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Death Metal
Sodom
A bridge between thrash and death metal, Sodom made simple songs using fast tremelo strumming and along with fellow European bands Celtic Frost and Bathory, became the impetus toward the styles that would amalgamate into the new genre of death metal.
Morbid Angel
Influenced by the extremity of Sepultura and Possessed, Morbid Angel injected fantasy realms of the complex codices of musical theory into death metal, exploring the edge of atonality with chaotic yet centrally-fused melodic structures.
At the Gates
Exploring complex song structures and different chord voicings, At the Gates created a classically-influenced style for Swedish death metal which expanded its basic precept of melodic construction based around brutally distorted guitar picked fast in a tremelo which blurred it into contiguous sound, sounding often more like it was written for violins (and indeed, they had a violinist in the band for their third album).
Therion
Dark romantic metal that flows through individualized song structures like a book of poetry encapsulates divergent views of life into one complicated worldview, Therion brought fantasy metal to a realization of artistic relevance to the world and inspired a generation or two of death metal and black metal bands.
Demilich
Almost universally misunderstood, this band created a form of metal that has never been explored, namely one in which the harmonic constructions of popular music were expanded and inserted within metal songs, allowing the melodic construction of the whole to detour into motifs reflecting a cyclic recombination of each idea.
Unleashed
Using rhythm like a blunt instrument, Unleashed combined the central chorus vocal rhythm organization of heavy metal with death metal's emphasis on the elements of rhythm microencoded in strumming and details of percussion to emphasize the band's mythological view of primal existence.
Massacra
An early and often overlooked contributor, Massacra were contemporaries of Morbid Angel who used a similar style of fast tremelo picking and abrupt variations in song structure to create classically-inspired, monumentally dynamic forms of sonic art.
Sepultura
Starting with a dark and unravelling black metal entry to extreme metal but working into a fusion of speed metal and death metal rhythm, Sepultura developed an aggressive but light on its feet style that brought a currency of energy into death metal approaching the techno age.
Black Metal
Hellhammer/Celtic Frost
One of black metal's developmental influences, Hellhammer/Celtic Frost found simple songs a method of injecting viral dissonance to music and therefore extrapolating complexity without necessarily expressing it in the music, all while riding dark but spiritual grooves that still compell listeners to this day.
Bathory
Raw and essential music follows rhythm through a pounding tribute to violence and darkness in this one-man war against the world; for basic blackmetal, none have surpassed this surprisingly current-sounding landmark.
Immortal
Creators of beauty in darkness and believers in the empowering factors of imagination and unleashed soul, Immortal made a symphony to the night with "Diabolical Full Moon Mysticism" and then followed it up with an exploration of harmony in internal turbulence with the seminal "Pure Holocaust," an album which captured both the polyrhythmic spirit of chaos metal and the developing science of black metal melody.
Ildjarn
Ildjarn uses clusters of related riffs made from a few chords whipped into phrases surrounding a motif-concept and massages them into organically structured songs in which a natural poetic impulse gives context to a change in perception. Like the best of black metal, this is simultaneously unlistenably abrasive and gently contemplative.
Enslaved
The genesis of this music is a fusion between the folk music of Norway, with its lengthy repetitive passages in which variation occurs as in nature, subtly and with slowly-building force that eventually alters the whole without a single clear causal trigger, and sonorous black metal with lengthy phrases of power chords culminating in a melodic concluding passage of the type that has always defined metal music as emotionally "heavy."
Burzum
The master of all that is dark and free, Burzum is music "to awaken the fantasy of mortals." Highly successful at that it is a yardstick for all metal to aspire toward.
Emperor
Sweeping melodic ushers of an imagination behind the wall of death, Emperor present a metaphor that is part escapism and part a realist dream of fantasy becoming realized against the current of aging and fatalistic human despair.
Graveland
Unrepentant politically-incorrect medievalists who make flowing sonatas out of a handful of chords and a melodic idea in order to free the human soul from its servitude in Judeo-Christian intellectual aestheticism, Graveland generate majesty and reverence within savage and feral music.
SPEED METAL
Heavy metal grew up after hardcore and got faster, borrowing the more interesting ideas from the 1970s prog-rock explosion to make poetically convoluted song structures and thunderous, socially-abrasive riffing. While speed metal is not a focus of this site, we hail to the ancestors who brought structuralism and strumming technique to underground metal. The forces that created speed metal were like the 1980s themselves: suffocating, immobilizing, neurotic, and paranoid. In the collision of extreme hardcore and the NWOBHM riffmasters, speed metal was spawned and with it the rising death/black metal family of techniques.
Nuclear Assault
Powermad
Prong
Torturer
Voivod
THRASH
Madness of music turned against itself like the disintegration of sense into military industrial suicide in the 1980s, thrash churns up primal angst with short simple blasting songs and charged post-hardcore anticontrol emotion. Formed of blisteringly fast hardcore and metal riffs, this music resisted society and suggested through straightforward logic and basic songs that another way must be found. Thrash and its next generation carryover, grindcore, are more humanitarian than death or black metal.
Corrosion of Conformity
Cryptic Slaughter
Dirty Rotten Imbeciles
GRINDCORE
Mechanical self-reduction through slamming destructive riffs that cycle into entropy like a society disintegrating, grindcore is for the purist who will never accept the compromise in personal integrity and morality that is social membership. Its name comes from the grinding aspect of atonal and often chromatic or even-interval power chord riffs, making a type of hardcore that grinds = grindcore. Where purest grindcore is a celebration of life and death with an inherent rejection of authority in favor of existential issues, although the grindcore/thrash genre is often clotted with morality masquerading as "differentness" as everywhere else.
Do not miss: Repulsion, Bolt Thrower, Carcass or Godflesh
Agathocles
Blood
Bolt Thrower
Brutal Truth
Carcass
Cianide
Drogheda
Godflesh
Hemdale/Exhumed
Mesrine
Napalm Death
Nyctophobic
Repulsion
Terrorizer