Seventeen years separate the first record in this piece from Scream Bloody Gore, and in that gap every single component was manufactured by somebody who had no idea what it would eventually be used for. That is the only honest way to run a proto list. Not "these bands were nearly death metal", because none of them were. Each one made one part.
So the rule here is strict, and it throws out most of what gets called proto death metal on the internet. A record qualifies if you can name the specific thing it donated and point at where that thing shows up later. Anything vaguer than that is ancestry worship. The four years in which the parts were finally assembled are the first four years, and this is what was lying around before them.
Before 1980: the interval and the engine
Black Sabbath donated one thing and it is enormous. The opening track of their first album is built almost entirely on a tritone, the interval medieval theorists called the devil in music, played slowly and left hanging. Recorded on 17 November 1969 at Regent Sounds in London in roughly twelve hours, the band playing their live set straight through, and released by Vertigo on 13 February 1970, it establishes that a heavy band can build a song out of an interval that refuses to resolve. Every chromatic death metal riff written since is downstream of that decision.
Motorhead donated the engine. Overkill, out on Bronze in 1979, opens with continuous double kick running underneath an entire song rather than as a fill, with a bass chorded through guitar amplifiers so that three men occupy the frequency range of six. Nobody in this story would have played the way they did without hearing that, and Lemmy always maintained he was playing rock and roll.
1981 to 1983: permission, the beat and the architecture
Venom donated permission. Three men from Newcastle who could not play well made Welcome to Hell in 1981 and Black Metal in 1982, and in doing so abolished the requirement to be competent before you were allowed to make a record. They also took the obvious name off the table, which is why the Americans had to invent a different one.
Discharge donated the beat. The pattern their name is now attached to, a snare on every offbeat driven over a continuous kick, is the rhythmic ancestor of half of what death metal does at speed, and it was made by a band from Stoke with no interest in metal whatsoever. Two years later, in February 1984, a Massachusetts hardcore band called Siege recorded six songs at Radiobeat in Boston with Lou Giordano, and their drummer went past the point where the pattern is still a beat. Napalm Death have named them ever since.
Mercyful Fate donated the architecture and the straight face. Melissa, out on Roadrunner in October 1983, is built out of songs with four and five distinct movements that do not repeat a chorus to get home, and the occult lyrics are delivered without a wink anywhere. Every death metal band that writes a six minute song in five parts is using a structure the Danes had already proved could hold an audience.
The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial
1984 and 1985: the last records before the line
Now the donations start arriving in months rather than years. Hellhammer donated primitivism as a deliberate choice: slow, low, technically poor on purpose, and copied by every trader in three countries after Apocalyptic Raids in March 1984. Celtic Frost, built out of the same band before the year was out, donated dynamics and the idea that ugliness could be arranged.
Bathory donated the murk. The first two records, made in Sweden in 1984 and 1985 by one man with almost nothing, sound like they were recorded through a wall, and the underground took that as a decision rather than a limitation. Half the production choices in Scandinavian extreme metal for the next decade trace back to somebody deciding that unlistenable was a legitimate setting.
Slayer donated atmosphere and the chromatic run. Show No Mercy, on Metal Blade in December 1983, is a thrash record, but the lead playing on it treats the fretboard as a place to get lost rather than a scale to climb, and by 1985 that had become the standard vocabulary for the genre's solos. And in West Germany, Sodom and Destruction donated filth: two 1984 records made with almost no technique and a total commitment to sounding wrong.
| Record | Year | What it donated |
|---|---|---|
| Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath | 1970 | The unresolved tritone and the horror frame |
| Motorhead, Overkill | 1979 | Continuous double kick and three piece density |
| Venom, Welcome to Hell | 1981 | Permission to record before you can play |
| Discharge, Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing | 1982 | The offbeat snare pattern under a driving kick |
| Slayer, Show No Mercy | 1983 | Chromatic lead playing with no key centre |
| Mercyful Fate, Melissa | 1983 | Multi part song architecture, played straight |
| Hellhammer, Apocalyptic Raids | 1984 | Primitivism as a choice rather than a failure |
| Sodom, In the Sign of Evil | 1984 | Filth, and the refusal to clean anything up |
| Bathory, The Return | 1985 | Production as hostility, one man alone |
The records that get called proto and are not
Three attributions circulate and none of them survives contact with the rule. Judas Priest are offered because "Exciter" from 1978 is fast and the twin guitars are upstream of everything. But the drumming is rock drumming, the songs are built to arrive at a chorus, and Priest were a professional band aiming at radio. Speed alone has never been the criterion.
Deep Purple get proposed on the strength of Ian Paice, which is a compliment to a drummer and nothing more. And Black Sabbath get offered a second time, as the forebear of everything downstream of heavy metal, which is a claim about ancestry rather than about donation. By that logic the blues invented the blast beat. Sabbath are on this list once, for one specific interval, and that is the correct size of the credit.
What the list actually proves
That there is no missing link and there never was one. What you have instead is the nine records on that table, made across seventeen years in six countries by musicians who mostly disliked each other's work, each of which contains exactly one component, and a group of teenagers in the mid eighties who owned all nine on cassette and could not tell you why the combination should work. It did work. That is the whole mechanism, and it is the same mechanism behind every genre anybody has ever argued about.
The one thing a proto list cannot do is give you dates you can trust, because donation and adoption are years apart in every case. If you want the sequence laid out properly, with the demos, the pressings and the signings in the order they happened, that is A Death Metal Timeline.
