Morrisound Recording, Tampa, June 1991. In the room is a band from Long Island that has never made an album, behind the desk is Scott Burns, who had engineered most of Florida's records, and on the table is a budget of five thousand dollars. The session takes about a week. A singer from another group working nearby, George Fisher of Monstrosity, wanders in and puts guest vocals on a track. The sleeve is being painted in England by Dan Seagrave, who in the previous eighteen months had painted the two records that defined swedish death metal. Every element of that description belongs to somebody else's chapter.
What came out of the week belongs to nobody but New York. Effigy of the Forgotten was released by Roadrunner on 22 October 1991, and it moved the argument about what death metal is off the two things everybody had been competing over. Florida had been chasing speed and precision. Stockholm had been chasing tone. Suffocation went after mass. Not volume, not tempo, not distortion, but the physical impression of a large object arriving, and once a band had worked out how to produce that on tape, the genre acquired a second engine it has never switched off since.
The floor, not the stage
To understand why weight rather than speed you have to look at who was in the room when these bands played, because New York's audience was not Florida's audience. The city had spent the whole of the eighties building the most physical live culture in American music. Hardcore had taken over the clubs, the shows were about the floor rather than the stage, and the crowd had developed a specific expectation: at some point in a song the band would stop being fast and start being heavy, and everyone would move differently for thirty seconds. In hardcore they called that a mosh part. It was the payoff, and every band in the five boroughs knew how to write one.
The venues taught the same lesson. L'Amour on 63rd Street in Bensonhurst had opened in 1978 as a discotheque, turned into a rock club around 1981, advertised itself as the rock capital of Brooklyn and stayed open until February 2004, and it worked as a room where a young band could open for something enormous and watch what actually moved four hundred people. Nothing about that education points toward playing faster. It points toward learning where in a song a crowd will give you its whole body, and then building the song around that spot.
So the innovation, when it arrived, was not a new sound. It was a piece of hardcore architecture carried across the fence into death metal and welded to a blast beat. That is the breakdown, and every argument about the last thirty five years of heavy music runs through it.
Centereach, and the band that fitted a mosh part into a blast beat
Suffocation came together in Centereach on Long Island at the end of the eighties, took its name from a Morbid Angel song, and by 1990 had the line-up that counts: Frank Mullen singing, Terrance Hobbs and Doug Cerrito on guitars, Josh Barohn on bass and Mike Smith on drums, the last of them arriving out of a local band called Mortuary. Relapse put out the Human Waste EP in May 1991. Five months later the album landed, and the things that make it are all mechanical rather than atmospheric: guitars in C standard, riffs chopped into palm-muted blocks that stop dead instead of ringing, a growl pitched lower than anyone had committed to tape before it, and a drummer who could put bass drums, cymbals and snare down in unison hard enough that the pattern reads as a single impact.
What Suffocation did that nobody had done was structural. A death metal song of 1990 accelerated, and when it wanted contrast it slowed to a mid tempo and rode a riff. Suffocation would blast at full speed, cut the tempo in half without warning, drop into a figure with more space in it than notes, and let the guitars and the kick drum land on the same beat while everything around them went silent. Anyone who has had to play one of those parts knows the hard bit is not the blast. It is the stop. Get the stop wrong by a sixteenth and the whole thing collapses into noise.
Florida taught the genre to run. New York taught it to stop dead, which turned out to be the harder trick and the more useful one.
The record was not received as a masterpiece. Reviews at the time were split, and the reassessment took a decade: Metal Storm eventually gave it ten out of ten, AllMusic four stars out of five, and Metal Hammer placed it eighteenth among death metal albums and called it ground zero for what came next. In the meantime the band had a hard decade. Breeding the Spawn arrived in 1993 with a budget too small to record it properly, the production is genuinely poor and everybody involved has said so, Mike Smith left afterwards, and Pierced from Within in 1995 is the record Breeding the Spawn should have been. The band stopped in 1998 after the Despise the Sun EP and came back in 2003.
Yonkers, Fair Lawn and a state full of bands
Suffocation were not alone and they were not first. Immolation had formed in Yonkers in 1986 as Rigor Mortis, took the name they kept in 1988 when Ross Dolan joined on bass and vocals, and put Dawn of Possession out through Roadrunner in 1991, the same year and the same label as Suffocation's debut. Their method is the opposite one. Where Suffocation build blocks, Robert Vigna writes riffs in dissonant harmonic patterns that set the two guitars against each other, sliding power chords and pinched harmonics over drum patterns that refuse to settle. It is heavy through wrongness rather than through mass, and thirty years of bands have taken more from it than they usually admit.
Incantation formed in August 1989 across the river in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, around the guitarist John McEntee, and Onward to Golgotha in 1992 does the third available thing: it takes the tempo down instead of up, tunes into the basement and lets whole passages crawl at funeral speed with Craig Pillard's voice somewhere underneath the guitars rather than on top of them. McEntee has said in print that the riff itself does not matter, only the feeling the riff produces, which is a strange thing for a guitarist to say and the exact reason the band still sounds like nothing else. Mortician in Yonkers went further and dispensed with a human drummer altogether. Morpheus Descends, Pyrexia and Malignancy filled in the rest of a scene that was, by 1993, the densest concentration of extreme bands in the country.
Then there is the band from the other end of the state, which everybody files under New York and nobody thinks of as a New York band. Cannibal Corpse formed in Buffalo in December 1988, four hundred miles and a different world from Long Island, and made Tomb of the Mutilated at Morrisound between 1 and 15 June 1992 with Scott Burns, released by Metal Blade on 22 September. It was the first time the band had money for overdubs, and Burns used it to push Alex Webster's bass up into the middle of the mix, which is why the record has a bottom the first two do not. Germany banned the first three albums and forbade the band from selling them or playing anything off them, a restriction that stayed in place until 2006. Australia did the same from 1996 for ten years. No death metal band has ever been better advertised by a government.
