Heavy Metal Music

"Today, we all find it kind of funny and sad at the same time. [...] Take Ivar from Enslaved: back then, we were writing stuff to each other that was so ugly, we had to look over our shoulders all the time. But today we’re the best of friends and we’re really embarrassed about all that stuff. A couple of years ago Kampfar won a Norwegian Grammy, and we were sitting there at the same table with Enslaved. We’re the same guys that back then sent death threats to each other. And we’re sitting there now in suits, drinking wine, eating fancy dinners. It was like: ‘How crazy is this?’” Pretty crazy."

"In , there’s one band that rules supreme, and that’s . Everyone from Gothenburg loves Iron Maiden for some reason, so naturally their version of death metal would be melodic and with a twin guitar attack."

"and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to record . For , you gotta have a drum kit that can cut through a . So it was important to have good and solid . For a while there, we were doing death-metal sessions."

"Scott knew what to do with fast and brutal bands, and not a lot of guys did at the time [...] It really drew people from the death metal scene down here. That was a big factor in Tampa becoming a haven here. They wanted to be close to the studio."

"With high-quality production that differentiated one band from another, artists in Tampa could carve and cultivate their own identities. Sure, there were similarities. The drummers often played blast beats — which used double-bass drumming and were considerably faster than thrash beats – and guitarists played rapid up and down strokes with few pauses (called tremolo picking). The rhythms flip-flopped from a high-octane burn to doomy, palm-muted chugs and often relied on irregular time signatures, and the leads were more cacophonous than Slayer’s. To the untrained ear, it was a mess, but that just made it a more exclusive form of music for those who could separate one cacophonic tone from another."

"In ‘05, was crazy popular. We were like OK, metalcore is cool, but what if you cut off all the singing shit and you just play the heavy shit and ? What if your drummer is a ? And what if your vocalist is more influenced by than he is by ? That’s kinda how it came to be."

"I think kids got tired of this fuckin' emo-metal bullshit. They wanted something a lot heavier, so they've made hybrids that incorporate death metal. They've learned their lessons from what we did 15 years ago from their uncles or parents and they want to capture that brutality."

"Bands like and came out saying, "Yeah, we like Cynic," and that spoke volumes to numerous kids who started researching the older bands like us."

"People are realizing that the heaviest music was definitely when death metal started. And today there are kids picking up instruments who really want to be good musicians, and death metal requires good musicianship. Kids are finally learning how to play goddamn fucking solos again."

"As it evolved and mutated, metalcore and deathcore bands including , , , , and applied elements of death metal to their own -heavy rhythms, while other purists played old-school sounds for new audiences."

"There was such a long period of time where [the genre] was so saturated [...] A large percentage of those bands sounded the same, regurgitating the same sounds and ideas. I think that's a big chunk of the negative connotations the deathcore tag had back then."

"People are in their garage making a demo, and once they get into a studio they're going to want to use the [recording equipment]. It offers all sorts of temptations. Even without trying, you start to become good at your instrument, you're gonna want to do things with it."

"Though death metal songwriters weren't moving away from the grim subject material, there was a growing desire for clarity, with bands tightening up to better communicate weird or abstract ideas of death, and to court some of the more lucrative commercial possibilities. This more professional approach, forged from recording engineers and musicians working to refine the sound, would be the spark that finally ignited the interest of larger organizations."

"Within the confines of a genre there's always a tension: Where do you go with extreme music? What limits are left to explore? One of the reasons I think that extreme metal artists end up producing more technical or listenable work is ultimately it becomes less artistically satisfying to produce [traditional death metal]."

"Beyond the blood, guts, screams and pick squeals, death metal has also become a platform for virtuosic musicians to display advanced musical techniques and challenging lyrics."

"There's only so fast you can play and there's only so heavy you can be without it all sounding the same, or without it all just being a blur, so you know, maybe we've opened up a whole new branch of direction [...] with the music. [...] As long as it keeps expanding and bands keep experimenting and doing different things, it's not going to die out."

"[Learning music theory] can spur your creativity. I’ve found that the guys who don’t know as much theory tend to write things in 4/4 most of the time. The guys who know theory are the ones who end up experimenting more and having music that sounds a little more out there, which I like. The more you know, the more you can mess around."

"There are blurry lines that separate death metal, grindcore, and thrash metal and even black metal; some bands certainly overlap these genres. What sets grindcore apart mostly is how bands push the limits known to extreme music with more intensity, speed, intensity and lyrics. Short, buzzing riffs fast enough to snap necks; guttural vocals, and blast beats underneath it all define some of grindcore's key characteristics."

"Grindcore is the bridge between and mixed with brutally fast . You take it and throw it all in a blender, hit and stand back."

"In Sweden, death metal started in Stockholm. [...] Grotesque were together in 1987 and so were Nihilist. And the Stockholm bands were more based around Judas Priest and Motorhead – a fast, but rock and roll kind of approach — more dirty than what came out of Gothenburg."

"In Stockholm bands were very heavily influenced by and noisy kind of stuff. They were all about getting and being unpolished."

