Sweden Before Death Metal: Merciless, Agony, Kazjurol

Sweden's thrash bands are mostly forgotten and what they turned into is not, and the transition happened so fast and so completely that the earlier records have been almost entirely absorbed into the story of what came next.

Bathory

The starting point, and not a thrash band by any strict definition. Quorthon worked almost alone in Stockholm, using the same source records as everybody else in Europe, and produced something so thin, cold and primitive that it became a genre.

What matters for this article is that Bathory came out of the same conditions as the Swedish thrash bands and took a different route out of them, and that Norwegian black metal took considerably more from these records than from anything American.

The thrash bands

Merciless from Strangnas made The Awakening in 1990, which was the first release on Deathlike Silence, the label run by Euronymous of Mayhem. The record is thrash played with a death metal weight and it is genuinely excellent.

Agony from Stockholm made The First Defiance in 1989. Kazjurol came out of the hardcore side and sat in the crossover position. Hexenhaus and Mezzrow filled out a scene that was productive and almost entirely unexported.

The conversion

Between roughly 1988 and 1991 the Swedish underground converted almost in its entirety into death metal, and the speed of it is the remarkable part. Musicians who had been in thrash bands two years earlier were now in Entombed, Dismember, Grave and Unleashed, using a guitar sound built in one studio in Stockholm.

That sound, produced at Sunlight Studio with a particular distortion pedal setting, became so identified with the country that it is referred to by the studio's name. It is a thrash guitar tone taken to an extreme, and the line from the earlier records is direct.

Why Sweden converted so completely

Three reasons, and together they explain why almost no Swedish thrash band survived into the 1990s.

The scene was young. The musicians were mostly teenagers in 1988, which meant nobody had a career invested in a style, and changing direction cost nothing.

The infrastructure was concentrated. One studio, one engineer and a small number of connected people, which meant a new idea propagated through the whole scene in months rather than years.

And the international attention arrived for the death metal records rather than for the thrash ones. Earache and Nuclear Blast were signing Swedish death metal in 1990; nobody had been signing Swedish thrash in 1988.

What was lost

Not much, honestly, and this is one of the few places in this history where that can be said. The Swedish thrash records are decent and mostly not exceptional, and what the same musicians made two years later is among the most influential extreme metal ever recorded.

The exception is Merciless, whose one great album sits exactly on the boundary and would be considerably better known if the band had arrived eighteen months earlier or later. It is the record to hear from this article.

The label that pressed Brazil's version of the same underground is Cogumelo Records, and the general account is in Brazil, Canada and the Rest of the World.

The Sunlight sound

Worth describing precisely, because it is the single most identifiable guitar tone in extreme metal and it came out of a thrash inheritance.

Recorded at Sunlight Studio in Stockholm by Tomas Skogsberg, it is a heavily distorted, mid scooped, almost liquid guitar sound produced substantially with a single well known distortion pedal set to extremes. It buzzes rather than chugs, and it turns a downtuned riff into a texture.

What makes it a thrash story is that it is a thrash tone pushed past the point of legibility. Everything the Bay Area producers did to keep a riff followable was deliberately reversed, and the result is a sound that half the world spent the following thirty years trying to reproduce.

The bands who did not convert

A handful stayed, and their careers illustrate what the alternative looked like.

Hexenhaus continued making technical thrash into the early 1990s to a shrinking audience. Mezzrow split. Agony stopped. None of them found the international attention that their contemporaries got by changing direction, and several of the musicians eventually turned up in death metal bands anyway.

That is not evidence that converting was cynical. It is evidence that the audience had genuinely moved, and that a Swedish band in 1991 playing thrash was making a record for people who had already gone somewhere else.

Where to start

With Merciless, The Awakening, which is the one genuinely essential record in this article and which sits exactly on the boundary the whole scene was about to cross.

Then Bathory's first two albums as context, and then Left Hand Path, which is what happened next and is one of the most influential extreme metal records ever made. Three albums, about two hours, and the whole transition is audible in them.

The Norwegian comparison

Worth drawing, because the two Scandinavian scenes made opposite choices at the same moment and both were right.

Sweden converted its thrash underground into death metal, built a studio sound, signed to English and German labels and sold records internationally. Norway, thirty miles across a border, took Bathory and the German records and went somewhere considerably darker, smaller and more hostile to the idea of a career.

Both scenes came out of the same source material and the same handful of imported albums. The difference in outcome is a difference in temperament and in what each set of musicians thought the music was for, which is a reminder that a scene is a set of decisions rather than a consequence of conditions.

Sources and notes

Years and labels refer to original pressings. Bathory is included as context rather than as a thrash band.