Death Metal
Located in 2 routes
Extreme metal defined by guttural, pitch-shifted growls and grunts, blistering tremolo-picked riffs in low tunings, and abrupt blast-beat-to-double-kick drumming that lurches between sub-200 BPM grooves and 250+ BPM eruptions. Guitars favor chromatic, dissonant riffing and palm-muted chugging over heavy distortion; bass often follows in a thick, scooped low end. Production ranges from murky and cavernous to surgically clean, but the mood is unrelentingly violent, morbid, and abrasive, with songs built from stop-start riff montages, tritone harmonies, and squealing pinch-harmonic leads rather than verse-chorus pop form.
History
Death metal grew out of early-1980s thrash and proto-death extremity: Possessed's 1985 debut Seven Churches and Death's 1987 Scream Bloody Gore are widely cited as the genre's founding statements, with Florida's Tampa scene (Morrisound Studios, producer Scott Burns) becoming the American epicenter for Death, Morbid Angel, Obituary, and Deicide. A parallel Swedish scene exploded out of Stockholm (Entombed, Dismember, Grave) built on the buzzsaw Boss HM-2 guitar tone at Sunlight Studio, while New York's Suffocation pioneered the slamming, technical brutal style. Labels Earache, Roadrunner, Nuclear Blast, and Relapse spread it worldwide; by the mid-1990s it had splintered into melodic, technical, brutal, and slam offshoots, and the form remains a vital global underground today.
Sub-genres in this family
18 sub-genres · 12 written up
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Albert Mudrian, Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore
- Daniel Ekeroth, Swedish Death Metal
- AllMusic genre overview: Death Metal
- Encyclopaedia Metallum (Metal Archives) band/album entries