Death metal – does what it says on the tin, doesn’t it? Since it was first formulated by the likes of Death and Possessed in the mid-1980s, death metal has been terrorising the uninitiated with its graphic artwork, violent lyrics and sonic brutality. It’s also gone from local subculture to worldwide phenomenon.
With its first texts being Possessed’s Seven Churches, Death’s Scream Bloody Gore and Necrophagia’s Season Of The Dead – and its primary influences including Slayer, Sepultura, Venom and Motörhead – death metal first took off in the swamps of Florida and the snowy cityscapes of Sweden. Tape-trading networks soon turned it into a global scene, and by the mid-90s it had multiple offshoots: melodic death metal, technical death metal and blackened death metal, to name a few.
