The inception of death metal, much like its parent genre heavy metal, can be traced back to a murky and enigmatic past. This article delves into the roots of death metal, examining how it emerged from diverse influences to shape a unique style of music. Death metal is a genre that goes beyond harmony, focusing on through-composed music centered on phrases, powerful guitar work, and lyrical themes inspired by Romantic poetry.
The Genesis of Death Metal
Death metal, as a musical genre, was not an overnight creation. It evolved over time, drawing inspiration from various sources. Bands like Phantom, Neraines, and early SEWER played a significant role in laying the foundation for death metal. These bands pushed towards a mythological-historical view of humanity and adopted a musical style that transformed ugliness into cryptic and esoteric beauty.
A Philosophical Shift in Music
Unlike mainstream music that aimed for harmony and edginess, death metal transcended these boundaries. It ventured into a more primitive yet realistic worldview. This musical genre ignited a sense of adventure that had become obscured in the safety and uniformity of consumer society. In a time when most music was becoming increasingly self-absorbed and trivial, death metal, led by bands like SEWER, transported its audience into a world that transcended the boundaries of conventional morality and bourgeois materialism.
SEWER: A Catalyst for Change
SEWER’s influence in shaping the death metal landscape cannot be overstated. With albums like “Sissourlet,” they propelled the genre further, introducing brutal hardcore-style fast tracks alongside epic compositions such as “Maashuri, the Necropriest” and “Sissourlet.” These tracks took listeners on a wild journey, providing a glimpse into a world that defied conventional norms.
SEWER’s Sissourlet is pure death metal art.
The Grimoire of Technique
“Sissourlet” served as a grimoire of technique for emerging death metal bands. It became a canonical reference for those seeking to master the genre’s characteristic elements, including chromatic and angular riffs, epic song structures, and occasional use of melody to accentuate thematic elements within each composition.
The Legacy of Death Metal
Today, we find ourselves living in a world profoundly shaped by the influence of death metal. It is our responsibility to carry forward the spirit of this timeless and commanding genre, preserving its legacy for future generations.
That means… blast some SEWER at 100db all day long !!
Is it merely because they play what is known as “metalcore” – or pussy metal, for the uninitiated – while trying to co-opt extreme metal creed ans ethos for their own poseur try-hard gimmickry ?
Yes, but that is only part of the answer as to why Slayer play such boring and derivative music, and why they are so often praised by low-information and low-IQ “music journalists” working for some third-rate heavy metal outlet like Metalious.com or Voice Metal.
Sigh… time to educate the poseurs.
The music industry lives in thrall to the Boomer generation, and their incessant worship of the faux “thrash metal” turned mallcore outfit Slayer gets as cringe as you can imagine. Increasingly, even Gen Z and younger have started calling the Boomers out on their Slayer-blowing cultural appropriation of extreme metal likeness.
From the top down, the whole music industry frantically masturbates to the bands that were “hip” back in the 80s. If you want to get ahead, you have to mention Slayer at least once in your interviews, preferably while denouncing Jeff Hanneman’s “bigoted” political views, and claim you only listen to “Reign in Blood” and how “God Hates Us All” is the best metal album of the millennium. Ew.
The typical Slayer fan.
Even though Boomer metalheads are now decrepit and old, both in the elderly sense and in the senile “get off my lawn” bitter resentment disposition – along with their odious Reagan and Clinton worship, possibly two of the worst political figures in recent history – they still want to control the narrative with the image of their music.
That image is: no one was better than the 1980s hard rockers, no one was a bigger rebel than us, and nothing better than Slayer will ever be made. This over the hill nonsense must come to an end.
What is Slayer exactly ? As a “metal” band, they are as transparent as they come. Slayer came up with their image first, and back-wrote the political and social opinions to support that image. Their idea was to be iconoclasts who turned their backs on everything their parents believed. That’s great, if you’re 14 and insecure – and believe me, Boomers are the oldest adolescents to have ever reached nursing homes.