"The difference between Stockholm bands and Gothenburg bands is in Stockholm you join a band to walk through the VIP door of the nightclub and in Gothenburg you join a band because you want to play and you stay home practicing Friday and Saturday night. There were a few places to play, but people were so focused on being nerdy with their instruments and their bands and rehearsed all the time. The Haunted shared a rehearsal space with In Flames for a year or two and everyone just hung out together playing and drinking beer."

"' remains one of the most gruesomely perfect pieces of Swedish death metal ever committed to tape. [...] Most importantly, the Swedish sluggers’ stellar debut showed the Yanks didn’t have the monopoly on white-hot death metal. Bands are still ripping it off 30 years on."

"When I compare other countries’ scenes, there is no healthier scene than Sweden’s when it comes to musicians. There are kick-ass bands in practically every town in this country, and there always have been. I remember going to concerts back in the day and you just had to look around and you saw all these guys from different bands. [...] In the black metal, thrash and death metal scenes, there was never this gap between the band and the fans. Everybody played. Some were on a bigger level but they always mingled with the audience, always. Everybody starts really early up here. Everybody wants to be as good as all the guys they looked up to in school, and with the way our community is built up, you get a chance early on. [...] You can borrow and rent equipment fairly cheaply, so it is a good opportunity if you are a young kid to jump on that bandwagon and have fun with it. I think the whole underground movement settled down here in Stockholm as a scene itself with bands like Nihilist, Unleashed, Dismember, Grave. There were tonnes of them. Then you finally knew you were into something that was going to last."

"I think there was always a big divide between the Stockholm and Gothenburg scenes. The Gothenburg scene seemed to be way more into the melodic aspect; I don’t think they ever went for the brutality in death metal. [...] If you overdo the melodic aspect within death metal you’re definitely going to chop off an important element. [...] Of course, there were bands who were mixing it up pretty good. You had bands like Grotesque, which led to At The Gates, but in some ways they kept the tradition of [heavy metal] - I don’t want to say the cheesy element but the hyper-melodic element of it all. [...] And, for me, if you overdo the melodic aspect within death metal you’re definitely going to chop off an important element, an essential element of death metal, and that is the darkness. The whole eerie, dark element of death metal is to not go too melodic. [...] Yeah, I’m really proud to be from the Stockholm scene when I talk about that because I think the Stockholm underground death metal scene really did good in keeping justice to the whole true promise of death metal."

"Remember when death metal was about big ugly riffs and spine-chilling leads rather than an attempt to cram as many notes and beats into a song as possible with the aid of Pro Tools? When albums were filled with memorable tunes and atmosphere instead of monotonous blastfests, one barely distinguishable from another? In Sweden they never forgot. Indeed, during the 20 years since that distinctly dirty, punishing sound first crawled from the depths of Stockholm, the beast has remained alive, kept in fighting fitness by the pioneers who first brought it to life."

"In contrast to the melodic and technical flourishes found [in the Gothenburg sound], the original Swedish sound – made famous by the likes of Dismember, Entombed, Grave and Unleashed – is characterised by big, dirty and generally downtuned guitars, pounding drum beats, a taste for morbid groove and relatively straightforward song structures. The fact that most of the bands central to its creation stuck to their guns enabled it to forge a clear identity, one which stands in welcome contrast to the cold, technical direction US bands – and those inspired by US bands – have tended to follow."

"is a really , , . So, it's a weird place to begin with, and then you have these kids with no place to go. So maybe death metal happened as a reaction to that or maybe it's just some energetic physics thing—a spirit that's in the air and kids tune into it if they have an artistic bone in their bodies."

"Down in Florida, people were listening to Nasty Savage and Savatage as well as shredders like Randy Rhoads before the really heavy stuff started with bands like Celtic Frost, Slayer, Hellhammer and Venom."

"The Florida technical death metal scene was huge for me. The mind-bending songs of Atheist were just so out of this world and even if I didn’t understand the songs back then they still resonated with me. I couldn’t love this more if I tried."

"I’d met Chuck in ’89 [...] We got in contact with him and hung out for a while, he introduced me to [producer and engineer] Scott [Burns] who was doing sound for a show at an airplane hangar. It was Morbid Angel, Obituary, Atheist, Amon and Nocturnus. That’s where I met every key member of every band. That was the first sign that something really cool was happening."

"I’ll never forget a party I went to in an old barn in central Florida. [...] Amon were playing and then Xecutioner (which became Obituary). I went to the party with Chuck [Schuldiner] and I remember David Vincent saying to Chuck, ‘Man, I love your vocals on ', which he had the advance cassette of. It seemed like every band that became influential from that Florida scene was there that night. It was just a room of artists interacting and there was a lot of camaraderie and respect. And you could feel it. It was like, ‘Whoa, this is a scene.’"

"It was more competitive in Florida than in Buffalo, which is where we were originally from. But I don't know if it was a completely negative thing because sometimes that competitive spirit helps bands better themselves. Everyone wants to be the fastest and the heaviest, and that kept the scene moving forward in a faster, heavier direction."

