 October released Effigy of the Forgotten, a record that alternates the fastest playing anybody had committed to tape with passages where the whole band drops onto one chugging half time figure and simply leans on it. Rolling Stone credits the breakdown in "Liege of Inveracity" as the first slam riff in death metal. Metal Hammer, ranking the album eighteenth of all time, called it ground zero for the brutal wing of the genre.

The press of the day did not agree. Kerrang! gave it two out of five. Rock Hard gave it three out of ten. Both were wrong, and the correction took roughly fifteen years: AllMusic four stars, Metal Storm ten out of ten, and a whole subgenre with a name coined not by a journalist but by Bill Tolley, the drummer of Internal Bleeding, who wanted a word that was not the one Anthrax had been using. Slam is the part of death metal written for a room full of moving bodies rather than a bedroom full of tape decks, and it has spread far enough that Manchester now has a scene of its own. The New York bands, the weight, the hardcore inheritance and the long argument over brutal death metal get their own chapter.

The rest of the map

By 1990 death metal had stopped being an American export and become a set of local industries, which is the part most histories skip. Britain had the grind wing, Napalm Death and Carcass, both on Earache out of Nottingham, and it had Bolt Thrower, who played slower than everybody and were heavier for it. The Netherlands produced Pestilence, Asphyx and Gorefest, three bands with almost nothing in common. Poland, working with equipment that Florida bands would have refused to plug in, produced Vader and then Behemoth, and by the 2000s was the most productive death metal country in Europe. Canada took the technical route, with Gorguts and Cryptopsy. Finland produced Demilich, whose single album in 1993 sold almost nothing and now trades like scripture. Japan, Australia, Brazil and Colombia all had scenes running before most American labels had heard of them.

None of those countries were working from a template. Each had different equipment, different studios and different money, and the equipment shaped the sound as much as the intention did. Polish drumming is what it is partly because of who taught it. The Dutch records sound the way they do because of a handful of local engineers with strong opinions. The map, country by country, is death metal around the world.

The nineties: the peak, then the floor

For about eighteen months in 1992 and 1993 it genuinely looked as though this music was going to be big. Earache, run out of Nottingham by Digby Pearson since 1985, signed a distribution agreement with Columbia for the Americas. Morbid Angel were signed by Irving Azoff to Giant Records for one album with an option on five more. Covenant arrived in 1993, sold more than 150,000 copies in the United States, and the video for "God of Emptiness" went into rotation on MTV and turned up on Beavis and Butt-Head. Cannibal Corpse, formed in Buffalo in December 1988 and signed to Metal Blade the following July, played "Hammer Smashed Face" in a Jim Carrey film in 1994. For a moment the guttural voice was on television at teatime.

Then the floor went out. Columbia did not deliver the sales it had projected for itself and moved to end the Earache deal early; the rights reverted and the label went back to being independent, which is what it has stayed. Giant did not take up its option. The majors concluded that a genre whose entire commercial ceiling was a hundred and fifty thousand copies was not worth the overhead, and the bands who had reorganised themselves around that ceiling were left holding it. Some slowed down and called it groove. Some went melodic. Several of the best simply stopped. Death made their last album in 1998, At the Gates were already gone, and the Canadian technical wing put out the strangest record the genre has produced, Obscura, in 1998, for an audience that did not exist yet.

What survived the decade matters more than what killed it. The genre stopped trying to be a career and went back to being a network, and everything good that has happened since came out of that decision. The whole arc, the boom, the deals, the cancellations and the bands who held on, is death metal in the nineties.

The revival, and the sound of a cave

Around 2008 a generation who had not been alive for any of the above began making records that sounded deliberately older than they were. Not a tribute and not a joke: a rejection of the clicking triggered drums and the surgical mixes that had become standard, in favour of tape saturation, room reverb and a picture in which you cannot always tell what is happening. The unkind name for it is cavern core. The kind name is the new wave of old school death metal, and it produced Horrendous, formed in 2009, then Tomb Mold, Necrot, Undergang and dozens more, mostly on small labels that dealt in vinyl and cassette on purpose.