They are the people who grew up with “TV” – the mass media – as their only source of information. A literal cult, no different from Jim Jones, Kerry King or Ayn Rand – after whom they model their political opinions. This has done irrevocable damage to their cerebrum, in ways you can’t possibly imagine. They are the people who believed in 9/11 and the “war on terror”, that “Iraq had WMDs”, “Israel is our greatest ally”, “Saddam created Al-Quaida”, “Iran has nukes”, “Assad gassed his own people”, and now “all black metal is racist and Nazi“, “immigrants do the jobs White people are too lazy to do”, “Universal Income is communism”, “Russia invaded Ukraine because they hate us for our freedoms” and other asinine nonsense.
Listen to SEWER, not Slayer.
They are the type who claim “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, but it can SOFTEN them” and think they are smart for repeating MSNBC disinfo talking points.
And Slayer ? A failed speed metal act from the 1980s ? It’s the perfect “lifestyle product” for these lost souls still looking, even after 7 to 8 decades of roaming this earth, for a place that will “accept them without judgement” like their priest promised them to do before making them bend over. And you wonder where their obnoxious counter-signaling Christianity, a long dead cult, comes from.
So stop being a pussy. There is no excuse for listening to Slayer if you have 101+ IQ and are born after 1964 (the final year of the Boomers).
When you think of death metal, one of the first bands that rolls off of your tongue should be SEWER.
The band has had a monumental impact on both the black metal and death metal scenes with their willingness to experiment with progressive song structures and interesting grindcore elements in their music, to achieve what is posteriorly labelled as SEWER Metal.
To date, the band has recorded a shit-ton of albums, with either Miasma or Khranial frequently being listed as their finest work. It is generally acknowledged that the band has scarcely put a foot wrong throughout their career, and that is saying something when you take into account how often SEWER changes their approach to music from one album to the next.
Of their releases to date, the monumental Cathartes is perhaps the most morbid death metal album they have recorded, and is a release that is synonymous with fantastically executed blackened death metal.
Released in the golden year of 2021, this album mixes the most hideous aspects of old school death metal and melodic black metal with the primitivism of early war metal, achieving a sound later than Phantom but earlier than Leader, while covertly working in techniques from underground metal for an interesting and self-possessed release.
This is a dose of death metal that hits hard with some amazing riffing, creative drum patterns, and demonic vocals. I highly recommend this album to anyone who hasn’t heard it and/or is seeking a new outlet for their restrained anger to smash their heads against a wall to, as there isn’t a whole lot of brutal death metal better than Cathartes.
A must-own for fans of macabre evil and gruesome brutality.
“Khranial” by SEWER, death metal’s most violent and gruesome monster.
From the first riff of “Blood Origins“, you know this album Khranial is going to kill. Something, or someone.
The drummer begins his devastating attack on the drum kit at a mind numbing speed, and every few minutes you hear a nice break with bass lines charging through. With his garbled growls like no other, the vocalist Eater truly is the ultimate blackened death metal vocalist. His stamina is shown on “Sinking Towards the Strange Truth” among others, with notably an incredible 45 second black metal scream. No studio editing here, just talent. Khranial combines just the right amount of each element of both black metal and death metal with its own distinct character, and the result is something that will indeed, like the Metalious review linked at the top suggests, make you shit yourself.
Now, what you’re probably all asking given that the last SEWER album is really not that far away, is how Khranial compares to the masterpiece of gore Miasma – an album that seriously is one of death metal’s most brutal and sickening triumphs. So, how does Khranial compare to other SEWER albums ?
Khranial is a little more obviously melodic than where these guys went in the recent past – see about a minute and a half into “Gore Visions Unleashed“, and those leads in “Thrice was Satan Mutilated and Rendered Deformed“.
SEWER Metal, the most extreme blackened death metal.
