Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1985

Death metal

Emerged 1985 Origin Florida / Sweden Subgenres 10 Vocals Growled or shrieked
Heaviness
10
Speed
9
Melody
4

Growled or shrieked. Unintelligible without a lyric sheet. The thing most newcomers bounce off.

In short

Guttural vocals, low tunings, blast beats and tremolo picking. Thrash pushed past the limit of legibility, with two founding schools: Florida and Stockholm.

How it sounds

  • Guttural growls produced from the diaphragm, with controlled vocal distortion.
  • Tremolo picking on down-tuned guitars (D, C, B) and blast beats past 200 bpm.
  • Structures without a classic chorus; riffs succeed one another instead of repeating symmetrically.

Hear what that means

  • The growl, doing a drummer's job

    Death - Leprosy

    Follow the vocal against the riff rather than against the melody, because there is no melody to follow it against. It lands with the accents, and where a singer would hold a note it simply stops.

    Open on YouTube
  • Tremolo as texture

    Morbid Angel - Altars of Madness

    One note picked as fast as the hand goes, so what reaches you is not a sequence of notes but a single wall with a pitch. Thrash picks fast to be percussive; this picks fast to stop being percussive at all.

    Open on YouTube
  • The Swedish guitar sound

    Entombed - Left Hand Path

    One distortion pedal - a Boss HM-2 with every control turned fully clockwise - is most of what separates Stockholm from Florida. A whole regional scene is audible here as an equipment setting.

    Open on YouTube

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Each opens at the start of the recording.

The specifics

Tempo
120-260 bpm
Song length
3.5-6 min
Tuning
B, C or D standard, or E dropped to D. This is where metal's down-tuning starts in earnest, and it is done for pitch rather than for slack.
Production
Thick and scooped: the guitars hollowed out in the mids to leave room, the kick drums close-miked until they click so they stay audible under a blast beat, and the vocal sat below both.
Written about
Death itself, Anatomy and disease, War, The occult

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Tremolo picking — one note repeated as fast as the hand goes — used as a texture rather than as a riff, with chromatic runs where thrash would have used a scale.
  • Bass Following the guitar an octave down, and finally given room in the mix. Death metal is the first extreme genre where the bass player is regularly a soloist.
  • Drums Blast beats and double kick as the default state rather than as an accent, with the tempo changing two or three times inside one song.
  • Vocals A growl from the diaphragm, pitched below the guitars and used as a percussion part. Not intelligible, and not trying to be.

What it isn't

That the growl is there to sound frightening. It is there because of what it lets the rest of the band do. A sung vocal has to be given harmonic room, which fixes the guitars in a key and the drummer at a countable tempo; a growl has no pitch, so it takes none. That is what freed death metal to change key and time signature mid-phrase and to write riffs out of chromatic runs that would fight any singer. The vocal is not the aggression — it is the thing that got out of the way.

Told apart from

  • Black metal Both came out of thrash and both stopped singing. Death metal is low, dry and precise, and the growl sits under the guitars; black metal is high, thin and shrieked, and buried in reverb.
  • Grindcore Grindcore takes these vocals, doubles the speed and throws out the arrangement. A grind song is over in ninety seconds; a death metal song has movements.
  • Thrash metal Thrash keeps a chorus you can shout back. Death metal keeps the riff and deletes everything about it that was built to be memorable.
  • Deathcore Deathcore plays death metal riffs and then stops dead for a breakdown at half tempo. Death metal proper almost never gives you that release.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

Chuck Schuldiner, a teenager in Florida, named his band Death in 1984 and released a demo that circulated on cassette worldwide. In parallel, in Stockholm, an entire generation used the same pedal — a Boss HM-2 with every knob maxed — and created an instantly recognisable tone. The two schools, Florida and Sweden, still define the genre.

Descended from

Branches into

On the timeline

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

  • Mathcore 2.2 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
  • Crust punk 3.0 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
  • Powerviolence 3.0 apart by rating · no shared ancestor

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim. These share no ancestor with it at all.