Death Metal

Death metal emerged in the second half of the 1980s, when American bands pushed thrash to the limits of speed and dissonance. Florida became the epicentre, led by Chuck Schuldiner's Death — a band whose name christened the genre and whose trajectory, from raw heaviness to elaborate progressive writing, sums up the breadth it would come to hold.

Technically it is among the most demanding subgenres: sustained blast beats, low tunings, chromatic riffs and guttural vocals that abandon melody entirely. That did not prevent melodic offshoots — Sweden's Gothenburg scene created, with In Flames and its peers, a strain where harmony returns to the foreground. The genre also built a powerful scene in Latin America, with names such as Krisiun, and still keeps a loyal audience that values precisely its refusal to compromise.