Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1991

Brutal death metal

Emerged 1991 Origin USA Subgenres 1 Vocals Growled or shrieked
Heaviness
10
Speed
9
Melody
2

Growled or shrieked. Unintelligible without a lyric sheet. The thing most newcomers bounce off.

In short

Built for density and weight: dissonant riffing, low guttural vocals and crushing breakdowns.

How it sounds

  • Very low tunings and dissonant riffs with dense construction.
  • Deep guttural vocals, often entirely unintelligible, sometimes with pig squeals.
  • Sustained blast beats and gravity blasts alternating with slow breakdowns.

Hear what that means

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Every second here is the uploader's own, read from the recording's tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
200-300 bpm
Song length
2.5-4 min
Tuning
A or lower on seven- and eight-strings, with the strings slack enough that pitch is nearly gone — the guitar becomes a percussion instrument with a rumble attached.
Production
Compressed to a wall, with triggered kick drums clicking through so the double kick stays audible. Everything is loud all the time, deliberately.
Written about
Violence, Body horror, Misanthropy, Deliberate transgression

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Palm-muted tremolo and pinch harmonics over blast beats, with slam sections — a sudden syncopated half-time riff that is the genre's one moment of space.
  • Bass Inaudible as a line and essential as a mass, doubling the guitars so far down that it registers as chest pressure rather than as pitch.
  • Drums Blast beats, gravity blasts and hyper-fast double kick, almost always with triggers. Without them the kick disappears entirely under the guitars.
  • Vocals The gutturals: a pig squeal or inhaled growl pitched below anything in old school death metal, and treated frankly as a texture rather than as language.

What it isn't

That the vocals are the point of it. They are the most conspicuous feature and the least musically consequential; what actually defines the genre is rhythmic — riffs written as syncopated percussion figures against blast beats, with the slam as the release. Listen past the voice and the drumming is among the most technically demanding on this tree, which is the opposite of the usual verdict.

Told apart from

  • Technical death metal Both are extremely fast and technically demanding. Technical death metal is harmonic and restless; this is percussive and stays put.
  • Old school death metal Old school death metal is looser, slower and rawer, and it wants atmosphere. This wants impact and has no interest in murk.
  • Slam death metal Slam is the wing built entirely around the half-time breakdown riff, and it is where brutal death metal's groove side goes.
  • Goregrind Goregrind shares the pitch-shifted vocals and the subject matter, and keeps grindcore's brevity and lack of structure.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

Suffocation released an album in 1991 that set a new standard for weight: lower, denser and more brutal, with breakdowns borrowed from New York hardcore. The genre spread globally, with strong scenes in the US, Russia and Indonesia. It is the branch least interested in melody in the whole tree.

Descended from

Branches into

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.