Sean Reinert — born in the United States on 27 May 1971, died on 24 January 2020 — was the drummer on Human (1991), the album on which Death stopped being a death metal band and became something else. His training came from jazz fusion, not metal, and that is exactly what the record required. Chuck Schuldiner was writing structures with changes of metre, asymmetric sections and complex instrumental passages, and needed a drummer able to play that naturally rather than by brute force. Reinert answered with a light touch, constant ghost notes and cymbals used as colour — jazz vocabulary applied at extreme speeds. Human is today considered the founding landmark of technical death metal, and much of that reputation comes from the drums. With Paul Masvidal, guitarist on the same record, he founded Cynic, a band that carried the fusion further and became a reference of its own within progressive metal. In 2014 Reinert and Masvidal publicly came out as gay, practically unheard of in extreme metal at that point. The gesture had considerable resonance in a world that had rarely faced the subject. Reinert died in January 2020, aged forty-eight.
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