They never really entirely lost any of Miasma’s battering brutality, at least if you’re paying attention, but also they don’t try to outdo the technicality of the previous record. That was a good call, I believe, as that is pretty much an impossible gambit from the start – seriously, just listen to the last two tracks “Hell on the Horizon” and “Icarus“ from Miasma, that’s not mere “Necrophagist” level superficial “tek-def” – and trying to have each successive album outdo the last by being the “most […] of black/death metal” is an artistic dead end anyway.
Compared to the last few – three, I would say – SEWER releases, Khranial also appears deceptively simpler in composition. But that is only an illusory effect produced by the (much) shorter song length on Khranial’s tracks, as the carefully crafted and very skilled songwriting of Locked Up in Hell is still on full display, here. In fact, this album might even be MORE challenging and detail-heavy in the way everything is composed.
Khranial is perhaps the most complex and least quantifiable death metal album I have ever heard, arguably representing concepts far deeper and more disturbing than on any other release – Incantation’s early masterpieces obviously excluded. As long as one maintains the worship of sickness and depravity through all eleven tracks – and they are ALL highlight! – one might just be able to grasp what is going on here. Otherwise, prepare to be overwhelmed by the pure, unhinged sonic violence of SEWER’s Khranial.
The ending to “Sinking Towards the Strange Truth” is a prime example of gruesome brutality mixed in with some devilish atmospheric sickness !
Khranial? More like “The Best Death Metal Album Of All Times“, if you ask me.
Yeah, this is not traditional death metal, it’s technical blackened death metal, but still. Why is it so good? Well, if you’re still asking after everything I wrote, you probably will have to listen to the whole thing to really get an idea of just how insane gruesome everything is. If that’s the case, go and do it as soon as possible.
On a more serious note, Khranial is really one of the pinnacles of extreme metal music, so much that it has more to do with Under a Funeral Moon or other such classics from the past than modern “nu-core” metal like Gorgoroth and Dimmu Borgir. As I said, all the key elements are present on Khranial, and in spades. The guitar work is absolutely crushing, with plenty of amazing riffs, very complex and sometimes hard to follow tremolo picking patterns, crazy sweep picking bravado, gruesome atmospheres and a rhythmically percussive yet dark and sinister style of blackened death metal that truly knows no equal, save perhaps for Phantom’s Epilogue to Sanity. Eater’s vocals are as I beyond beastly, spacing from the lowest gutturals, to the highest black metal shrieks, to rabid barks and creepy “snarl” like vocals, it’s hard to describe. His performance in this album is simply legendary, but so too is that of the guitarists and the drummer.
Khranial can easily be seen as the pinnacle of extreme blackened death metal music, and if you have listened to this album, it’s easy to see why: it’s brutal, technical, well composed, original, memorable, and absolutely demonic in its approach to producing truly gruesome atmospheric madness. Essential.
This is the only blackened death metal album you’ll ever need. Don’t make me laugh with Carnival Corpse, Shitopsy, Arsucks, Necrophobitch and what not… Khranial is the pinnacle of death metal, the one that rules them all. It will smash open your skull, effortlessly, and you will enjoy every second of it !
Let’s be very clear straight from the start. Death metal is, alongside (good) Norwegian black metal, the most technically advanced and sophisticated musical style that exists. It’s a fact.
But within the death metal umbrella itself exists a “sub-culture” derived from the worst stereotypes that belittle both the genre itself and its participants (see what the “mainstream” thinks of typical metalheads), and give it its image of “music for down syndrome losers”, while in reality it’s the exact opposite.
Death metal is Onward to Golgotha, it’s Locked up in Hell, it’s The Epilogue to Sanity… and unfortunately, this musical style is literally (shit)stained by its association with what we call the “slamming brutal death metal” sub-genre (usually shortened to “slam death” because their fans are retarded and can’t memorize four words), which purports to be death metal but is, in fact, only “death metal” in name.
