Death metal did not die in the nineties. It was dropped. The distinction carries the whole decade, and getting it right matters, because the folklore version, in which the music burned out on its own excess somewhere around 1994 and lay in the ground until somebody dug it up, is wrong in every particular that can be checked.
The shape is this. Between 1991 and 1993 the genre made more good records than it had in the previous five years put together. The industry noticed. For roughly thirty months major label money went into a form of music that had been assembled in garages by teenagers with second hand cabinets, and then the money looked at what it had bought, did not care for the arithmetic, and walked. Nobody died. Contracts lapsed, catalogues went out of print, tours stopped covering their own fuel, and a genre that had briefly been a business went back to being a network of people who wrote to each other. If you want the full arc in one place, the complete history of death metal runs it from 1983 forward. This chapter is the section where the graph turns over.
1991 and 1992: everything at once
Count the records. In 1991 alone the genre produced Human, Effigy of the Forgotten, Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious, Blessed Are the Sick, Clandestine, The Rack, War Master, Mental Funeral, Dawn of Possession and Unquestionable Presence, and not one of them is filler. Death made Human for Relativity with session players borrowed from Cynic and Sadus, which turned a band into a workshop. Suffocation made Effigy of the Forgotten for Roadrunner and set the template that a hundred later bands would work from without improving on it. This was the year the music stopped proving it existed and started competing with itself.
1992 kept the pace and hardened the tone. Deicide cut Legion at Morrisound with Scott Burns, released it through R/C on 9 June, and made it twenty nine minutes long, which is the correct length for a record that has one idea and executes it with a bone saw. Cannibal Corpse put out Tomb of the Mutilated and were rewarded with a legal problem that lasted fourteen years. Vader, Dismember, Unleashed and Grave filled in the rest of the map. There was now a circuit, a press, a distribution chain and, crucially, a single address where most of the American records were being made.
That address is the part worth pausing on. Morrisound Recording in Tampa, with Scott Burns at the desk, engineered so much of the genre between 1988 and 1993 that a listener could identify the room in four seconds. It was the best thing that happened to death metal and it was also the beginning of the case against it, because uniformity of sound is indistinguishable from exhaustion of ideas once a critic has decided which way to argue. By 1993 the reviews had started to say so.
What the majors thought they were buying
Morbid Angel got the biggest cheque. Covenant came out through Giant, a Warner subsidiary, on 1 June 1993 in Britain and 22 June in America, recorded at Morrisound with Flemming Rasmussen producing alongside the band, the same Rasmussen who had made Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets and ...And Justice for All. The videos for "Rapture" and "God of Emptiness" went into rotation on Headbangers Ball, the MTV metal show that was the only national television any of these bands would ever get, and "God of Emptiness" then turned up on Beavis and Butt-head, which put a death metal band in front of an audience of millions who had not asked for one. By 2003 the album had sold over 150,000 copies in the United States according to Nielsen SoundScan, which made it the best selling death metal record ever made.
Read that figure twice, because it is the hinge of the decade. A hundred and fifty thousand copies over ten years is a triumph for the genre and a rounding error for a major label. In the same period Earache licensed a group of its records to Columbia for the Americas, which is how Heartwork, Wolverine Blues and Cathedral's The Ethereal Mirror came to be pressed with a major's logo on the spine. Columbia did not hit the sales it had projected for itself, wanted out early, and the rights reverted to Earache, who went back to being independent and stayed that way.
A hundred and fifty thousand copies over ten years is a triumph for the genre and a rounding error for a major label.
Meanwhile the same labels were being shown exactly where the money actually was. Roadrunner, the company that had signed Deicide, Suffocation, Immolation and Gorguts, put out Type O Negative's Bloody Kisses in 1993 and got its first radio play and its first gold record, upgraded to platinum in 1995. Sepultura's Chaos A.D., the same year, became the first Roadrunner album to reach the Billboard top forty. Seven years later Slipknot went platinum. No executive needed a memo explaining what those three facts meant when set beside a death metal band selling fifteen thousand copies and needing tour support to leave the state.
