Death Metal

Growls, blast beats and down-tuned tremolo riffs came out of Florida in the mid-1980s.

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ContemporaryTimbreElectric guitarDrum Kit

Death metal pushed thrash further down, building from growls, blast beats and down-tuned tremolo riffs, and formed in Florida in the mid-1980s.

Origins and era

In 1983 Death's predecessor Mantas formed in Altamonte Springs, Florida, and Scream Bloody Gore in 1987 set the template. Morbid Angel, Obituary and Deicide in Tampa concentrated the scene in Florida. In the late 1980s Entombed in Stockholm produced a different distortion at Sunlight Studio, and At the Gates and In Flames in Gothenburg later added melody. Bolt Thrower in Britain and Pestilence in the Netherlands made the style genuinely international.

What you hear

Vocals are growls or guttural rasps, and lyrics circle around death, violence and the occult. Drums rely on blast beats and double kick, guitar plays low riffs with tremolo picking, and down-tuning muddies the tone. Sections change speed abruptly, from full pace to half-time weight, and solos avoid melody in favour of noise and chromatic sliding. Recordings are dry, low-heavy and short on reverb, with drums pushed far forward. Guitar alternates rapidly on the low strings and riffs move by semitone or diminished fifth, while blast sections land snare, kick and cymbal almost together. The voice sits in the guitar's register and sounds like another percussion instrument. Bass mostly follows the guitar's low notes rather than striking out on its own.

Key figures

Chuck Schuldiner of Death wrote clearer structures than his contemporaries, Trey Azagthoth of Morbid Angel used dissonant intervals, and John Tardy of Obituary pushed the voice into an indistinct growl. Entombed's Sunlight tone became shorthand for the Swedish sound, and At the Gates and In Flames brought melodic lines into the genre.

Lineage

Thrash metal, hardcore and the 1980s tape-demo network feed in; melodic death, deathcore and 1990s extreme metal come out. It turned a tape-trading underground into an international scene and gave bass and drums a weight they had not had before. In the 1990s labels began signing these underground bands, budgets rose, and the sound grew cleaner. Its growls and blast beats later became a common language across extreme metal.

Common misunderstandings

The common claim is that death metal has no structure, when it depends heavily on riff order and tempo change. Another is that it belongs only to Florida, though Sweden, Britain and the Netherlands each developed their own tone. Equating it with deathcore also blurs two generations of line-up and production. Treating it as one tone is equally wrong, since Swedish and Floridian recordings differ clearly.

Sources

• Albert Mudrian, Choosing Death, The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore（Feral House, 2004），用于核对佛罗里达与瑞典场景
• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry Death Metal，用于交叉核对风格特征

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.