Boss built the HM-2 Heavy Metal pedal from October 1983 until October 1991 and then stopped, because a small orange box with four knobs and one idea had stopped selling. In August 2021 the company put it back in American shops as the HM-2W Waza Craft at a hundred and seventy nine dollars, and the buyers were guitarists who had not been born when the first run was killed off. One pedal, thirty years apart. That gap is this chapter.
The revival is the strangest thing that ever happened to this music, because it is a genre that came back by deciding to sound older than it was. Nothing else in metal did that. Thrash came back playing thrash faster; black metal came back playing black metal cleaner. Death metal came back by hunting down a discontinued distortion pedal, a dead studio's microphone placement and a drum sound nobody had wanted since 1993, and by treating all three as scripture. If you want how death metal was born in the first place, that is the chapter at the top of this series. This one is about what happened when a later generation dug the corpse up on purpose.
The digging started because the alternative had become unbearable. By the turn of the century the genre's professional wing had gone to Pro Tools, triggered kicks, quantised grids and a guitar tone with the low end scooped out of it until the riff sounded like a fax machine, and the men who had made 90's death metal bands matter were either playing to two hundred people or not playing at all. A record made in 2001 could be technically flawless and completely dead. Some of the audience left. A smaller part of it went looking for the shovels.
What OSDM actually means
The acronym is old school death metal, and it is used badly more often than it is used well. It does not mean death metal made a long time ago. It means death metal made now to the specification of 1990, and the specification is narrower than the slogan suggests: mid tempos that leave room for a riff to land, songs built out of four or five parts rather than fourteen, blast beats used as punctuation instead of grammar, a guitar tone that is thick rather than sharp, and a drum kit recorded as a drum kit with the room left in it. The vocal is dredged out from under a floor and stays there. Nothing is sped up after the fact.
The negative definition is more useful than the positive one. This music is defined against triggers, against the click track ruling the arrangement, against the surgical guitar sound of the technical wing, and against anything that asks you to admire the playing rather than feel the weight of it. Those bands exist and some of them are magnificent, and they belong to the technical wing of the genre, which is a different argument entirely. This one is about bands who wanted the record to sound like it had been in the ground a while before you got to it.
The Stockholm four who did it first did it without an audience. Repugnant formed in Norsborg in 1998, ran until 2004, and left behind a handful of demos and one album, Epitome of Darkness, recorded in 2002 and not released until 2006 on To the Death, by which point the band no longer existed. Their singer and guitarist worked under the name Mary Goore and was Tobias Forge, who a few years later put on a mitre and started selling out arenas with Ghost. Daniel Ekeroth, in Swedish Death Metal, calls what they made amazingly old school sounding, and that is the correct verdict: the record is a deliberate forgery of 1990, executed well enough that people who found it secondhand assumed it was one.
The bands that went backwards first
Assembled in Stockholm the same year out of four men who were already known for playing something else entirely, Bloodbath made the revival respectable before it had a name. Mikael Akerfeldt of Opeth sang, Dan Swano of Edge of Sanity played drums, and Anders Nystrom and Jonas Renkse, both of Katatonia, took guitar and bass. The Breeding Death EP arrived in 2000 and Resurrection Through Carnage in 2002, and the joke, if it ever was one, stopped being funny the moment anybody heard it: four musicians who had spent a decade making progressive and melancholic music sat down and built a reproduction of the Stockholm sound of 1991 that beat most of the originals.
What that band proved is the load bearing fact of the whole movement. The old sound was not a limitation the nineties had grown out of. It was a set of choices, and the choices still worked. The Swedish wave that followed took the point literally: Entrails, Bastard Priest, Miasmal, and Tribulation, whose 2009 debut The Horror is a straight salute to the buzzsaw before that band walked off in a completely different direction. England arrived later and colder, with Cruciamentum and Grave Miasma. None of them were pretending to be new. That was the point of them, and the wider story sits in the revival as its own scene.
The old sound was not a limitation the nineties had grown out of. It was a set of choices, and the choices still worked.
