Death metal was not an invasion from outside. It was made, almost entirely, by people who had been in thrash bands, using thrash technique, on labels that had been releasing thrash records, and in several cases by the same band without a change of name.
This is the crossing point: who went, when, what they took with them, and what happened to the ones who stayed.
Possessed, the ones who did it first
Six teenagers from the Bay Area, one week at a converted chicken farm, and a record that is faster, uglier and more chaotic than anything else released in 1985. Jeff Becerra's vocal is the first recognisably death metal vocal on an album, and the closing track is called "Death Metal".
They were not trying to found a genre; they were a Bay Area thrash band who had gone further than the others. Their guitarist Larry LaLonde later joined Blind Illusion and then Primus, which is one of the more improbable career paths in this history.
Death, and the writer who outgrew the scene
Chuck Schuldiner started in Florida making music that was audibly thrash played more crudely, and spent a decade making it steadily more sophisticated until, on Human in 1991, he was writing with a jazz rhythm section and had left the genre entirely behind.
The trajectory is the clearest single illustration of the crossing. Nothing in Death's early work is unrecognisable to a thrash listener, and nothing in the late work belongs to thrash at all, and there is no point at which a line was crossed.
Pestilence
The Dutch case, and the cleanest example of a band changing category between records. The 1988 debut is a thrash album. Consuming Impulse a year later is a death metal album by the same band, and the difference is entirely in the vocal and the riff vocabulary rather than in the technique.
Sepultura and Kreator, the ones who supplied the vocabulary
Neither became a death metal band and both are more responsible for death metal than most bands that did. Morbid Visions and Pleasure to Kill established the vocal, the tremolo riff and the refusal of melody, and half the Florida and Stockholm musicians have said so in print.
What that means is that the crossing was not a defection. The material was already inside thrash, in its German and Brazilian wings, and death metal is what happened when somebody stopped restraining it.
Sadus, Atheist, Demolition Hammer
Three American bands who ended up on the death metal side of a boundary they had not moved across. Sadus were a thrash band with a fretless bass player who got progressively more extreme. Atheist were filed as death metal and were audibly the children of technical thrash. Demolition Hammer were a New York thrash band who simply kept getting heavier.
| Band | Started as | The record where it changed | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Possessed | Bay Area thrash | Seven Churches, the first one | 1985 |
| Death | Florida thrash | Gradually, complete by Human | 1991 |
| Sepultura | Brazilian thrash | Never fully crossed | - |
| Pestilence | Dutch thrash | Consuming Impulse | 1989 |
| Sadus | Californian thrash | By the third album | 1990 |
| Atheist | Technical thrash | Filed as death from the start | 1989 |
| Demolition Hammer | New York thrash | Epidemic of Violence | 1992 |
What actually changed
Four things, and none of them is speed, which is the common misconception.
The vocal went from a shout with words you can follow to a growl where the voice becomes a texture. The riff went from palm muted chugging to tremolo picking, which fills the space rather than punctuating it. The drums went from the offbeat snare to the blast beat, which turns the pulse into noise. And the tuning dropped.
Everything else stayed. The riff sequence arrangement, the refusal of choruses, the recording philosophy and in most cases the same producers and the same studios.
Why so many went
Because by 1990 death metal was where the young audience was and thrash was where the mortgages were. A twenty year old musician in 1990 choosing between the two was choosing between a genre whose founding bands were signing to majors and a genre being made by people his own age with nothing to lose.
That is the same calculation the thrash founders had made in 1983 against heavy metal, and it produced the same outcome. The bands who stayed are covered elsewhere, and the ones who went further in the other direction, towards pure speed rather than pure extremity, are in Speed Thrash Metal Bands. The full map is in the bands you need to know.
The producers who carried them across
The same handful of names appear on both sides of the boundary, which is one of the clearest pieces of evidence that this was a continuity rather than a break.
Scott Burns recorded Sepultura in Rio and then most of Florida death metal at Morrisound in Tampa. Harris Johns in Berlin worked on German thrash and then on early European death and grind. Randy Burns produced Megadeth and then Possessed.
Same engineers, same studios, frequently the same equipment and the same working method: get the room, get the take, do not fix it. What changed was the material arriving in front of them.
The ones who stayed
The counterfactual matters, because the crossing looks inevitable only in hindsight.
Overkill, Testament, Exodus, Kreator, Sodom and Destruction were all offered the same choice by the same conditions and did not take it. Testament flirted with a death metal record in 1997 and went back. Kreator went industrial and gothic instead, which turned out worse.
What separated the stayers from the crossers was mostly age and contract. A band signed to a major in 1990 could not credibly become a death metal band; a twenty year old on an independent could become anything he wanted. The genre split roughly along the line of who had something to lose.
Sources and notes
Years refer to original pressings. Genre attributions are contested for several of these bands and the descriptions here follow the sound of the records rather than the labels' marketing.