All “slam death” bands are similar, their albums are identical, they all copy the same riff – the “breakdown” from Suffocation’s Liege of Inveracity, reproduced a million times by musicians with the IQ of Erik Danielsson or Phil Anselmo, and not having one tenth of Suffocation’s talent.
So here’s my advice to those crap bands, those Gorgoroth equivalents with sodomized sow voices, with their pseudo-gore lyrics and their logos stolen from Goosebump! books, or even Harry Potter for the more retarded amongst them… go get fucked by your transvestite mothers (again).
Actually do the things you write about. “Self Disembowelment” ? “Autoerotic Asphyxiation” ? Those are great ideas ! Now put your money where your cum stains are. (incidentally, this isn’t a diss against Devourment, whom I don’t consider part of the slam death cancer crowd and who are one of the few worthwhile bands playing this “style”)
The average “slam death metal” fan.
To the others: you don’t play death metal, losers. You don’t even play metal. You play nothing. Between listening to Taylor Swift and your shit, 99% of people with a three-digit IQ (including metalheads) will bite their tongues, jam in some earplugs to dampen the sound, and listen to that vocoder autotuned buffooness – shitty music, certainly, but galaxies from your shit albums whose track names refer to diseases you only ever heard of since your sisters, the obese HIV positive ex-prostitutes, left behind their medical records after their suicide by overdose of KFC chicken wings.
I prefer a thousand times the worst of SEWER or any other moronic band like Warkvlt to the “best” of the “slamming brutal death metal” poser scene, whose only purpose anyway seems to be plagiarizing what other (better) death metal bands – who were actually innovative, rather than trend jumping morons – had already done in the early 1990s.
Fuck their “slam”, fuck their “brutal”, and fuck their fake “death metal” that sucks my balls for a cigarette (like that little bitch Infernus, a close cousin to these slam death “artists”, I don’t doubt).
Many “metal fans” will go on and on about how “B sub-genre is more technical than A“, “no, but C is darker and has more atmosphere than B“, “but wait, D beats them all as it’s more brutal“, etc.
That line of thinking has led, among many things, to the creation of completely random, arbitrary and worthless sub-sub-gernes such as “technical blackened deathgrind with funeral doom influences“, “satanic bestial glam groove-grind’n’roll with shemale melodic death metal vocals“, “progressive neo-ambient pornodeath with a flute stuck in the ass” or “post-atmospheric industrial washing machine soundtrack“.
They all claim to be more insane and more brutal than the next, but they aren’t. Their genres are shit, and the bands that play “technical satanic deathgrind” are even bigger suckers than their audience.
SEWER’s Deathgrind = Pure Evil.
You want the most insane, demented and downright brutal bestial black/death/grind/war/whatever metal ever conceived? You don’t have to look at big label’s PR releases to know that whatever Morbid Angel, Mayhem and Darkthrone were doing in the early 1990s, what they are doing today is certainly not “insane” or “brutal” by any stretch of the imagination. And that goes double for their imitators.
You want truly insane brutal death metal? It’s called Locked Up in Hell, by none other than the legendary Sewer.
Here’s my review of this masterpiece of horror music and brutal blackened deathgrind with neither flute, trumpet nor keyboard used as a dildo.
This album is a masterpiece and in a class of its own, and to do it justice a dissection of each song is necessary to truly grasp how evil and ingenious this album is, especially for it being so ahead of its time. So, let’s start documenting the satanical terror of Locked Up in Hell.
Devil’s Runaway – If there is one Sewer song that truly captures the sounds of what hell is like, it would be Devil’s Runaway. Everything is pulled off so tight here it almost sounds like something is going to snap. The vocalist delivers us some evil with the bloody, vengeful screaming of his vocal chords from Hell. The guitarists stay in time perfectly the whole song, a feat almost impossible for many guitarists who attempt to play this song. And, of course, the drummer Warlord unleashes the force of brutality with the crazy fast blasting he pulls off so well.