The labels that printed it
None of this would have left the rehearsal room without a specific kind of small business: a label run by one or two people out of a spare room, pressing between three hundred and two thousand copies of a record by a band nobody had heard of, and shifting most of them by mail order to the same few hundred customers. That is not a romantic description. It is the actual arithmetic, and the whole revival stands on it.
| Label | Founded | Run by | What it did |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hells Headbangers | 2000 | the Horval brothers, Cleveland | Kept the filthiest end of death and black metal in print through the dead years |
| Nuclear War Now! Productions | 2001 | Yosuke Konishi | Began with a Blasphemy live recording made on 13 July 2001; became the home of war metal and the caverns |
| 20 Buck Spin | 2005 | Dave Adelson | Signed Tomb Mold, and did more than anyone to make the second wave audible outside the underground |
| Dark Descent Records | 2009 | Matt Calvert, Colorado | Released Blood Incantation and Horrendous before either had a reputation |
The men running these labels were not speculating on a trend. They were guessing in public, with their own money, on records with no radio and no press behind them. Matt Calvert started Dark Descent late in 2009 with a co-founder who left almost immediately, and his first release was an EP by the Turkish band Burial Invocation. Six years and a great many records later he described the job in the plainest terms available.
I have to determine how I think it will initially do and press accordingly.
Matt Calvert of Dark Descent Records, interviewed by No Echo, 3 September 2015
That sentence is the revival's entire business model. Every record in this chapter exists because somebody made that calculation and was willing to eat the boxes if it went wrong. The tape labels ran the same maths one order of magnitude down: a hundred cassettes, dubbed and sleeved at a kitchen table, which is a run small enough that a band with forty friends is already halfway to sold out. Cassettes came back for that reason and for no aesthetic reason whatsoever. They are the cheapest physical object a band can put a catalogue number on.
A hundred cassettes and a Bandcamp page
The distribution problem was solved by a website with no interest in metal at all. Bandcamp launched in 2008, founded by Ethan Diamond, Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt and Neal Tucker, and its terms did the thing that mattered: fifteen per cent of a sale, dropping to ten once an artist passes five thousand dollars, with the money going straight to the band instead of through a distributor, a label advance and a recoupment schedule. A band in Denver or Athens or Auckland could put up a demo, sell forty tapes to Finland and Chile in a fortnight, and know the names of the people who bought them.
Death metal took to it faster than almost any other music, because death metal had been a mail order culture since the tape trading years and this was the same transaction with the postage removed from the middle. When the pandemic shut the touring economy down, Bandcamp waived its cut on selected days, and those Bandcamp Fridays moved more than forty million dollars to artists during 2020 alone, most of it in small amounts from people buying records they could no longer see played live.
It is worth being honest about what happened next, because the underground's favourite shop is now an asset on somebody's balance sheet. Epic Games bought Bandcamp in March 2022. Eighteen months later, on 28 September 2023, Epic sold it to the licensing company Songtradr, and roughly half the staff were not offered jobs by the new owner. The service still works and the bands still get paid. Nobody who watched that sequence assumes it is permanent, and if you want the bands who live on it, the underground as it stands right now is a piece of its own.
The caverns, which are not a revival at all
Here the chapter stops being about nostalgia, because the two strains that actually pushed this music somewhere new were not looking backwards. The first is cavernous death metal, and its ancestor is precise. Incantation released Onward to Golgotha on Relapse on 5 May 1992, cut at Trax East in New Jersey with Steve Evetts engineering, and it did what nothing else of the period did: it dragged the tempo down until the riff smeared, buried Craig Pillard's voice under the guitars instead of setting it on top of them, and used reverb as a structural element rather than a finishing coat. For a decade almost nobody followed. Then everybody did.
The Brisbane group who wear executioners' hoods and answer questions in riddles took it furthest. Portal formed in 1994 and spent nine years getting to Seepia in 2003, then made Outre in 2007 and Swarth in 2009, records on which the riff is genuinely hard to locate and the drums arrive as pressure rather than as rhythm. Their singer, credited as the Curator, performs in headgear built fresh for each album, including a tattered wizard's hat that covers his whole face. Written down it sounds ridiculous. In a room at volume it is not ridiculous at all.
The Athenians who took Incantation's method and gave it a liturgy made the other version. Dead Congregation formed in 2004 and released Graves of the Archangels on 30 January 2008 through Nuclear War Now!, seven thousand copies on CD, opening with a fragment of the Trisagion, a hymn out of the Orthodox Divine Liturgy, before the record buries it alive. Add Grave Miasma in London, Spectral Voice in Denver and Undergang in Copenhagen and you have a style with its own logic, its own recording preferences and its own audience, none of which existed in 1991. Calling that a revival is lazy. It is the cavernous school, and it is a new thing wearing old clothes.
