Picture the room this decade was actually built in. It is not a studio and there is no engineer in it. It is a bedroom in Glendale, Arizona, four teenagers who formed a band in December 2003 when the oldest of them was sixteen, a computer, and an EP called Doom that they put out themselves in December 2005 and pushed through a social network. Eighteen months later their first album entered the Billboard 200 at number 54, having sold close to thirteen thousand copies in a week, which made it the highest charting debut heavy metal had produced since 1999.
Hold that beside the previous decade's high water mark. In 1996 the best a death metal record had ever managed on the same chart was number 151, and it took the biggest band in the genre seven albums to get there.
Something in the machinery had changed, and it was not the music. The chapter on 90s death metal bands ends with a genre that had lost its distribution, its television slot and its press. The 2000s are the decade it built replacements for all three, out of parts nobody had to ask permission for.
The decade opened with a funeral
Chuck Schuldiner died on 13 December 2001, aged thirty four, of brain cancer, while Control Denied was unfinished. The man who had renamed his band Death in 1983 did not live to see any of what follows, and for about two years the genre's response was to look backwards: reissues, tributes, box sets, a long argument about what the catalogue was worth and who owned it.
Meanwhile the bands who had never stopped simply carried on. Cannibal Corpse made Kill in 2006 with a line-up that had been stable for a decade. Immolation kept a record every three years going with no line-up drama and no press. Nile went from Black Seeds of Vengeance in 2000 to Annihilation of the Wicked in 2005 and turned Egyptology into a working method rather than a gimmick. None of that was news at the time. In hindsight it is the spine of the decade.
What did change under those bands was the equipment. By 2003 a competent home setup could edit a drum take to the grid, replace a kick drum with a sample and punch a guitar part in a syllable at a time, and the genre took to all three like a man taking to a power tool. Precision stopped being a talent and became a purchase. That is the single fact underneath everything else in this decade, and it cuts both ways.
Faster, cleaner, and legible to a machine
The technical wing got the benefit first and ran with it. Necrophagist released Epitaph on Relapse on 3 August 2004, recorded across three German rooms with the drums cut at one studio, the bass in a home setup and the guitars in a basement, assembled from punch-ins until the playing was exactly as clean as Muhammed Suiçmez wanted it. It has never had a successor, because the band effectively stopped, and it remains the record every guitarist of that generation learned from.
Decapitated arrived from Poland with Winds of Creation on Wicked World on 17 April 2000, cut the previous year at Selani Studio in Olsztyn by four musicians of whom the drummer, Witold Kiełtyka, had been fifteen at the session and the oldest was eighteen. Origin pushed tempo to the point of abstraction. Hate Eternal and Cryptopsy did the American version, and by mid decade there was a whole tier of bands whose selling point was the difficulty of their own material.
The bill for all this came in around 2006. A record made this way can be flawless and still feel like nothing happened, because the human error that used to make a band sound like four people in a room had been engineered out along with the mistakes. That reaction is the seed of everything the following decade did, and it is why the old school revival, when it came, was a revolt about production before it was a revolt about riffs.
Precision stopped being a talent and became a purchase. The bill for that arrived around 2006.
The bands came back
Then the reunions started, and they kept coming for the rest of the decade. Suffocation came back in 2003 and made Souls to Deny the following year. Obituary returned with Frozen in Time in 2005 and pulled Scott Burns out of retirement to engineer it, which was the closest thing the genre had to a homecoming. Atheist reassembled in 2006, twelve years after a contractual album had finished them off. Carcass played again in 2007. Pestilence came back in 2008. Gorguts restarted the same year, and Cynic made a second album in 2008, eighteen years after the first.
It is easy to be cynical about a reunion and in this case it is wrong. These bands did not come back because a promoter waved money at them. They came back because a generation who had been fourteen in 1993, with no chance of seeing any of them, had grown into an audience with jobs, and because the records had gone on selling quietly the whole time they were gone. The demand had been accumulating in the dark for ten years.
An encyclopaedia and a festival, built by nobody in particular
Read that last figure slowly, because it settles an argument. Fifty one thousand bands is not a scene, it is a population, and it exists because the barrier to entry collapsed twice in ten years: once when recording became affordable and again when distribution became free. Every one of those entries was typed in by somebody who was not paid for it.
The physical counterpart arrived at the same time. Maryland Deathfest was started in 2003 by Ryan Taylor and Evan Harting, three days at a Baltimore venue called the Thunderdome over Memorial Day weekend, and it grew into the largest event of its kind in North America, drawing bands and audiences from dozens of countries. No sponsor invented it. Two people booked a room, and the constituency that the nineties had supposedly killed turned up in it.
The nineties lost the machinery and kept the audience. The 2000s found out that the audience could build machinery of its own.
Rafael Quintero, KaosMetal
Deathcore, and the row it started
Which brings us back to the bedroom in Glendale. Job for a Cowboy did nothing that had not been done before musically, taking the death metal vocal and grafting it onto hardcore song shapes and breakdowns, but they did it on a platform where a fifteen year old could hear a band, share it and buy it in the same afternoon, and the result was a chart position that no death metal band had come close to in twenty years of trying.
The genre's reaction was ferocious and mostly beside the point. Deathcore was accused of being a costume, of putting the growl on music with no death metal in it, of selling breakdowns to people who had never bought a record with a Dan Seagrave painting on it. Some of that was true. What the argument concealed is that the platform, not the style, was the change, and every band in the underground was about to use it. Job for a Cowboy themselves moved out of the style within one album and kept moving.
So the decade ends with the genre larger, better documented, better attended and much better recorded than at any point in its history, and with a substantial part of its own audience convinced that all four improvements had cost it something. Both positions were correct, which is why the next ten years were spent digging up the sound of 1990 on purpose. Before that, though, there is a debt to settle with the bands the previous decade swallowed whole: one album and gone is the roll call of the groups who made a single record and were never heard from again.
