In December 1989 a Stockholm band booked a small studio, finished a debut album inside a week and walked out carrying a guitar sound the rest of the world is still copying. Entombed's Left Hand Path went out through Earache on 4 June 1990, produced by Tomas Skogsberg with the band at Sunlight Studio, and the recipe was not complicated: guitars tuned to B, two Boss HM-2 pedals with every control turned to the stop and panned hard left and right, a third guitar through a cheap DS-1 down the middle. The band picked the HM-2 because it was the pedal everybody already owned, being the cheapest distortion in the shop. A bad box, used correctly. It does not shape a note the way a tone control shapes a note. It works like a bandsaw brought down on the end of it.
Start the decade there, because that is where it starts. Not with a plan, not with a contract, not with a manifesto. Equipment, a room and a week.
The money version of the nineties, the one in which major labels arrive, run the arithmetic on a music assembled in garages and then walk away from it, belongs to the chapter on 90's death metal bands and what the industry did with them. This is the other half of the same ten years: the rooms the records were made in, the post they travelled by, the fields they were eventually played in front of, and the format that carried them. If you want the whole arc instead, 1983 to the present, that is the death metal overview.
Three rooms and the sound they rented out
Sound was geography in this decade. Hand a listener fifty records and he could name the country off the guitar tone before a word had been sung, because three studios were doing a great deal of the work and none of them was trying to sound like the others.
Sunlight sold mass. Skogsberg's method removed the option of subtlety by setting everything at maximum and leaving it there, and the records that came out of that room between 1990 and 1993 form the tightest family resemblance the genre has ever produced: Left Hand Path, Dismember's Like an Ever Flowing Stream and Grave's Into the Grave in 1991, Entombed's own Clandestine. The studio's session list runs past fifty albums and the place was still working into the 2020s.
Morrisound Recording in Tampa sold the opposite article. Scott Burns wanted every limb of the kit audible and every note of a riff separable from the note beside it, and when Obituary cut Cause of Death there with him for Roadrunner, out on 19 September 1990, the record arrived with James Murphy playing lead over a rhythm section mixed like a piece of machinery laid open for inspection. Murphy had come out of Death and never made another Obituary album. That session is the American half of the decade in miniature: definition, a working engineer, a queue outside the door.
The third room gets left off the list every time. Dan Swanö ran Unisound through most of the decade, first in Finspång and later in Örebro, and what he offered was neither Stockholm mass nor Tampa clarity but room to try something: Edge of Sanity's The Spectral Sorrows in 1993 and Purgatory Afterglow in 1994, Fleshcrawl's Impurity, Opeth's Morningrise in 1996. A studio run by a man who was also in the bands is a different proposition from a studio run by a professional, and the catalogue shows it.
Hand a listener fifty records from this decade and he could name the country off the guitar tone before a word had been sung.
Everything arrived by post
Now the unglamorous half, which happens to be the half that explains how a music with no radio and almost no television reached three continents. It went by post. Not as a figure of speech: padded envelopes, hand written addresses, international reply coupons, a tape or a seven inch inside, and a network of people who had never met each other keeping the whole apparatus moving out of their own wages.
That basement is the model rather than the exception. A label in this decade was frequently one person with a catalogue, a post office run and a wholesale account, and the mail order list was often worth more than the roster, because the list was how a band in Greenville or Kuopio reached a buyer in Osaka. Relapse took Suffocation and Incantation early and sold everybody else's records at the same time. Earache did it from Nottingham, Nuclear Blast and Century Media from Germany. Distribution was not a service the scene used. Distribution was the scene.
Fanzines carried the opinions and the addresses, photocopied and stapled and paid for by whoever felt like it, and a demo review of nine lines could shift two hundred tapes. What nobody had in 1992 was any way of hearing a record before buying it, which is exactly why the flyer, the review and the word of a trusted correspondent carried the weight they did. You paid first and found out afterwards. A trade conducted on those terms breeds a particular sort of listener, and that listener is the reason the music survived the second half of its own decade.
Eight hundred people in a gravel pit
The live economy went from nothing to something faintly absurd inside ten years, and two festivals mark the range. Wacken Open Air was put on for the first time on 24 and 25 August 1990 by Thomas Jensen and Holger Hübner in a gravel pit in their own village, and barely eight hundred people turned up. Thirteen hundred the next year. Ten thousand by 1997.
Dynamo Open Air in Eindhoven went the other way and nearly came apart under its own weight. Begun in 1986 to mark the fifth birthday of the Dynamo club, five thousand people in the club car park, it drew 118,000 in June 1995, still the largest multi day open air ever held in the Netherlands, and left behind traffic queues long enough that people got out and cooked on the hard shoulder. The municipality capped the following year at 60,000. Death metal was never the whole bill at either event, and that is the useful part: by mid decade the music had a circuit big enough to become a public order problem and small enough that the bands on it still went home to day jobs.
Between the gravel pit and the airfield sat the package tour, which is how most people actually saw these bands. Earache put four of its acts into American vans in 1992 and called the thing the Campaign for Musical Destruction: Carcass, Napalm Death, Cathedral and Brutal Truth, four bands sharing one crew and one bill because not one of them could have filled those rooms alone. Decibel later placed it twenty fifth in a list of the hundred best metal tours ever run. Nobody on it got rich. That is not a complaint about the period, it is the business model: the tour existed to sell the record, and the record existed to justify the next tour.
The nineties handed death metal a distribution network, a press and a festival circuit. What the decade never handed it was a wage.
Rafael Quintero, KaosMetal
What the compact disc did to the songs
The format changed underneath the genre while it was working, and the consequences are audible on the records. The demo cassette had been the entry ticket since the middle eighties, cheap to dub and cheap to post, and by 1993 a band that wanted to be taken seriously needed a compact disc instead, which cost real money to manufacture and therefore required somebody with real money. That one change professionalised the underground and thinned it in the same movement.
The disc also stretched the records. Vinyl gave a band forty minutes and an argument about which side the best song belonged on. A compact disc gave them seventy four, and a great deal of the filler on the genre's mid decade albums exists for no better reason than that the space was sitting there. The bands who stayed sharp were the ones who refused the extra room. Deicide's Legion runs twenty nine minutes. Cryptopsy's None So Vile, out in 1996, runs a little over half an hour and does more damage in that time than most of its neighbours manage in seventy.
What the decade handed forward was not a sound. It was a set of working conditions: cheap equipment run at maximum, small labels who answered their letters, festivals that had learned to sell a ticket, and an audience prepared to pay for something it had never heard. Everything after 2000 is built on those four things, including the parts of it that pretend otherwise. The roster who did the building, band by band and record by record, is the 90s death metal bands that defined the decade.