Its best band came out of Denver. Blood Incantation formed in 2011, put out Starspawn on Dark Descent in 2016 and Hidden History of the Human Race in 2019, and then did the thing nobody expected, which was to take the whole apparatus somewhere else. Absolute Elsewhere, recorded in the summer of 2023 at Hansa Tonstudio in Berlin with Arthur Rizk producing and released by Century Media on 4 October 2024, is two tracks of roughly twenty minutes each, in three movements apiece, moving between blasting death metal and long passages of analogue synthesiser without apologising for either. Metacritic aggregated seven reviews into a 92. Metal Hammer made it their album of the year, Decibel placed it second, Pitchfork gave it 8.5, and it reached number 3 on the UK rock and metal chart. Forty years after the demo tapes, this music is being reviewed by people who once refused to admit it existed. That story, from the first reissues to the present, is the old school revival.

Six musics under one word

Here is the argument the whole history rests on. Death metal did not branch the way other genres branch, drifting apart over decades. It was opened up on the table within six years of being born, and every scene that reached into it took a different organ and walked off with it. Florida took the musicianship. Stockholm took the guitar tone. Gothenburg took the melody. Long Island took the weight. The technical wing, Death's own Human in 1991 and then Atheist, Cynic and Gorguts, took the harmony and the time signatures. The doom wing took the tempo away entirely. Grindcore took the length. Not one of those was a compromise. Each was somebody deciding which part of the body was the important one, and then building a music out of it while the rest of the carcass cooled.

Six musics under one word, and the word still fits, because what they share is not a sound. It is a refusal to make the music easier for you.

That is why the subgenre arguments here are so vicious and so long lived. They are not arguments about labels. They are arguments about which organ was the heart. The full anatomy, from brutal and slam through technical, melodic, death doom, deathgrind, blackened and dissonant, with the bands and records that define each one, is set out in death metal subgenres.

The bands, the records and everything around them

Three articles sit beside this history and do jobs it cannot. The first is the roll call: the bands worth your time, from the four or five everybody knows to the ones that exist as a single seven inch and a rumour, each with a paragraph and a link to its page here. Argue with it, that is what it is for, and it lives at death metal bands. The second is the shelf, ranked by the KaosMetal score, which combines the critic ratings with the ratings left by people on this site, with a note on each record and a suggested place to start if you have never heard any of this: the essential death metal albums. The third is everything that was not the music and mattered anyway, the dubbed tapes and the international post, the fanzines, the logos nobody can read, the Dan Seagrave and Ed Repka paintings, the shirts that got people suspended from school and the line that a good number of these bands walked up to and a few walked over: the culture around the music.

If you want the short version of the shelf, here it is, in order of release, and every death metal fan alive would swap at least three of them for something else.

How to read this history

The chapters are written to be read in order and each one stands on its own. Chapter one is the break from thrash. Chapter two is Florida and the studio. Chapter three is Sweden and its two answers. Chapter four is New York and the weight. Chapter five is the rest of the world. Chapter six is the nineties, the peak and the slump. Chapter seven is the revival. Then come the reference articles: the subgenres, the bands, the records and the culture that carried all of it. Underneath every chapter sit the supporting pieces, the questions people actually ask, the records taken one at a time, the labels, the studios, the artists who painted the sleeves. The whole thing is refreshed once a year and the two ranked lists are recalculated from the ratings on this site.

One last thing, and then go and read chapter one. Every genre ever declared finished was declared finished by somebody who had stopped looking. Death metal was pronounced dead in 1996, again in 2002 and again around 2010, and in the meantime it has quietly become the most durable extreme music there is, because it never depended on a chart, a magazine or a major label to tell it that it existed. Somebody is recording a first demo tonight in a room with bad acoustics and a borrowed amplifier, and it will be better than it has any right to be. That is the entire mechanism. It has not changed since 1985 and there is no sign at all that it intends to.

Sources and notes

• Wikipedia: Scream Bloody Gore
• Wikipedia: Morrisound Recording
• Wikipedia: Left Hand Path (album)
• Wikipedia: Effigy of the Forgotten
• Wikipedia: Slaughter of the Soul
• Wikipedia: Absolute Elsewhere (Blood Incantation)