On 31 August 1993 Earache and Columbia released a record by the band that had invented the Swedish death metal guitar sound, produced by the same engineer in the same studio, and on it that sound is playing mid tempo hard rock. Nobody had been sacked. Nothing had gone wrong. The four men had simply decided to be a different kind of band, and Wolverine Blues is the moment they said so out loud.
Genre borders in extreme metal are drawn after the fact, by writers, out of records that were made without reference to them. So the traffic across the line is heavier than any map admits, and it runs both ways: bands walked into death metal out of thrash, out of punk and out of black metal, and other bands walked out of it into folk melody, hard rock, jazz and progressive rock. What follows is the crossings, dated, with the album that turned named in each case. For the settled roster rather than the migrants, our death metal band list is the place to start.
Arriving out of thrash
The cleanest case in the genre is Dutch. Pestilence made Malleus Maleficarum for Roadrunner in 1988 and it is a thrash album, raw and fast and audibly in debt to Germany, with none of the tuning or the vocal register that would arrive a year later. Then Patrick Uterwijk came in on second guitar, Martin van Drunen moved to the front, the band went to Berlin, and Consuming Impulse came out at the end of 1989 as a death metal record with almost nothing left of the previous one. Twelve months, one line-up change, and a band on the other side of a border that had barely been drawn.
France did the same thing at higher speed. Massacra formed in Franconville in 1986 on demos called "Legion of Torture" and "Final Holocaust" that are thrash by any measure, signed to Shark Records in Germany off the back of them, and had turned into a death metal band by the time the debut album of the same name reached shops in 1990. Death itself is a thrash band for the length of the Mantas demos and stops being one somewhere in the Los Angeles sessions of November 1986. The traffic went the other way too, and the loudest example is Brazilian: Sepultura made a death metal record in 1986 and a thrash record three years later, which is why the argument never dies and why it is settled separately in is Sepultura Death Metal.
Arriving out of punk
Sweden did not come to death metal through thrash at all. The teenagers who became Entombed were trading tapes as Nihilist from 1987 with a drummer who had learned the instrument off hardcore records, and the whole Stockholm rhythmic vocabulary, the D beat under the tremolo riff, is punk that has been tuned down rather than metal that has been sped up. Dismember came out of the same rooms. Britain arrived the same way from a different direction: Napalm Death began as an anarcho punk group in the Midlands, invented grindcore across the two sides of Scum in 1987 with a different line-up on each, and only became legible as death metal in 1990 when Harmony Corruption was cut in Tampa with Barney Greenway singing. Bolt Thrower had punk in the rhythm section and a wargaming magazine on the coffee table, and never sounded like anybody in Florida for a second.
Genre borders in extreme metal are drawn after the fact, by writers, out of records that were made without reference to them.
Arriving out of black metal
The largest crossing of the last thirty years took a decade to complete. Behemoth released Sventevith (Storming Near the Baltic) in April 1995 and it is black metal without qualification: lo-fi, shrieked, played fast and thin. The move begins on Pandemonic Incantations in 1998, hardens through Thelema.6 in 2000 as the guitars thicken and the drumming becomes precise rather than frantic, and is finished by Demigod in 2004, which is a death metal album by any test you care to apply. Nergal is the only man present at both ends of it. The band that came out the far side is now the largest extreme metal act in Europe, which is not a coincidence: the crossing bought them the low end and the discipline that black metal had been refusing on principle.
Leaving
Entombed's exit is the most complete. Wolverine Blues kept Tomas Skogsberg, kept the guitar tone, dropped the tempo into a groove and pointed the whole thing at hard rock, and the phrase death 'n' roll was fixed to the result and has never come off it. Carcass went out through a different door in the same season, replacing the medical dictionary with twin lead harmonies on Heartwork and handing melodic death metal its blueprint on the way past. Michael Amott then left to found Arch Enemy, which is the clearest possible evidence of where the band had actually arrived.
Finland produced the slowest and most graceful departure. Amorphis made The Karelian Isthmus in 1992, a straight death metal album with no clean singing on it anywhere, then put folk melody and keyboards into Tales from the Thousand Lakes in 1994 and split the vocals between a growl and a clean voice. By Elegy, released on 14 May 1996 with Pasi Koskinen in the band, the clean voice was carrying most of the record. Part of the audience never forgave them. Thirty years and a dozen albums later they are one of the largest bands their country has produced, so the arithmetic worked out.
Pestilence walked out of the genre they had walked into, which nobody else on this page managed. Spheres arrived in 1993 with guitar synthesisers and jazz phrasing on a Roadrunner death metal record, baffled almost everybody at the time and has been slowly acquiring defenders ever since. Opeth made the same move in slower motion and finished it on Heritage in 2011, a progressive rock album with no growled vocal on it at all. Paradise Lost left death doom for gothic metal and then for electronics before turning around in the 2010s and coming back, which makes them the only band here to complete a full circuit.
| Band | Came from | The record that turned | Ended up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pestilence | Thrash | Consuming Impulse (1989) | Death metal, then jazz fusion, then back |
| Massacra | Thrash | Final Holocaust (1990) | Death metal, then groove |
| Nihilist and Entombed | Hardcore punk | Left Hand Path (1990) | Death metal, then death 'n' roll |
| Napalm Death | Anarcho punk | Harmony Corruption (1990) | Grindcore with a death metal decade in it |
| Behemoth | Black metal | Demigod (2004) | Death metal at arena scale |
| Carcass | Goregrind | Heartwork (1993) | Melodic death metal, then a comeback |
| Amorphis | Death metal | Elegy (1996) | Folk tinged heavy metal |
| Opeth | Death metal | Heritage (2011) | Progressive rock |
| Paradise Lost | Death doom | Host (1999) | Gothic, electronic, then death doom again |
What the crossings have in common
Two things, and neither is artistic restlessness. The first is a line-up change: almost every turn on this page has a new singer or a new guitarist standing exactly where the style changes, and the man who arrives writes what he can write rather than what the band used to. The second is money, or the collapse of it. The departures cluster hard around 1993 to 1996, which is precisely the period when the majors came in, looked at the returns and left, and a band that had been selling to a growing audience found itself selling to a shrinking one. Nobody wrote a hard rock album in 1990.
None of which is a complaint. A genre that nobody ever leaves is a genre that has stopped being made, and the bands that crossed the border took something with them in both directions. Behemoth carried black metal's theatre into death metal and it is now the biggest thing in the room. Entombed carried the buzzsaw out into hardcore, where it has been sitting ever since, waiting to be brought back.
