Southern Europe had better access to the records than Brazil or Australia and almost as little recognition, and it produced at least one album as filthy as anything from the Ruhr.
Bulldozer
From Milan, and the founding Italian extreme metal band. The Day of Wrath in 1985 is crude, fast, blasphemous and completely committed, and it is the Italian equivalent of what Sodom and Destruction were doing in Germany at exactly the same time.
They were working from Venom, like everybody else in continental Europe, and they went further than most. The band's reputation has grown considerably in the last twenty years as the records have become findable.
Necrodeath
From Genoa, and faster than almost anything else in Europe in 1987. Into the Macabre sits on the boundary between thrash and death metal and has been reissued repeatedly. The band are still active, which for an Italian extreme metal group formed in 1984 is remarkable.
The rest of Italy
Schizo, Extrema and Nefas filled out a scene that had a genuine underground press and almost no export capability. Italy's problem was never the bands; it was that the domestic industry had no interest and the international one did not look south.
Spain
A later start and a different set of constraints. Spain had come out of a dictatorship in the mid 1970s and its music industry spent the 1980s catching up on everything at once, which left very little room for a genre this marginal.
Muro, Legion and Sobredosis made records in the second half of the decade. What Spain eventually produced was Angelus Apatrida, formed in 2000, who are now one of the best thrash bands in Europe, and whose existence rests on an underground that had been quietly working for twenty years.
| Band | Country | Record | Year | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bulldozer | Italy | The Day of Wrath | 1985 | The founding Italian extreme record |
| Necrodeath | Italy | Into the Macabre | 1987 | Faster than most of Europe |
| Schizo | Italy | Main Frame Collapse | 1989 | The deeper end |
| Muro | Spain | Sobrenatural | 1989 | Spanish language, domestic audience |
| Legion | Spain | Legion | 1990 | Late, and short lived |
| Angelus Apatrida | Spain | The Call | 2012 | What the underground eventually produced |
Why southern Europe was overlooked
Not isolation, because the records were reaching Milan and Madrid without much delay. The problem was the other direction.
The international metal press was British, German and American, and its attention went to the scenes it could reach. Italian and Spanish labels had no distribution into those markets. And several of these bands sang in their own languages, which closed the export route entirely.
Add a domestic industry in both countries that regarded metal as a curiosity, and a scene can be productive for a decade without anybody outside noticing.
What is there now
Considerably more than there was. Italy has a substantial extreme metal scene with genuine international standing, and Spain has produced in Angelus Apatrida a band who headline European festivals.
The 1980s records have been reissued and are collected, and Bulldozer in particular are now understood as part of the same European wave as the German bands rather than as an Italian oddity. That reassessment is thirty years late and it is at least accurate.
The Scandinavian scene that made the same transition and then turned into something else entirely is Sweden Before Death Metal, and the general account is in Brazil, Canada and the Rest of the World.
The language decision
Both countries split on it and the split determined what happened to each band.
Bulldozer and Necrodeath sang in English, which is why they were licensed abroad and why they are the two Italian names anybody outside Italy knows. Muro sang in Spanish and became genuinely popular at home with no international profile at all.
Neither choice was wrong. Singing in your own language builds a real relationship with a domestic audience and closes the export route; singing in English opens the route and produces lyrics written in a language the band frequently did not command. Every non anglophone scene in this history faced the same decision and they did not all answer it the same way.
Where to start
With The Day of Wrath, which is the record from southern Europe that most deserves to be better known and which sits comfortably next to the German albums of the same year.
Then Into the Macabre, which is faster and closer to death metal. Then, if the modern end is of more interest, Angelus Apatrida, who are one of the two or three best thrash bands operating in Europe today and whose existence is the long delayed payoff for everything above.
What Italy did instead
The country's real contribution to heavy music came later and elsewhere. Italy became, from the 1990s onwards, one of the most productive countries in Europe for symphonic and power metal, with an industry and an audience that thrash never had there.
That is worth noting because it explains the shape of the underground. The bands in this article were working against the grain of what their country would eventually be good at, which is a harder position than being early in a scene that later flourishes.
The bands nobody reissued
A closing note on what is missing. Both countries produced bands whose entire output was a demo or a single track on a local compilation, and a substantial proportion of that material has never been digitised.
Italy's fanzine culture documented some of it in print, which means there are reviews of records that nobody alive has heard. Spain's underground of the late 1980s is even less recorded.
That is normal rather than tragic, and it is worth stating because a chapter like this can imply that what survived is what mattered. What survived is what somebody pressed, and in southern Europe in 1987 that decision was taken by a very small number of people with very little money.
Sources and notes
Years and labels refer to original pressings. Several of these records have complicated reissue histories.