"To make it fun and exciting, we kind of looked at it like wrestling. You know how in wrestling you've got these big guys and it's all competition and they've got something to say about this or that guy, but it's all in fun? The idea was to write songs that blew everybody else away and pull off the most wicked, fucking beats. But it was only in fun, and it was a motivational tool."

"I didn't really see [Morbid Angel] as competition. I just saw it as someone who was shit-talking who was gonna get pounded. But after a confrontation at an airport, that came to an end. We got on a plane with them and I went, "Hey man, what the fuck is this shit about?" And there was an about-face. "Oh, we didn't say that, man." But we have some mutual friends and shit, so we know what was said. And it was like, "OK, you know what, if you want to take it to the next level, we're ready." We made peace after that and realized we were all on the same team."

"Back then, I really wanted to destroy everybody. I wanted people to have to work a lot harder after the fans witnessed what we had going on. I wanted to smoke people. I really believed that bands were challenging each other, trying to outdo each other and make each other quit - almost like the rivalries with East Coast and West Coast rappers. I really kind of thought people wanted to write parts that would engulf the whole world. I wanted to get onstage and have people go, "Holy shit - what the fuck is going on?" I wanted to write stuff that would make other bands run and hide. It's not really very nice, but that's what drove me."

"To be honest, the early Tampa scene was very divisive, and a lot of the bands didn’t like each other or talk to each other because it was extremely competitive. No one knew that literally every single one of their bands was going to get signed."

"I was jamming with a few other guys in in the late 80’s, when we collectively decided to move to Florida. […] It was who actually told us about the scene in Florida before we came down. […] So we moved down in December of 1989. […] But when we first moved to South Florida, the scene was just killer for metal. That was a big reason why we moved down."

"Back then, we were all trying to define our own sounds and images. I don’t wanna say there was unfriendly competition, but I don’t wanna say there was friendly competition either. We were all competing for the front seat. It all started with and . You had the thing going on with and we wanted to outdo that. My goal was to be heavier, vocally especially."

"Tampa never really got the shows coming through town that New York or the West Coast got, and that created a real hunger for good music. We kind of had to create our own scene."

"I found for me personally the easiest way to think about things [in the transition to veganism] was to not actually think about the products I was boycotting as food, but for what they actually were—for instance, the flesh of an animal or the embryo of a chicken."

"So many people don’t know about what happens behind closed doors in slaughterhouses and with animal testing. We’re a small minority of people up against large corporations with billions of dollars, but if we can sort of chip away and slowly spread awareness through whatever medium it is, whether it be music or television or anything, it’s going to help toward positive change. … According to PETA, some of the biggest animal-testing companies are Colgate and Gillette … and so whether it’s just having a shave in the morning or brushing their teeth with toothpaste, it’s not just women who are funding animal testing …. Changes in government legislation won’t come without social change. … [We activists] are trying to get information out to people so they know what they’re getting involved in on a daily basis."

"Around the time I was first getting into hardcore/metal/punk and going to shows, I had a lot of friends who were vegan and vegetarian and after having a few conversations with them regarding the subject I realised I'd never really thought about things the way they did. I was never pressured into anything and I found myself doing my own research on the subject matter and after finding some cold hard facts about the meat and dairy industry which disturbed me deeply, I made the decision to go veg and then a year later vegan and I've now been vegan for eleven years with no problems whatsoever."

"I’ve grown up with animals in the house, I have 3 brothers and 3 sisters, and all of us had cats, dogs, mice, chickens, frogs, tortoises, so they’ve always been a big part of my life. My dog, Scamp, was my best friend when I was growing up, and he was just as much a brother to me as my human brothers. Someone threw acid on him, and he almost died, but my parents spent their life savings having him treated. It appalled me that people could be so cruel, and ever since I have stuck up for animals. It is something I can be active in, unlike trying to figure out the appalling things humans do to each other."

"In the hard rock and heavy metal world, Butler is a downright god. Known for his early use of the wah-wah pedal and down-tuning his instrument (which would become a favorite technique among grunge guitarists and bass players), Butler is one of the most celebrated bassists within the genre. Butler, who was also the primary lyricist in Black Sabbath, has been claimed by such greats as Steve Harris, Billy Sheehan, and Jason Newstead when it comes to posing as an influential figure. Butler’s performance on the Sabbath classic "Paranoid" holds the whole song together."

"Ronnie was so enthusiastic, and he could play instruments which Ozzy couldn't play, so it was easy to communicate with him, and for him to communicate musically with us. That enthusiasm gives us all a kick up the bum."

"I went vegetarian when I was about… 8 years old. One day I cut this piece of meat open and blood came out of it, and I realized, I asked my mother, “Where did this come from?,” and she said, “From animals,” and that was it."

"'Cause I need metal in my life, Just like an eagle need to fly [...] Hold your head up high! Raise your fist up in the air! Play metal louder than hell! They can't stop us, let 'em try, for heavy metal we will die!"

"Under the blanket of rock 'n' roll music lies heavy metal."

"Metal! It comes from hell!"