Extreme Metal

Extreme metal starts where Black Sabbath stopped being enough. In 1981 Venom released Welcome to Hell — barely in tune, recorded fast, and the record that gave black metal its name three years later with the album Black Metal. Bathory took that in 1984 and made it Scandinavian; Possessed titled a song Death Metal in 1985 and named a second genre by accident.

Thrash ran in parallel out of the Bay Area and Germany at once: Slayer's Reign in Blood in 1986 compressed ten songs into 29 minutes, while Kreator, Sodom and Destruction did the same thing in Essen and Gelsenkirchen with worse equipment and more speed. Florida turned it guttural — Death, Deicide, Obituary and Morbid Angel all recorded at Morrisound in Tampa with Scott Burns behind the desk. Norway went the other way in the early nineties: Mayhem, Immortal, Darkthrone and Emperor chose cold, thin, deliberately ugly production, and the scene's story got dark enough that the music is still argued about separately from the men who made it.

What holds the four scenes together is not a sound but a refusal: no radio edit, no ballad, no apology for the volume.

Half of modern heavy music is downstream of these records. Pantera's groove — Dimebag playing behind the beat — became the template for a decade of American metal and you can hear it in Lamb of God, Machine Head and every band that ever wrote a Walk riff. At the Gates' Slaughter of the Soul invented melodic death metal in 1995 and, by way of Gothenburg, ended up in metalcore and eventually in mainstream rock radio.

Norwegian black metal's tremolo-and-blast formula escaped its own scene entirely and turned up in post-rock, in film scores, and in the wave of atmospheric bands that kept the guitars and dropped the corpse paint. Cannibal Corpse have sold over two million records without a single minute of radio play, which is the whole genre's argument in one statistic. The scenes also outlived their own controversies and their own dead.

Chuck Schuldiner died in 2001 and Death's Human and Symbolic are still the records technical death metal measures itself against. Dimebag Darrell was killed on stage in 2004 and Pantera's four studio albums have only grown in stature since. Sepultura pulled Brazilian percussion into Roots in 1996 and opened a door that Soulfly, Gojira and half the modern scene walked through.

None of it was ever on the radio and none of it needed to be — extreme metal built the first genuinely global underground, trading cassettes across borders before the internet existed and filling festivals now that it does.