Death metal and the roads less travelled | Part I – The Awakening, 1986-1991

A hundred death metal albums not from the USA This is essentially a housekeeping exercise I decided to inflict on other eyeballs. A broad sweep through death metal’s classical era in a hundred albums, from 1985 to 2000. If anything, the choice to exclude the US from this list is a sign of respect. It has always been the nation of death metal. It can make a strong claim for inventing the genre, perfecting it, and pushing it to its very limits. In any “best of” list, the US will more than likely make up over 50% of the entries. Straight up excluding them from this exercise paints a slightly different picture. A genre that, by the late 90s was briefly engaging in a conversation with the avant-garde alongside the more well documented story of the genre’s decline into irrelevance. My intention was to prove a thesis, one that the USA’s outsized influence can sometimes unintentionally obstruct. Namely that death metal, from its inception, was a very leftfield move for metal as a whole. Aside…