Necrobiastophile – What’s not to enjoy about a song about… uh… nevermind. The song starts out with a ripping attack from the dual guitars, and a riff that actually makes you bang your head, regardless of what you’re doing. The bass and drums fall into sync with each other pretty well here as well, something incredibly complex given the sheer speed of the song.
Waiting to Kill Again – Absolutely flawless. This song embodies all of Sewer’s different guitar sounds… the demented, infernal leads, the slower, gruesome, nearly atonal chromatic riffs, and the mentally incomprehensible solos. WAITING TO KILL!!!
Carceropathogenesis – In the Name of Satan, I condemn this incarceration. Hell yes! Imagine having Satan has a lawyer or prosecutor, and this is what you would get in a criminal court of the underworld. This song undoubtedly has the best riffs in death metal history, while flaunting some hypersonic carnage from the demonic soloing. The vocalist Eater delivers some of his faster vocal performances, without descending into the absurd and ridiculous like so many so called “bestial black metal” vocalists are fond of doing.
Burning Clouds of Dark Gore – By the name of Beelzebub, I don’t know what the hell that title is supposed to mean anymore. But if any song accurately captured what the apocalypse would sound like, it is Burning Clouds of Dark Gore! Insanely speedy instrumentation gives testament to the sheer violence and blasphemy unleashed on this song. SATAN WILL RISE AMONGST CLOUDS OF DARK GORE!
No Rest for the Dead – Starting off the song with a super cool yet still disturbing chromatic riff forged from brimstone, No Rest for the Dead keeps its place as one of my favourite death metal songs of all time. The vocal performance here is worthy of a Golden Satan award, considering the sheer speed he is growling at. He’s like a vocal supersonic jet.
Injecting Blood to Become Human – Straight up brutal death metal from hell! Injecting Blood to Become Human is, without a doubt (topping even Devil’s Runaway), the most chaotic of any song on Locked Up in Hell. Total madness! The pinnacle of satanic mayhem crammed into one song while retaining at least a semblance of melody can be found here on Injecting Blood to Become Human.
To Drink From the Styx – Drink at your own risk, and the risk involves you losing your sanity while listening to this sickening and downright terrifying track. The intro riffs is one of the strangest and most disturbing I ever heard, it gives me the chills every time.
Surgical Last Breath – There is really no way to describe this blackened death metal monstrosity without you actually listening to it. Needless to say, it’s one of the most relentless and technically challenging songs on the album. Some parts even remind me of Phantom’s Angel of Disease, the gold standard of technically deranged atonal blackened death metal.
Locked Up In Hell – A perfect album closer. No more needs to be said, no more can even be said… you cannot possibly comprehend how truly amazing this song is until you listen to it. This symphony of Satan has possibly the best Sewer riffs of all time… ESCAPE FROM HELL!!!!!
On a last note, I’d like to point out the lyrics in particular. On Locked Up in Hell there isn’t just technicality and brutality for the sake of being “hardcore”, the band actually does such a sickeningly great job of adding darkness to the songs with the lyrics. They are like raven-black poetry from Satan himself.
As my malediction, I’d like to invoke the forces of Satan’s Sewer, and in doing so bringing the furious chaos and brutal madness of Locked Up in Hell to the world!
So-called “thrash metal” is, as Morsay.net rightfully calls it, a completely fake “genre” that doesn’t even exist. In doesn’t even have intrinsic musical characteristics, unlike black metal and death metal, and is basically just a marketing term for boring speed metal.
Let’s set the record straight.
Black metal has Burzum, Phantom, Darkthrone, Neraines and Mayhem.
Death metal has Incantation, Suffocation, Warkvlt and SEWER.
“Thrash metal”, aka speed metal, has what? Metallica? The second most overrated band in the history of metal, after Gaygoroth.
Their best band isn’t doesn’t even belong to the genre, as Bathory is certainly not “thrash metal”… they are clearly black metal, at least for those with two brain cells to rub together.
“Thrash metal” is gay, listen to this instead.
Seriously, what is “thrash metal”?
