Decibel Magazine

In honor of Mother’s Day, Decibel is exclusively premiering the song “Mother” from Lita Ford’s new album Living Like a Runaway

By 1989, John McEntee was growing increasingly disenchanted with his membership in technical thrash band Revenant. With the aid of Revenant drummer Paul Ledney, McEntee set out to pursue his own brand of blackened death metal, christening it Incantation.

From a brief moment in 1986, bassist, songwriter and lyricist Leif Edling, almost by sheer willpower alone, managed to raise the leaden monolith of Candlemass from their murky depths and into an upright position.

It’s both Repulsion’s genre-sparking album and the way enlightened metal fans will look at you should you admit ignorance of the fact—which is very well possible, seeing as Repulsion has always been a band that your favorite bands worshipped, but were somehow otherwise criminally unheard of.

Without Napalm Death’s Scum, you probably wouldn’t be holding this magazine. This album—essentially a split LP between two almost completely different lineups—defined grindcore with its growled vocals, whirring, hardcore-influenced riffs and faster-than-a-locomotive blast beats.

While it’ll never be regarded as the kind of breakthrough record Leviathan became, thanks to universal acclaim (indie rock critics and all) and its inclusion on not one but three video game soundtracks (Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Project Gotham Racing 3, Saints Row), Mastodon’s Remission LP is much more important in the scheme of the band’s history and modern metal itself.

Of all of their bizarrely captivating feats, the fact that Coalesce managed to create arguably their most important album after they had ceased to be a band has to rank near the top of the list.

Death metal had never sounded so guttural and primal before Obituary’s 1989 debut, Slowly We Rot, infected record stores.

When Darkthrone’s monumental epic, A Blaze in the Northern Sky, hit the shelves in 1991, it was an album of hesitant firsts: the first Norwegian black metal album (Mayhem’s Live in Leipzig came out earlier but with faulty distribution); the first major second-wave black metal album, globally (Czech group Master’s Hammer had released Ritual a year prior, but with less impact); the first truly blackened death metal album; and the first to chime DM’s death knell in popularity.

When New York grinders Brutal Truth released their debut, Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses, bassist extraordinaire Danny Lilker (Anthrax, S.O.D., Exit-13) had just severed his ties with Nuclear Assault.

In 1991 My Dying Bride already stood out from the cookie-cutter, cookie-monster death metal that was hegemonic in the underground at the time.

Northern England, 1990. Amid the cacophony of blast beats echoing from the speed obsessed world of UK death metal and grindcore, five lads from the grim North were feverishly gathering songs and ideas for the follow up to their doom laden debut album Lost Paradise.