The label was in the same city
None of it would have travelled without an accident of geography that nobody planned. Roadrunner Records had been founded in the Netherlands in 1980 by Cees Wessels and had opened an American office in New York City in 1986, which meant that when the local bands were ready there was a functioning international label with an A and R department, Monte Conner among them, sitting in the same city and able to watch them play on a Friday. Immolation and Suffocation both went out through it in 1991. That is not a scene being discovered from outside. That is a label walking to the show.
Underneath Roadrunner sat a second tier that mattered more in the long run, because it had no commercial reason to exist and therefore no reason to compromise. Relapse issued the Human Waste EP and later Onward to Golgotha. Pavement Records took Internal Bleeding. United Guttural, a label whose entire purpose was records nobody else would press, took Skinless. The economics were brutal in the ordinary sense: small runs, mail order, distribution by post and by hand at shows, and bands who financed a recording out of day jobs. It is the same arrangement the Stockholm tape trade ran on, three thousand miles west and five years later, and it produced the same result, which is a genre that owed nothing to radio and therefore never had to please it.
What brutal actually means
By 1993 the word had arrived. Death metal around the world was splintering into local dialects, and the American term for what New York was doing was brutal death metal: a music that puts heaviness, speed and rhythmic complexity ahead of every conventional marker of melody or tunefulness, and takes the missing melody as a feature rather than an omission.
The components are specific and they are all still in use. The vocal is the clearest of them. Frank Mullen is credited with originating a growl pitched well below anything on record before 1991, produced from the chest rather than the throat and deliberately stripped of anything a listener could follow as words, and the reason it works is not depth on its own. It is that a voice with no consonants left in it stops competing with the guitars for the same job and becomes another rhythm instrument, which is exactly what a music built on stops and impacts needs. The guitars are down-tuned and played in palm-muted blocks with pinch harmonics used as punctuation. The drums alternate blasts with abrupt half time. Solos, where they exist at all, are short and atonal and no part of the song's identity. And the whole apparatus is built around the moment the tempo drops, because that moment is what the audience came for.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Bill Tolley did not want the word mosh
Internal Bleeding formed on Long Island in 1991, a few miles and two years from Suffocation, and they took one half of what Suffocation had invented and threw the other half away. The blasting went. The technical riff writing went. What stayed was the part where the tempo drops and the whole band lands together, and they wrote entire songs out of nothing else, with the bass pushed forward, the tempo changes made deliberately blunt and a rhythmic feel borrowed as much from hip hop as from metal. Their debut, Voracious Contempt, came out on Pavement Records in 1995.
The name for it came from inside the band. They had been calling those sections mosh parts, in the hardcore way, and the drummer Bill Tolley argued the word had gone jovial and no longer described what the music did to a room. What he wanted was slam. The word stuck, then travelled, and thirty years later it names a worldwide subgenre with its own labels, its own festivals and its own sleeve conventions, all of it traceable to an argument about vocabulary between five men from Long Island. Tolley died on 20 April 2017 in a fire while working as a firefighter in Queens.
Where the line between brutal and slam actually falls
Once both words existed, people started using them interchangeably, and they should not. The difference is not intensity and it is not extremity. It is what the riff is for.
| Element | Brutal death metal | Slam death metal |
|---|---|---|
| Default tempo | Fast, with the drop as contrast | Mid tempo, with speed as contrast |
| What the riff does | Carries a complex rhythmic figure | Carries a groove the body can follow |
| Drums | Blast beats, dense fills, technical | Syncopation locked to the guitar, simplified |
| Vocals | Guttural, still articulated | Guttural, treated as a percussion part |
| Solos | Present, short, atonal | Usually absent |
| Reference record | Suffocation, Effigy of the Forgotten, 1991 | Internal Bleeding, Voracious Contempt, 1995 |
Put plainly: brutal death metal is complicated music that occasionally becomes simple, and slam is simple music that occasionally becomes complicated. Both come from the same rooms and the same audience. Neither is a diluted version of the other, whatever people who prefer one of them will tell you.
Brutal is complicated music that occasionally becomes simple. Slam is simple music that occasionally becomes complicated. That is the whole distinction.
How it got heavier, and where it went
The escalation ran fast. Cryptopsy, from Montreal rather than New York, recorded None So Vile at Studio Victor between December 1995 and January 1996 and released it on 3 July through Wrong Again Records, the small Swedish label that had put out In Flames' first album two years earlier. Thirty-two minutes long, with Lord Worm's vocals abandoning language entirely and Flo Mounier playing drums at a level nobody in the genre had reached, it went to number ten in Decibel's list of the hundred greatest death metal albums. It also proved that the New York method exported cleanly to anybody with the technique to play it.
Slam went in the opposite direction, downward and outward. Skinless, from upstate, put Progression Towards Evil out through the small label United Guttural on 12 March 1998 and toured behind Mortician and Incantation until Relapse signed them. Devourment made Molesting the Decapitated in Texas in 1999 and stripped the form down to almost nothing, which is where the subgenre's reputation for stupidity comes from and also where its appeal lives. By the 2000s the breakdown Suffocation had built out of hardcore had gone back to hardcore, arriving as deathcore, and a generation that had never heard Effigy of the Forgotten was playing its central idea every night.
That is the whole New York inheritance in one line: a city that was never the fastest or the best recorded gave the genre the one thing every subsequent development had to negotiate with. Sweden had already handed over the instrument and the melody. Florida had handed over the speed and the studio. Long Island handed over the moment the music stops moving forward and starts moving down, and no scene that came after, anywhere, has managed to do without it.