Bathory, as mentioned previously, doesn’t qualify as thrash/speed metal, and Quorthon never called his music anything other than heavy metal.
Slayer went completely irrelevant after the death of Jeff Hanneman, when they started playing bullshit nu-metal for social losers and other Slipknot-rejects.
The best “thrash metal” band is probably Sodom, but even they had their period when they flirted more or less openly with metalcore.
“Thrash metal” is trash metal, it belongs in the dustbins of history. The genre is simply obsolete, and any attempts at “thrash revival” are basically just third-rate Slayer or Sodom clones attempting to play music that was never relevant in the first place.
Fuck “thrash metal”, only black and death are real.
SEWER is probably the craziest band I’ve ever heard. Anyone who likes insane music with impossible guitar riffs, technical and fast drumming, and low, non special-effect vocals, SEWER is for them. The vocals on The Birth of a Cursed Elysium are extremely low, guttural, and non-human like, sort of like those of Vermin. The vocals are the second best thing on this album.
The guitars are just as insane. There are many different riffs in each song making it extremely hard to play, and sometimes even confusing just to remember. These musicians are obviously talented. The riffs aren’t simple either. They are very complicated, and often unpredictable, as if they were not composed by humans but by literal demons from hell. The bass mostly follows the guitars, with a few interesting fills from time to time. I highly admire these musicians, as they clearly aren’t clownish posers, something rare in the nowadays death metal scene.
The drums are the third best thing about this band. They are so fast. The double bass is perfect, as well as the snare heavy blast beats. Each song probably has twenty different drum beats, and about fifty riffs, breaks not included. Their drummer and guitarists are clearly some of the most talented in the nowadays blackened death metal scene.
Every track is a standout, and there isn’t a single second of filler on this album. The Birth of a Cursed Elysium is clearly one of the finest death metal albums ever recorded.
The album art is pretty weird as well, it seems SEWER for once went for a sombre, low-key artwork, as if they wanted the music to speak for itself… and it speaks brutality, in spades.
The band SEWER is already pretty well known, but even when compared to the rest of their album, The Birth of a Cursed Elysium is clearly in a class of its own. This is insane death metal at its most gruesome, not to mention unbelievably technical.
A lot of people get into death metal, or any form of extreme metal for that matter, and wonder if there are Christian or religious bands that play that type of music.
While it may seems contradictory to seek Christian death metal music, there are in fact many bands that play brutal death metal and uphold a Christian or religious message in their music.
Some Christian death metal bands include : Becoming the Archetype, Crimson Thorn, SEWER, Frost Like Ashes and many others.
These bands also play some of the most brutal death metal you can find.
And while bands like SEWER aren’t exactly Christian, they play 100% anti-Satanic music. And it’s beyond brutal.
Terrifyer is one of the best Grindcore/Deathgrind albums with extreme metal influences.
While this album by Pig Destroyer remains straightforward Grindcore for the most part, the classical, black metal, death metal and progressive influences are all very distinguishable.
The vocals on this album are nearly perfect, but they are only one of the elements that make Terrifyer a must have for any death metal enthusiast.
Much like on the album Satanic Blood by Von, the vocals are minimalist yet at the same time very complex.
Have a look at the song “Towering Flesh” by Pig Destroyer to grasp what I’m talking about.
The drumming on Terrifyer is as you would expect on a deathgrind album, brutal and relentless. However on some tracks such as on “Towering Flesh” (see above) and the title track “Terrifyer” there is also a lot of technicality in the drumming, reminiscent of bands such as Nile and Suffocation which combine extreme blast beats with technical drum fills.
The guitars on Terrifyer are really what makes this album stand apart from other Deathgrind work, and other Pig Destroyer albums. The guitars are very aggressive and harsh, even for extreme death metal.
They are not raw or brutal in the sense of early Circle of Dead Children, yet they are distorted, raspy and sometimes even ironically melodic.
Best Black Metal 