Death

• Genre: Death Metal
• Hometown: Orlando
• Death Website

About

Death founder and mastermind Chuck Schuldiner has skippered the band through endless line-up changes and stylistic permutations. The group's general trajectory has been from gruff Thrash blasts to operatic technical metal with wall-of-sound mixing and Byzantine song structures. Death deserve credit for almost single-handedly hewing off the prickly, gore-spattered Metal sub-genre which shares the band's name. Unlike the anatomically fixated, charnel house miscreants that followed in their wake, Death's music possessed real substance. It was arguably profound. Using sickness and moribundity as metaphors for social decay and moral corruption, the band never merely gloried in gore for gore's sake. Schuldiner endeavored in his lyrics to make connections between the social and the somatic, between the pollution of the planet and the contamination of the spirit.

- Chad Driscoll