Part V
Thrash metal spawned yet another subgenre of metal that was to be the most extreme ever: death metal. Hellhammer's Apocalyptic Raids, Death's Scream Bloody Gore, and Possessed's The Seven Churches marked the beginning of a gender of music destined to never attain commercial success. Guitars became as heavy and downtuned as possible, tempo changes went from breakneck speeds to grindingly slow aggression, double pedaling almost became a rule for drummers, and vocalists switched from screaming to uttering guttural growls that were barely intelligible. Venom's Welcome to Hell had subtly predicted death metal's rise, and the new bands just reassured it. Acts such as the groundbreaking Celtic Frost continued death metal, but due to a new interest of metal bands in metalcore, death metal was losing ground.
Then came Sepultura, Obituary and Morbid Angel to resurrect death metal. Sepultura's precise and exacting Beneath the Remains, along with Obituary's brutal Slowly We Rot, revived the long-dead interest of metal fans and again established death metal as a strong branch of metal, propelling the existence of a slew of new bands and resurgence of old ones, such as Malevolent Creation, Cannibal Corpse, and Fudge Tunnel; as well as the progressive Believer, Pestilence, Atheist, and Cynic (the latter three forming the core of the so-called jazz-death metal scene). Furthermore, the subgenre strengthened itself in Sweden, where the brutal Entombed began a strong death metal tradition that featured slight hints of melody and bands such as Dismember, Edge of Sanity, Pan-Thy-Monium, and Hypocrisy. However, death metal also stagnated into boring repetition. Against the background of success for bands such as Morbid Angel and Deicide, along with the technically renewed approach of Death on Human, Individual Thought Patterns, and Symbolic, most new bands had nothing new to offer, but instead chose to rehash everything done before and therefore help begin carving death metal's tomb again.
