50 Fun Facts About Death Metal

What are death metal's harsh vocals commonly called?

Death growls are a trained technique, not just shouting: vocal coach Melissa Cross, whose 2005 video The Zen of Screaming teaches harsh singing, has shown more than 250 artists how to scream without wrecking their voices.

Death metal vocals are jokingly compared to which Sesame Street character?

Cookie Monster vocals sound like a joke, but done badly they are no laughing matter: in 2007 a Dutch hospital reported treating several singers of the style for swelling and polyps on their vocal cords.

Which drumming technique, alongside double kick, defines death metal's rhythm?

The blast beat was named by the grindcore band Napalm Death, but punk and hardcore drummers had been playing it for years before metal took it up.

Venom, whose first two albums shaped extreme metal, came from which English city?

Newcastle's Venom also named a genre by accident: their 1982 album Black Metal lent its title to the whole black metal style that followed.

Which Slayer album does AllMusic credit with inspiring the entire death metal genre?

Reign in Blood lasts barely 29 minutes, and its release was held up over the opening track, 'Angel of Death', about the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele.

Which 1985 debut is often cited as the first true death metal album, two years before Death's own?

Seven Churches was recorded over spring break in 1985, because the band's singer and lead guitarist were still 16-year-old high school students.

Under what name did the pioneering band Death start out?

Mantas became Death in 1984, and a later bandmate said the founder chose the new name to turn his older brother's death into 'something positive'.

Who is widely recognized as the 'Father of Death Metal'?

Chuck Schuldiner shrugged the title off, telling an interviewer in 1999, 'I'm just a guy from a band', and that he thought of Death simply as a metal band.

What was the title of Death's 1987 debut album?

Scream Bloody Gore had to be recorded twice: the label threw out a first attempt made in an ill-equipped studio and sent the band's founder and his 17-year-old drummer to Los Angeles to start again.

Which Brazilian band broke through worldwide with Beneath the Remains in 1989 and Arise in 1991?

Sepultura cut Beneath the Remains in Rio on night shifts, talking through translators to an American producer who took a cut-price fee because he was curious about Brazil.

Obituary, Morbid Angel and Deicide are the core of which state's death metal scene?

Florida's scene grew up around a single Tampa studio, Morrisound Recording, where producer Scott Burns gave band after band its thick, heavy sound.

What was Morbid Angel's 1989 debut album?

Altars of Madness began an alphabet by accident: the follow-up happened to start with B, and Morbid Angel have deliberately titled every album with the next letter ever since.

Which 1991 Death album became a hallmark of technical death metal?

Human was partly an act of revenge: after his bandmates toured Europe without him, Death's founder replaced them all, bringing in two members of the jazz-minded band Cynic.

Which label released albums by Carcass, Napalm Death and Entombed?

Earache Records was started by Digby Pearson in Nottingham, and its first release of note, Napalm Death's Scum, took off after BBC DJ John Peel championed the band on air.

Which label released albums by Obituary and Pestilence?

Like its rivals it went on to bigger successes in other metal genres across the 1990s.

Deicide frontman Glen Benton is notorious for branding which symbol into his own forehead?

An inverted cross, burned in about a dozen times since he was 22; he has called it his symbolic way of taking the mark of his Catholic christening off his skin.

Which Swedish melodic death metal band writes almost all its songs about Vikings and Norse myth?

Amon Amarth's name is not Norse at all: it is the Elvish name for Mount Doom in Tolkien's Middle-earth, and the band rejects the 'Viking metal' tag.

Fenriz, who said Norwegian musicians were 'fed up' with death metal, drums for which band?

Darkthrone knew the scene from the inside: their 1991 debut, Soulside Journey, was a death metal album, made just before they turned to black metal.

What is the 2010s movement reviving the genre's 1980s sound called?

Tomb Mold, Necrot, Undergang and Blood Incantation were among the first to gain traction, and the pandemic amplified the attention.

Which melodic death metal band has been fronted by both Angela Gossow and Alissa White-Gluz?

Arch Enemy managed an unusually friendly handover: when Angela Gossow stepped down in 2014 she recommended Alissa White-Gluz as her successor and stayed on as the band's manager.

Loudwire describes which death metal vocal style as a 'breeee' sound?

Pig squeals run through Job for a Cowboy's 2005 EP Doom, the only record the band made in that style before turning to a straighter death metal sound.

Who says he coined the term 'death metal' for a high school English assignment?

Jeff Becerra says he reasoned that speed metal and black metal were already taken, and that 'death' was a word not yet attached to Venom or anyone else.

Which band released a 1984 demo titled Death Metal, with a song of the same name?

Possessed were Bay Area teenagers at the time, and their guitarist Larry LaLonde went on to a very different kind of fame in the funk-rock band Primus.

Thomas Gabriel Fischer and Martin Eric Ain broke up Hellhammer in 1984 to form which influential band?

Celtic Frost was meant as a clean break: Fischer feared Hellhammer's savage reviews would follow him, yet both bands are now counted among the founders of extreme metal.

Which 1993 Carcass album is sometimes credited as the first melodic death metal record?

Heartwork swapped the band's medical-dictionary horrors for sleek, melodic riffs, and its sleeve shows a sculpture by H. R. Giger, the artist behind the creature in Alien.

In Flames, Dark Tranquillity and At the Gates define which city's metal sound?

Gothenburg's three founding bands began as one circle of friends who lived along the same bus route into the city, then split into In Flames, Dark Tranquillity and At the Gates.

