Roughly four hundred miles separate Centereach from Buffalo, and for the whole of the period that matters the two ends of New York State shared no promoter, no studio and no rehearsal room. Both ends get filed under the same three words anyway, and the filing hides the only interesting thing about the subject. The state never had a death metal scene. It had five of them, in five pockets, separated by drives of one to seven hours, each working on a different problem, and four of those five answers went into worldwide circulation. The genre entire is the main article. What follows is the map underneath the famous part of it.
A hundred and eighteen miles of commuter rail
The island east of Queens, a hundred and eighteen miles of parkway, strip mall and unheated garage, put more consequential death metal into the world per mile than any comparable strip in America, and it did it within walking distance of the same train line. Suffocation assembled in Centereach at the end of the eighties and left behind the half time drop that everything since has had to answer to. Internal Bleeding formed in 1991, kept the drop, discarded the blasting and the riff arithmetic wrapped around it, and gave what was left a name that has long since outgrown them. That invention, and the argument over what to call it, belong to the chapter on brutal death metal. The layer working underneath those two is what this piece is for.
Take the clearest case. Before there was a band called Pyrexia there was one called Mortuary, in which the bass player Chris Basile wrote alongside Terrance Hobbs, Doug Cerrito and Mike Smith, the three men who would shortly cut the record that started all of this, and more than thirty songs came out of those rehearsals, with riffs from them surfacing later on the early releases of both groups that grew out of the room. Pyrexia proper formed in 1990 around Basile, the vocalist Darryl Wagner and the guitarist Guy Marchais, who would go on to play in Internal Bleeding and then in Suffocation itself.
The demo Liturgy of Impurity arrived in 1991 and Sermon of Mockery followed in 1993 through a small overseas company called Hard Vinyl, which is the sort of arrangement that decided how far a New York record travelled in that decade. Century Media reissued it in 2015, twenty two years late, to an audience that had spent the interval paying collector prices for the original. Nothing about the music had changed. The distribution had.
New York did not run a scene. It ran an abattoir with five separate lines, each one dressing the same carcass a different way, and no line ever stopped to watch another.
Yonkers, where three bands took three roads out of one city
That city produced three bands with nothing in common except a postcode, which is the best short argument against treating any of this as a single sound. Immolation formed there in 1986 and built heaviness out of harmonic discomfort, with Robert Vigna writing two guitar parts that refuse to resolve against each other and Ross Dolan singing over the top of the disagreement. Mortician came together in the same place in 1989 around the bass player and singer Will Rahmer, signed to Relapse in 1993, and spent the decade dredging horror film dialogue and a subterranean low end into records built for velocity rather than for detail. Malignancy arrived in 1992 with the vocalist Danny Nelson and the guitarist Javier Velez, put out a demo called Eaten Out from Within the following year, waited until 1998 for a deal with United Guttural and released Intrauterine Cannibalism in 1999.
Three bands, thirteen years, one city, and three unrelated methods: dissonance, blunt force and technical chaos. Yonkers is not a large place. It simply had nobody in it telling these people what a death metal band was supposed to do, because there was no local orthodoxy to break and no scout close enough to reward one for breaking it.
Middletown, Franklin Square and the rooms nobody travelled to
Between the island and the city sits the Hudson Valley, which supplied the scene's most useful piece of evidence about how these records were actually made. Morpheus, later Morpheus Descends, held its first rehearsal in Middletown on 31 October 1990, and Ritual of Infinity was recorded in three separate sessions across January, April and September of 1992 at Legend Studios on Long Island before JL America issued it late that year. Three sessions across nine months is not an artistic decision. It is what a record costs when five people are paying for it out of wages, and it describes the finances of nearly every band on this page.
The boroughs went in the opposite direction from the island, which is to say downward. A trio called Winter formed in New York City in 1988 and made one album, released in 1990 and reissued by Nuclear Blast two years later, that took the tempo below anything a doom band was attempting and then simply left it there. It sold almost nothing at the time. The Village Voice later placed it fourteenth in a list of the twenty best New York hardcore and metal albums ever made, which is a strange fate for a record that came and went inside eighteen months.
Sorrow, assembled out of a band called Apparition, went the same way with better luck at the front end and worse at the back. Roadrunner released Hatred and Disgust on 6 October 1992, recorded at Speed of Sound Recording in Franklin Square, and the group split the following year, having got a major independent behind them and then run out of time to use it. They returned three decades later with a new album on Xtreem in 2023.
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Four hundred miles the other way
Buffalo sits closer to Cleveland than to Long Island and behaved like a separate country. Cannibal Corpse formed there in December 1988 and went on to outsell everybody else in this music by a distance nobody has closed. A band called Baphomet had started in the same city a year earlier and cut The Dead Shall Inherit, released in 1992 through Deaf Records, the Peaceville imprint, before changing its name to Banished and carrying on with the same line-up. Neither had contact with the Long Island bands during the years both were forming, and the music proves it. Where Centereach was milling riffs into blocks, Buffalo was playing something rawer and faster, much closer to the thrash it had walked out of.
North again, in South Glens Falls, Ryan Wade and Noah Carpenter started Skinless in 1992 and spent six years getting to a first album. Progression Towards Evil arrived in 1998, the band eventually landed at Relapse, stopped in 2011, reformed with the original line-up in 2013 and released Savagery in 2018. Six years from formation to debut is the honest tempo of this state outside its two famous pockets, and it is why so many of these names read as cult items rather than as careers.
| Bands | Window | What it worked on | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Long Island | Suffocation, Internal Bleeding, Pyrexia | 1988–1995 | The stop, and what a crowd does inside it |
| Yonkers | Immolation, Mortician, Malignancy | 1986–1999 | Three unrelated methods, no local orthodoxy |
| Hudson Valley | Morpheus Descends | 1990–1998 | Records made in instalments, out of wages |
| The boroughs | Winter, Sorrow | 1988–1993 | Tempo taken below doom and left there |
| Upstate | Cannibal Corpse, Baphomet, Skinless | 1987 onward | Raw speed, and the largest audience in the genre |
What the state does now
The map has held. Artificial Brain came together on Long Island in 2011 around the guitarist Dan Gargiulo and the vocalist Will Smith, and Labyrinth Constellation arrived through Profound Lore in 2014 carrying the whole local inheritance intact: the riff turnover of the island, the harmonic wrongness of Yonkers and a voice buried where the boroughs used to bury it. Immolation have never stopped, and Acts of God in 2022 came thirty six years after they formed. Mortician and Malignancy still play, on labels that did not exist when either started. The state is four generations deep now, and the pockets go on doing what they always did, which is ignore each other productively.
What none of them ignores is the mechanism the island built. Strip away the geography, the labels and the four decades, and what remains is a small set of technical decisions about riff construction, tempo, voice and room, all of them settled in New York between 1989 and 1993 and every one of them still binding on anybody who wants to play this music correctly. Those decisions are taken apart one at a time in brutal Death Metal Explained. The state supplied the parts. Everyone else has been assembling them ever since.
