Explore the essential death metal albums that forged the genre’s early identity, from Florida’s underground tape-trading scene to the guttural sounds of Sweden.

By Steve Huey on Discogs https://www.discogs.com/digs/music/essential-death-metal-records/

Even the most casual heavy metal fan knows the essence of death metal: growling Cookie Monster vocals, crusty down-tuned guitars, blast beat drumming, and horror-movie lyrics about blood, guts, and Satan. Unlike its more European cousin black metal, death metal evolved primarily from American thrash, with its high-velocity palm-muted riffs. Slayer‘s influence on death metal towers above all else, but early bands also drew inspiration (especially vocal) from European extreme-metal pioneers like Venom, Celtic Frost, and Bathory.

Death metal initially blossomed thanks to an underground tape-trading network dedicated to raw, unpolished demo recordings. These fans wanted the ugliest, most intense sounds they could get their hands on. Once a few metal labels started taking chances on these bands, producers had to figure out how to properly mic and record music played this fast and low. Scott Burns, of Tampa, Florida’s now-legendary Morrisound Studios, developed a signature sound that was clear and well-defined, making him for a time the world’s premier producer of death metal, and Tampa its unlikely capital.

Death metal was too harsh and amelodic to ever land a true mainstream breakthrough, but it’s still an underground institution. Over the several decades it’s been, ahem, “alive,” it’s spun off a number of subgenres, and even scored its own cartoon series in Adult Swim‘s Metalocalypse. And it all started with a relative handful of metalheads who wanted to hear – and make – the most repulsive, ungodly racket possible.

Here, then, are the ten most essential albums from that very first wave of death metal bands, the ones that created and defined the genre.