Death Metal Foundations
Death metal emerged from thrash metal in the mid-1980s, taking its predecessor's speed and aggression and adding down-tuned guitars, blast beat drumming, guttural vocals, and lyrical subject matter centred on death, violence, and existential horror. The formative acts: Death (Chuck Schuldiner's band is both the genre's namesake and its most musically sophisticated early practitioner); Possessed (whose 1985 album Seven Churches is arguably the first death metal album); Morbid Angel (whose Altars of Madness (1989) remains a benchmark of the form); and Cannibal Corpse (the genre's most commercially successful act, whose artwork and lyrical content pushed extreme metal's visual language to its limits).
Black Metal and Atmosphere
Black metal, emerging from Norwegian and Swedish underground scenes in the early 1990s, took extreme metal in a different direction from death metal's technical brutality. Where death metal's horror is visceral and physical, black metal's is atmospheric and cosmic — the cold, raw production of early black metal recordings by Mayhem, Darkthrone, Burzum, and Immortal created a sound of genuine desolation that matched the genre's imagery of winter, darkness, and anti-human misanthropy. The second wave of Norwegian black metal — despite (or because of) the criminal activity that surrounded several of its key figures — produced some of the most sonically extreme and genuinely frightening music of the 20th century.
Doom and Gothic Metal
Doom metal — slower, heavier, and more melodically oriented than death or black metal — provides the intersection between extreme music and gothic aesthetics. Type O Negative (whose Bloody Kisses (1993) combined Black Sabbath-derived heaviness with gothic atmosphere and Peter Steele's darkly romantic songwriting) are the genre's defining act. Paradise Lost (UK gothic doom with genuine emotional depth), My Dying Bride (funeral doom with violin and operatic vocals), Anathema (who evolved from doom metal into something more atmospheric and ultimately hopeful), and Suicidal Angels represent the range of the gothic metal tradition.
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