Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1993

Death 'n' roll

Emerged 1993 Origin Sweden Subgenres — Vocals Growled or shrieked
Heaviness
8
Speed
5
Melody
6

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

In short

Death metal that admits its rock roots: groove, blues riffing and a hoarse shout.

How it sounds

  • Riffs with rock and roll groove played with a death metal tone.
  • Mid tempos with swing and shuffle drumming instead of blast beats.
  • Hoarse vocals, closer to Lemmy than to a classic growl.

Hear what that means

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Every second here is the uploader's own, read from the recording's tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
120-160 bpm
Song length
3-4.5 min
Tuning
The Swedish HM-2 guitar tone applied to rock and roll riffs — down-tuned, buzzsaw distortion over a groove rather than over blast beats.
Production
Thick and punchy, with the drums forward and the songs structured. It is death metal recorded like a rock record, which was the entire provocation.
Written about
Violence, comically, Drinking, Contempt, Rock and roll

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Boogie and hard rock riffs played through death metal's tone and tuning, with the groove intact. The buzzsaw distortion is unchanged and everything else is.
  • Bass Locked to the kick in the rock manner rather than doubling the guitars for mass, which is what lets the groove exist.
  • Drums A rock backbeat with swing, and blast beats almost entirely absent. This is the clearest break with the parent genre.
  • Vocals The death growl kept exactly, over music you could dance to — the tension the whole genre lives on.

What it isn't

That it was a sellout. Wolverine Blues was received as a betrayal in 1993 and is now regarded as one of the more influential records on the branch — it demonstrated that death metal's tone could be detached from death metal's structure, which is the observation half of modern extreme metal is built on.

Told apart from

  • Death metal Death metal removes groove and hooks deliberately. Death 'n' roll puts both back and keeps only the vocals and the guitar tone.
  • Old school death metal Entombed made both, consecutively. Old school death metal is the Swedish tone over tremolo; this is the same tone over a boogie.
  • Black 'n' roll The same manoeuvre on the black metal branch a decade later, and Darkthrone were explicitly aware of the precedent.
  • Groove metal Groove metal arrives at a similar place from thrash rather than from death metal, and shouts where this growls.

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

History

After Left Hand Path, Entombed swerved toward rock with 1993's Wolverine Blues, to the displeasure of part of their audience. The label put a Marvel character on the cover without the band's consent, which complicated the reception further. Time has vindicated them: the album is now considered a classic.

Descended from

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

  • DSBM 1.4 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
  • Rap metal 1.4 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.