Before it became the genre every non-metal fan uses to imitate what extreme music sounds like, death metal was beautifully weird. When the art form officially broke off of thrash in the very late ’80s and swelled dangerously in the early ’90s, it was a strange and experimental genre, in some ways more resonant with the disgusting extremism of punk than metal’s sword-and-stone fantasy. But like any musical culture, the outlandish pioneers gave way to bands wanting to sound just like them, and so eventually death metal became a body of music with discernible and at times cliched boundaries.
But if the past 10 years have proved anything, it’s that death metal still has fertile soil in which to dig a shallow grave. A new wave of crashing, creative, and most of all diverse death metal bands has crashed onto the scene in recent years, making the genre once more a place to find unique and insane talent. To celebrate this creative resurrection, we cataloged 50 bands who are championing the genre’s various foul and brutal niches right now. The rules for inclusion were that a) the bands had to be specifically death metal (we love you, Rivers Of Nihil, but you’re your own weird beast), b) the bands had to be active, c) their first full-length albums had to have come out in 2010 or later, and d) they had to have at least one full studio LP out (sorry, Oxalate!).
Here are the 50 bands who best remind us that death conquers all…