The dissonant strain
The other genuinely new development came out of Quebec and took fifteen years to be understood. Gorguts released Obscura on 23 June 1998 through Olympic Recordings, written by Luc Lemay and Steeve Hurdle and cut at Studio Victor in Montreal with Pierre Remillard producing, and it is one of the few records in metal that people bought, filed and forgot before deciding it was a masterpiece. The guitars are detuned and scraped, the intervals refuse to resolve, whole passages sound like the tape is being physically bent. At the time it sold badly and confused nearly everyone who heard it.
What it did was give a later generation permission to abandon consonance without giving up force. Ulcerate, formed in Auckland in 2000 by Michael Hoggard and Jamie Saint Merat, built the vocabulary out properly: Everything Is Fire on Willowtip on 7 April 2009, The Destroyers of All on 25 January 2011, and Vermis on Relapse on 13 September 2013, three records on which the drumming carries the melody and the guitars carry the anxiety. Ad Nauseam in Italy and Artificial Brain in New York went their own ways with it. If a riff has ever made you feel physically uneasy rather than excited, that is death metal today doing something the nineties never attempted.
Obscura is one of the few records in metal that people bought, filed and forgot before deciding it was a masterpiece.
The second generation and the record that got out
By the middle of the 2010s the movement had a second generation who had grown up inside it, and the difference showed at once: they were not reproducing anything. Blood Incantation formed in Denver in 2011 and put out Starspawn on Dark Descent in 2016 and Hidden History of the Human Race in 2019, records that carry the old guitar tone into long, drifting, science fiction structures no band in 1991 would have recognised. Tomb Mold, out of Toronto, released Manor of Infinite Forms on 20 Buck Spin on 8 June 2018 and followed it with Planetary Clairvoyance in 2019. Horrendous, formed in 2009, made Ecdysis in 2014 and Anareta in 2015 for Dark Descent and quietly turned into the best songwriters of the lot. Between them they are most of what the genre looks like now.
A parallel wing came in through hardcore rather than through a record collection, and it is the reason the rooms got bigger. Gatecreeper formed in Arizona in 2013 and made Sonoran Depravation for Relapse on 7 October 2016 and Deserted on 4 October 2019, both built on the Swedish guitar sound and on song shapes borrowed from bands who play to moving bodies. Necrot released Mortal on Tankcrimes on 28 August 2020. Frozen Soul put out Crypt of Ice on Century Media on 8 January 2021. 200 Stab Wounds went from Slave to the Scalpel in 2021 to Manual Manic Procedures on Metal Blade on 28 June 2024, a two record climb out of a Cleveland practice space. Undeath, Sanguisugabogg and Creeping Death made the same journey on roughly the same schedule, and the full roll call is in the current crop, band by band.
Then one of them got out completely. Blood Incantation recorded Absolute Elsewhere at Hansa Tonstudio in Berlin during the summer of 2023 and released it on Century Media on 4 October 2024: two tracks, one of twenty minutes and one of twenty three, each cut into three parts, with Thorsten Quaeschning of Tangerine Dream playing synthesiser on one of them. It scored 92 on Metacritic, the third highest rated release of any kind that year, reached number three on the UK rock and metal albums chart, number sixteen in Switzerland, number seventeen in Austria and number twenty in Germany, and was named album of the year by Metal Hammer. A band off the Dark Descent mail order list was being reviewed by people who own no death metal records at all.
Twenty years is not a revival any more
So here is the honest question, and you already know the answer if you have been buying these records. Repugnant formed in 1998. Bloodbath released their first EP in 2000. That is more than a quarter of a century of continuous activity, four label generations, two entirely new substyles and a record that charted in four countries. At what point does a revival stop being a revival and simply become the way the music is played?
It passed that point a long time ago. What gets called old school death metal now is a living tradition with a canon, festivals, an economy and its own internal arguments, in the way that hard bop and Delta blues are living traditions rather than reenactments. The bands who are good at it are not copying anybody; they are working inside a form, exactly as a band in 1991 worked inside a form, and the form happens to have been fixed thirty five years ago. The bands who are bad at it are copying the logo font and the cover art and hoping you will not notice there is no song underneath. That has always been true of everything.
What did change is the shape of the map. This is no longer one thing with a Florida address, it is a dozen adjacent practices that share a vocal register and disagree about everything else, and if you want that laid out properly, the death metal subgenres are the next chapter and the one that explains why two records with the same growl on them can have nothing else in common.
Meanwhile the pedal is back in production, the tape labels are still dubbing hundreds, and somewhere tonight a nineteen year old is recording a demo through a borrowed amplifier and putting it up for four dollars. The corpse got exhumed in 2002. It has not gone back in the ground since.