Where the audience went
The listeners did not evaporate either. They divided, and every direction they went in was away. The extreme end of the audience, and almost all of the extreme end of the press, turned north from 1993 onwards, because the Norwegian black metal scene was producing both records and criminal trials, and no death metal band on earth could compete with that for column inches. The mainstream end went to the groove and then to nu metal, which offered the same volume with a chorus attached. A third slice went to Gothenburg and the melodic strain, which kept the vocals and dropped the density.
What was left over was the core, and the core was small. This is the honest measure of the slump: not that death metal stopped being made, but that the number of people who would pay for it in 1996 was roughly what it had been in 1990, while the number of bands making it had multiplied by ten. Every one of them was competing for the same shelf, and most of the shelves belonged to companies who had just decided that the shelf should hold something else.
The clearest fossil the period left behind is the one album death metal band. A group signs, records, gets a pressing, and then the option is not taken up, and there is no second album ever, however good the first one was. Demilich formed in Kuopio in 1990, made Nespithe for Necropolis in 1993 and came apart almost immediately over the label arrangement and what the record earned, which is a career ended by paperwork rather than by any shortage of ideas. Terrorizer later put the album on its list of records a listener has to hear, and it has been reissued repeatedly since. Disembowelment formed in Melbourne in November 1989, released Transcendence into the Peripheral through Relapse in 1993, split the same year, and never played a single concert in their entire existence. Two of the most discussed death metal records of the decade, and both bands were finished before the audience for them had assembled. Multiply that pattern by a hundred and you have the middle of the nineties.
The records that changed direction
Entombed went first and went furthest. Wolverine Blues arrived on 31 August 1993 with Tomas Skogsberg producing, a mid tempo swing under the guitars and a term attached to it, death and roll, that the band spent years objecting to. The sleeve made the situation plainer than any review could: Earache did a deal with Marvel to put the Wolverine character on an alternate edition, without the band's approval, and the video used him too. The comic company got a promotion, the label got a hook, and the record that was supposed to carry Swedish death metal into a wider market carried it into a different genre instead.
Carcass made the same journey with better manners. Heartwork, in October 1993, is the most melodic and best produced record they ever made and it went out through Columbia in North America, and then the label situation came apart, and Swansong in 1996 was released with twelve of the seventeen tracks that had been recorded for it. The band split the same year. In the Netherlands Gorefest pulled the tempos back on Erase in 1994, went to rock on Soul Survivor in 1996, and issued Chapter 13 in 1998 to poor sales before announcing the end before the year was out. Pestilence had already gone, breaking up in 1994 after Spheres divided their audience down the middle.
Atheist are the clearest case of all, because they did not change direction so much as sign off. The band had broken up in 1992 and reassembled purely to deliver Elements in 1993 and discharge a contract, then disbanded again in early 1994. Their bassist Roger Patterson had died in a van accident on 12 February 1991, at the age of twenty two. What that band was building, three albums of rhythmic writing that nobody else in the genre could follow, stopped there for twelve years.
Five years for one record
The single sharpest illustration of what the slump actually was belongs to Gorguts. Roadrunner dropped them after The Erosion of Sanity in 1993. Luc Lemay went away and wrote the strangest death metal record anyone had attempted, a thing built out of dissonance, scraped harmonics and rhythmic writing that refuses to resolve, and the songs were substantially finished by the end of that same year. Then nothing happened, for five years, because no company wanted to release it. Obscura finally came out on 23 June 1998 through Olympic Recordings, cut at Studio Victor in Montreal with Pierre Rémillard producing, with Steeve Hurdle on second guitar, Steve Cloutier on bass and Patrick Robert on drums. Lemay has said since that the audience for it at the time was very small and mostly bewildered.
Hold that against the folklore, which says the middle nineties produced nothing. The middle nineties produced Obscura, and had no mechanism to put it in a shop. They also produced None So Vile, which Cryptopsy released on 3 July 1996 through Wrong Again Records, recorded in the same Montreal studio with the same producer, and which is now cited in more interviews than most platinum albums. The absence in this decade is not an absence of records. It is an absence of anyone to press them.
A genre does not stop because the records stop. It stops when there is nobody left whose job it is to answer the letter.
