Close to a hundred thousand copies. That is what one Mexican extreme metal album shifted after it came out in 1993, and the band who made it had recorded it at Morrisound in Tampa with Scott Burns at the desk, which is to say in the exact room, with the exact engineer, that the Florida bands were using.
Hold that against the American numbers. Morbid Angel's Covenant, the biggest death metal record a major label ever paid for, took ten years to pass a hundred and fifty thousand in the United States. Mexico did two thirds of that in one country, in one year, for a band almost nobody outside Latin America can name.
That is the shape of this whole scene. Enormous at home. Locked in.
The market did the work the industry would not
Every isolated scene invents its own distribution. Chile used the post, which is why the story in death metal outside America keeps coming back to what a cassette could survive. Mexico did something better. Mexico had a street.
The Tianguis Cultural del Chopo started in 1980 outside the Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico City, a tianguis being a street market that assembles on one day of the week and vanishes again by evening. It began as a swap for books and imported LPs that the shops did not stock. By 1982 there were too many people for the museum to tolerate and it was pushed into the road. It wandered for six years, through San Rafael, the Casco de Santo Tomas and the university, and settled in 1988 on Aldama street in the Guerrero neighbourhood, where it still runs every Saturday.
Understand what that is. It is a record shop, a distributor, a fanzine stand, a rehearsal noticeboard and a national tape exchange, open one day a week, owned by nobody, impossible to close. On 22 September 2023 the city government declared it intangible cultural heritage, which is a very formal way of admitting that a market of cassette dealers outlasted every record company in the country.
A record shop, a distributor, a fanzine stand and a national tape exchange, open one day a week, owned by nobody, impossible to close.
The other thing worth knowing about Mexico is that the authorities had spent the seventies treating this entire culture as a policing matter, closing venues and leaning on anybody who put a show on. Musicians from that first generation remember rehearsals being visited. The scene that came up in the eighties was therefore already used to operating in the gaps, and it treated the market on Aldama the way a Polish band treated Jarocin. It was the only institution that had never let anybody down.
Transmetal, and the arithmetic nobody quotes
The three brothers who built the biggest extreme metal band in the country did it in Ciudad Azteca, in Ecatepec on the edge of the capital, and they have never once changed the line-up at the centre of it. Transmetal formed in 1987 around Juan Partida on lead guitar, Lorenzo Partida on bass and Javier Partida on drums. The EP Desear un Funeral came in 1989. More than thirty records have followed since, which is a working rate the American bands of the same vintage never came close to.
El infierno de Dante, in 1993, is the one that broke the ceiling. Morrisound, Scott Burns producing, videos in rotation on television, and sales approaching a hundred thousand. A Mexican band went to Tampa and came back with the record that made extreme metal a mass product in its own country, and the entire Anglophone press of the period missed it, because the lyrics were in Spanish and nobody at the magazines was reading Spanish.
Cenotaph, and the split that produced two bands
The death metal proper starts in Mexico City in 1989 with Cenotaph, formed by Daniel Corchado, who sang and played most of it. Two EPs went out through the Brazilian label Distorted Harmony, which tells you where the Mexicans were looking for allies. Then the Mexican company Horus Records put out The Gloomy Reflection of Our Hidden Sorrows in 1992, with Guillermo Hernandez and Cesar Sanchez on guitars and Oscar Clorio on drums, and it is the record the rest of the continent measured itself against for the next decade. It is slow where the Americans were fast, and it is mournful in a way Florida had no vocabulary for at all.
Corchado then left, in 1992, and started The Chasm in the same city. Antonio Leon came in on drums and the two of them have been the whole band ever since, through ten records from Procreation of the Inner Temple in 1994 to The Scars of a Lost Reflective Shadow in 2022. They moved to Chicago. They signed to Earache. They kept writing long instrumental passages that no death metal band was supposed to be able to sell, and they sold them.
Every scene has one record that the next twenty bands are secretly arguing with. In Mexico it is the one Cenotaph made in 1992, and you can hear people still losing that argument.
Rafael Quintero, KaosMetal
The rest of the first wave
Mortuary got there first with an album. Blackened Images came out in 1991 on Avanzada Metalica, recorded and mixed at P and C Studios in Monterrey, and it matters partly because it is one of the earliest important Mexican records sung in English, which was a commercial decision and a bet on the post.
Shub Niggurath began in Mexico City in 1988 under the name Tormentor and took the Lovecraft name two years later. Evilness and Darkness Prevails arrived in May 1994 through Guttural Records and Triangle Circle, and the full length that everybody quotes, The Kinglike Celebration, was not recorded until May 1997. Nine years from first rehearsal to first album. In Mexico that was normal rather than tragic.
Guadalajara had Sargatanas from 1986. Ciudad Juarez had a thrash scene from the early eighties. And then the thing that separates Mexico from every other scene in this chapter arrived: the bands started writing about where they were. Xibalba named themselves after the Maya underworld and put pre Hispanic instruments on Ah Dzam Poop Ek in 1994. Hacavitz and Yaotl Mictlan went to the Aztec material after 2000. Nobody in Tampa was doing that, because Tampa had horror films instead of a conquered civilisation to think about.
Brujeria, and the Mexico invented in Los Angeles
The strangest chapter in Mexican death metal was not made in Mexico. Brujeria came together at a party in Los Angeles in 1989 around Dino Cazares of Fear Factory, the singer known as Juan Brujo and a rotating cast who took stage names, wore bandanas and told the press they were drug traffickers hiding from the FBI. The joke had teeth. The songs were in Spanish, they were about narcotics, migration and the border, and they were played at grindcore speed.
Matando güeros went out through Roadrunner in 1993 with a photograph of a severed head on the front, lifted from a Mexican crime publication, and it was pulled from sale in a lot of places for exactly that reason. Raza odiada followed in 1995, Brujerizmo in 2000, and after a long gap Nuclear Blast took them for Pocho Aztlan in 2016 and Esto es Brujeria in 2023. Juan Brujo died in September 2024, aged 61, after a heart attack.
Argue about whether a band of session musicians in California gets to speak for anybody. Plenty of people did, and still do. What is not arguable is that Brujeria were the first extreme metal band to make the border itself the subject, and that a very large number of listeners in Mexico heard them before they heard Cenotaph, because Roadrunner could get a record into a shop and Horus could not.
That gap between what a scene makes and what a scene can ship is the whole of this chapter. Japan solved it from the opposite direction, with an audience rich enough to buy every import on the shelf and a domestic underground working at a scale that would have embarrassed Santiago. That is japanese Death Metal Bands, and it is the strangest economy in this whole history.