Melodic death metal borrows its guitar style from which earlier movement?

The new wave of British heavy metal supplied the tunes: asked what shaped In Flames, the band's founder named Iron Maiden's style of guitar playing, which he set against death metal's brutality.

Which doom subgenre did Finland's Thergothon and Skepticism pioneer by slowing death metal to a crawl?

Funeral doom's two Finnish pioneers took odd paths: Thergothon split up before their only album came out, while Skepticism built its sound around a keyboard played like a church organ.

Which style name did the music press coin for Entombed's 1993 album Wolverine Blues?

Death 'n' roll is the tag critics pinned on Entombed after Wolverine Blues, whose title came from a James Ellroy crime novel and not from the Marvel hero who appears on one of its covers.

Suicide Silence, Whitechapel and Carnifex are leading names of which subgenre?

Deathcore owes much of its rise to MySpace, where bands like these could share their music with fans worldwide in the mid-2000s.

Decibel credits which band's trademark breakdowns with spawning an entire subgenre?

Suffocation's breakdowns seeded more than one style: the grinding half-time riff in their 1991 song 'Liege of Inveracity' also earned them a name as godfathers of slam.

Slam death metal evolved from which city's 1990s death metal scene?

New York's hardcore scene left its mark: slam bands dropped solos and sheer speed for mid-tempo breakdowns and rhythms borrowed from the city's hardcore and hip-hop.

Cannibal Corpse, Dying Fetus and Cryptopsy are filed under which subgenre?

Brutal death metal can sell: in 2003 Cannibal Corpse were named the best-selling death metal band of the SoundScan era, despite almost no radio or television exposure.

Which grindcore fusion focuses on forensic pathology themes?

Goregrind began with Carcass, whose early lyrics were stitched together from medical terminology and meant, their guitarist says, with a sense of humour.

Which guitar pedal, with every dial turned up full, gave Swedish death metal its 'buzzsaw' sound?

Boss HM-2: a Stockholm guitarist found the tone by maxing out its controls, Entombed's Left Hand Path made it famous in 1990, and the pedal, dropped in 1991, grew such a cult that Boss revived it in 2020.

Which band is a notable example of industrial death metal?

Fear Factory began in Los Angeles as a death metal band, and its 1992 debut, Soul of a New Machine, set those riffs against industrial samples and machine-like drums, which is why the band is filed under both styles.

Which Swedish progressive death metal band has Mikael Åkerfeldt led since the early 1990s?

Opeth later walked away from harsh vocals altogether: from 2011's Heritage Åkerfeldt sang clean for more than a decade, and the old roar only returned on the band's 2024 album.

Which Polish blackened death metal band is fronted by Adam 'Nergal' Darski?

Behemoth's frontman tore up a Bible on stage in 2007 and has been taken to court in Poland more than once for it, arguing each time that it was artistic licence.

Blackened death metal bands are more likely than others to wear suits of armour and what?

Corpse paint was taken furthest by Mayhem's singer Dead, who wanted to look like an actual corpse and would bury his stage clothes, then dig them up to wear on concert nights.

Blasphemy and Archgoat play which 'bestial' offshoot of blackened death metal?

War metal was pioneered by Canada's Blasphemy on their 1990 debut, Fallen Angel of Doom, but the name itself came later, coined by members of another band, Bestial Warlust.

Which Italian band plays symphonic death metal with an operatic soprano?

Fleshgod Apocalypse turned a near-disaster into music: frontman Francesco Paoli's fall while mountain climbing in 2021 put the band on hold, and their 2024 single 'Pendulum' tells the story.

Which Cannibal Corpse song is performed in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective?

Hammer Smashed Face is in the film because Jim Carrey asked for the band himself: they first said no because of a European tour, and the production rearranged its schedule to get them.

Germany restricted Cannibal Corpse's early albums, but which country banned every record in 1996?

Australia pulled every Cannibal Corpse release from its shops in October 1996, and the albums only came back a decade later, classified and restricted to buyers over 18.

Which US senator accused Cannibal Corpse of undermining the national character in 1995?

Bob Dole named them alongside the Geto Boys and 2 Live Crew in a campaign speech, though an aide admitted he had not actually listened to any of the band's records.

In which city was Cannibal Corpse formed in 1988?

Buffalo is where two local bands, Beyond Death and Tirant Sin, broke up in late 1988 and their members pooled into one new group, which had a record deal within eight months.

What nickname does vocalist George Fisher, who replaced Chris Barnes in 1995, go by?

Corpsegrinder was the only singer Cannibal Corpse ever considered for the job, and he is such a devoted World of Warcraft player that its makers once named a character after him.

Which 2021 album gave Cannibal Corpse its first top 10 on the Billboard Top Album Sales chart?

Violence Unimagined was also the first album with the band's producer, Erik Rutan, on lead guitar, after he had spent nearly two years filling in on tour for Pat O'Brien.

Which label signed Cannibal Corpse in July 1989?

Metal Blade Records got the demo through the manager of the record store where the band's singer worked, and its president has called 'A Skull Full of Maggots' one of the greatest song titles ever.

Death's final album ends with a cover of which Judas Priest song?

Painkiller was meant only as a bonus track for Japan until the label urged the band to put it on every edition, and the founder's death three years later left it as the last song on Death's last album.

Which band did early Death drummer Chris Reifert go on to form in California?

Autopsy began in 1987, when Reifert left Death after its debut album and stayed in California, taking over lead vocals himself while still playing the drums.