Rafael Quintero, KaosMetal
The man who closed the desk
Scott Burns worked full time from 1987 to 1997 and then stopped, moving into computer programming and taking on studio work only occasionally afterwards. He has said plainly that he had been pigeonholed as the death metal guy, and that being the death metal guy in 1997 was a smaller job than it had been in 1991. He came back for Obituary's Frozen in Time in 2005 and otherwise left the desk to other people. Nothing summarises the decade better than that. The genre's central address stopped taking bookings, not because the engineer had lost interest in the music but because the diary had emptied.
The genre's central address stopped taking bookings, not because the engineer had lost interest in the music but because the diary had emptied.
What survived, and how
Three things carried the genre through to the other side, and none of them is the thing the folklore credits. The first is the bands who never signed for anyone who could drop them. Cannibal Corpse went to Metal Blade in July 1989 and have never left, and by 2015 their catalogue had sold two million copies worldwide, a figure no death metal band on a major ever came close to. Morbid Angel went back to Earache for Formulas Fatal to the Flesh on 24 February 1998, recorded at Morrisound the previous year with Steve Tucker in place of David Vincent, and made a harder record than the one the major had paid for. Immolation, dropped by Roadrunner, signed to Metal Blade and released Here in After on 13 February 1996, recorded the previous July, and it is better than anything they had made with a bigger company behind them.
The second is the European infrastructure, which had been built for a smaller market and therefore did not break when the market got smaller. Nuclear Blast, Century Media, Relapse and Osmose kept signing and kept paying, and the scenes described in the chapter on polish death metal bands and the rest of the world had never depended on American money in the first place. Vader kept recording. Behemoth turned into a death metal band precisely when the Americans were being told there was no market for one. Nuclear Blast took Death for The Sound of Perseverance in 1998 after Roadrunner had put out Symbolic in 1995. Chuck Schuldiner was later diagnosed with brain cancer while working on Control Denied, and he died on 13 December 2001, aged 34.
The third is the new bands who came up inside the slump and never knew any other conditions. Nile formed in Greenville in 1993, self released the Festivals of Atonement EP in 1995, and had their debut album stranded when Visceral Productions folded in 1997, at which point Relapse picked it up and put them on tour with Incantation and Morbid Angel. That is what a functioning underground looks like: a label with no radio budget catching a record that a bigger company had let fall.
| Band | The record | By the end of the decade |
|---|---|---|
| Death | Human (1991) | Final album 1998 on Nuclear Blast, then Control Denied |
| Suffocation | Effigy of the Forgotten (1991) | Split in 1998 after the Despise the Sun EP |
| Carcass | Necroticism (1991) | Split in 1996 after Swansong |
| Atheist | Unquestionable Presence (1991) | Split in 1994 having delivered a contractual album |
| Gorguts | The Erosion of Sanity (1993) | Dropped, then five years to get Obscura released |
| Pestilence | Testimony of the Ancients (1991) | Split in 1994 after Spheres |
| Gorefest | False (1992) | Split in 1998 after a rock album and a poor seller |
| At the Gates | Slaughter of the Soul (1995) | Split in 1996, and the record outlived them |
| Morbid Angel | Covenant (1993) | Back on Earache with a new singer, still working |
| Cannibal Corpse | Tomb of the Mutilated (1992) | Still on Metal Blade, still touring, never dropped |
| Immolation | Dawn of Possession (1991) | On Metal Blade and making their best records |
| Vader | The Ultimate Incantation (1992) | Still recording, still touring, working from Poland |
One record proves the point better than the table does. Slaughter of the Soul was recorded at Studio Fredman in Gothenburg between May and July 1995 with Fredrik Nordström producing, released by Earache on 14 November, and it is the most influential death metal album of the decade's second half. At the Gates broke up the following year. The band that made the record was not there to benefit from it, and a generation of American bands took it apart in the early 2000s and built a whole industry out of the pieces. The nineties end exactly like that: with the music going one way and the people who made it going another.
So here is the verdict, and it is not a funeral. The majors opened the genre up on the table, decided there was nothing saleable inside it, and closed it again without stitching. What crawled off the table was leaner, angrier and no longer under any illusion that a cheque was coming. It went back to the labels that had never promised one, to the countries that had never had one, and to a generation of bands who had watched the whole thing happen and drawn the obvious conclusion. That is the ground the old school revival grew out of, and it explains why the revival sounds the way it does: not like 1993, when there was money in the room, but like 1990, when there was not.
