If the ’80s belonged to thrash, and the 2000s belonged to metalcore, then the ’90s were the era of death metal.
Music scenes in Florida and Sweden gave birth to some incredible death metal bands that are still active today, and we even got longtime death metal fan Jim Carrey putting Cannibal Corpse in his hit film Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, kind of vindicating the genre’s place in culture.
Still, there are a lot of bands that never got the credit they deserve for their role in advancing the sound, and I want to take a moment to give those underrated ’90s death metal bands some recognition…
Dissection
Maybe the most obvious name on this list is Sweden’s Dissection, and most specifically because of their sophomore album, Storm of the Light’s Bane, and its predecessor, The Somberlain.
Released in 1993, The Somberlain introduced the world to Dissection’s brilliant amalgam of blackened melodic death metal. With songs like “Heaven’s Damnation” and “Mistress of the Bleeding DF. Then, just two years later, they followed that up with Storm of the Light’s Bane, a bona fide death metal masterpiece.
Despite its melodically blackened perfection, the album was mostly overlooked for years, and the band went inactive in 1997 after guitarist, vocalist, and main songwriter Jon Nödtveidt was convicted of a hate crime murder, which is clearly a glaring stain on the band’s legacy.
The band would briefly reunite in 2006 for a third album, but the reunion was short-lived, as Nödtveidt was found dead on Aug. 13 of the same year. He’d taken his own life.
Storm of the Light’s Bane has, I’ll say, within the last decade or so, started getting the credit it deserves for being such a brilliant record, in spite of Nödtveidt’s controversial life.
Angelcorpse
The death metal scene that festered in Florida during the ’80s and ’90s was one for the ages. It produced so many crucial bands, like Death, Morbid Angel, Obituary, Cannibal Corpse, and Six Feet Under.
Now, technically, Angelcorpse relocated to Florida from Kansas City at the beginning of their career, and frankly, who could blame them? This would have been the equivalent of stage actors moving away from their small midwestern town to go to New York for Broadway. It’s where the scene was flourishing.
Originally formed in ’95, Angelcorpse wrote some of the best thrashy, unholy death metal to ever be unleashed from the Everglades. The band’s debut album, Hammer of Gods (’96), is a must-listen, as is their second full-length, Exterminate, featuring the merciless opening track, “Christhammer.”
Mortification
While death metal was initially forged mostly in Sweden and Florida, a number of other countries produced some incredible bands as well, like Australia’s Mortification. Founded as a Christian alternative to the macabre, violent death metal bands that were proliferating at the time, Mortification was anything but a typical youth group band.
Founded by bassist Steve Rowe in the late ’80s, Mortification burst onto the death metal scene with their self-titled debut album in 1991, and then the following year they released what many would call the greatest Christian death metal album of all-time, Scrolls of the Megilloth.
I mostly agree with this take, but would go a step further and say that it’s just one of the best death metal albums of the ’90s, period. Even if you’re not a religious person, it isn’t hard to enjoy the speed and brutality the band injected into their records.
They didn’t stop their either, dropping bangers like Primitive Rhythm Machine (’95) a few years later, and closing out the decade with 1999’s Hammer of God.
General Surgery (Sweden)
In some ways, this one feels like a little bit of a cheat, because General Surgery only released one album in the ’90s before going on hiatus for practically a decade, but man, oh man, was that one record so incredibly underrated.
The gruesome marriage of grindcore and death metal into goregrind is often credited to originating with Repulsion and Carcass. This is pretty hard to argue with, and I wouldn’t anyway. But… in terms of really perfecting the concept into something so beautifully foul and hellish, absolutely no one comes close to what General Surgery did with their 1991 Relapse Records debut, the Necrology EP. You just have to hear it.
The Swedish band would go quiet for several years, eventually reemerging to record a couple more albums in the 2000s, as well as a killer split EP with The County Medical Examiners.
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