In 1989 an attempted armed robbery in California left Jeff Becerra paralysed from the chest down, and the voice that had opened the genre four years earlier went off the record for eighteen years. He reformed Possessed in 2007 and has fronted the band from a wheelchair ever since.
Start there, because it is the corrective to the standing assumption about this music. The growl is supposed to have flattened every singer into the same anonymous instrument. It did not. It removed the accent, the range and the vibrato, and what was left underneath turned out to be enough for a dozen men and women to build entire careers on. What the voice does to the music, and why it sounds the way it does at all, sits in the chapter this belongs to.
The ones who had to invent it
Becerra was not executing a style in 1985. He was pushing a throat past what it would comfortably do because the songs seemed to require it, and the result on the first Possessed album is more frantic and less governed than anything that came after, which is why it has aged better than most of its imitators.
Kam Lee, singing in the first version of Death, went lower and more deliberate, taking the clipped phrasing off the early Celtic Frost records and dragging it under the floor. He has said since that he worked the thing out by copying dogs, which is the least pretentious origin story in the genre and probably the truest.
Chuck Schuldiner did something none of the others did, which was change his mind. The voice on Scream Bloody Gore in 1987 is the low template everybody copied; by Human in 1991 he had begun moving upward, and by the last two Death albums he is in a high, corroded rasp that carries diction and emotion the growl had given up. He is the only major singer in this genre who deliberately went up rather than down. He died on 13 December 2001, aged 34, of a pontine glioma.
The ones who turned it into weather
John Tardy took the most extreme decision available and mostly stopped using words. What he does on the early Obituary records is closer to a sustained animal sound shaped to the rhythm than to singing, and the band's lyric sheets from that period are correspondingly thin. It should not work. It works completely, because the voice is doing the job of a second guitar rather than the job of a narrator, and it is the single most imitated performance in the slower half of the genre.
The cavernous school took the same idea and buried it further. Craig Pillard on the first Incantation record and Ross Dolan in Immolation sit inside the mix rather than on top of it, so that the voice reads as another layer of murk rather than as a man in a room. Half of what people now call cavernous death metal is a production decision made about a vocal.
The voice is doing the job of a second guitar rather than the job of a narrator.
The ones who made it legible
The opposite project was to put consonants back. Frank Mullen built the Suffocation vocal around attack and articulation so that individual syllables land on the beat like snare hits, which is why that band's rhythmic writing works at all. Cannibal Corpse ran the experiment twice inside one album: Chris Barnes was dismissed during the sessions for Vile in 1995 and George Fisher came in from Monstrosity to finish it. Barnes had the wetter and more theatrical voice, Fisher the cleaner and more sustainable one, and the band went on to have their largest commercial years with the second. Both readings are legitimate and the argument has run for thirty years.
The ones who made it a performance
David Vincent fronted Morbid Angel through their defining records with something closer to a command than a growl, phrasing lines with the timing of a man who expects to be obeyed, and the difference between that and a flat guttural is the difference between a band and a ceremony. Glen Benton layered a high shriek over a low growl in Deicide, both at once, and no other singer in the first wave sounded like two people arguing. Karl Willetts, singing for Bolt Thrower, went the other way entirely and delivered campaign histories in a level, unhurried bark, which is why those records read as reporting rather than as horror.
The European reading, which is a different instrument
Continental Europe produced a voice the Americans never had, and its clearest example belongs to Martin van Drunen. What he does on Pestilence's Consuming Impulse in 1989 and on Asphyx's The Rack two years later is not a growl at all: it is a shredded, high, screamed delivery that sounds like a man being harmed rather than a man doing harm, and it puts an entirely different emotional charge under the same riffs. Thirty five years later he is still doing it, which is its own argument about whether the approach was sustainable.
Sweden went somewhere else again. Lars-Goran Petrov sang the Stockholm records with a bark that had more rock and roll swagger in it than menace, and the whole later career of that scene, the loosening and the groove, is audible in his phrasing before the bands got round to writing it into the songs.
| Singer | Band | Hear it on | What changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jeff Becerra | Possessed | Seven Churches | The first one, and the least controlled |
| Kam Lee | Death, Massacre | The early demos | Took it lower and made it deliberate |
| Chuck Schuldiner | Death | Human | The only one who went upward on purpose |
| John Tardy | Obituary | Slowly We Rot | Removed the words entirely |
| Frank Mullen | Suffocation | Effigy of the Forgotten | Put the consonants back on the beat |
| Glen Benton | Deicide | Legion | Two registers at once |
| David Vincent | Morbid Angel | Blessed Are the Sick | Made it a command rather than a texture |
| Karl Willetts | Bolt Thrower | Realm of Chaos | Level delivery, reporting rather than horror |
| George Fisher | Monstrosity, Cannibal Corpse | Vile | The professional standard everyone measures against |
| Angela Gossow | Arch Enemy | Wages of Sin | Ended the assumption that this was a male sound |
What changed after 2000
Angela Gossow fronted Arch Enemy from 2000 to 2014 and then stepped sideways into managing the band, and Alissa White-Gluz took the job from 2014. Between them they closed an argument that should never have been open, since nothing about a voice with the pitch taken out of it is sexed in the first place. Anybody still surprised by a woman doing this has not been listening for twenty five years.
The other modern development is range. Trevor Strnad of The Black Dahlia Murder built his whole approach on switching between a high shriek and a low growl inside a single line, and a generation took that as the default; he died on 11 May 2022 at the age of 41. Travis Ryan in Cattle Decapitation added a strangled half sung register that has no precedent anywhere in the genre. Will Ramos in Lorna Shore covers four distinct voices in one song and made a career out of it in eighteen months.
So the template is not fixed and never was. Ten people made ten different decisions about what to do with a voice that had supposedly been reduced to one option, and the genre kept every one of them. What all of that sits inside, the question of why any of this had to be pushed so far in the first place, is why Death Metal Became So Extreme.
