A Death Metal Column Asks What the Genre Even Is Anymore

The latest edition of Heavy Consequence’s Mining Metal column does not simply list new releases. It pauses on a deceptively simple question: what is death metal?

Columnist Langdon Hickman uses the monthly roundup—which this time includes Ænigmatum, Amargor, Anatomy of Habit, Arise from Worms, Cabinet, Coprolith, Hexorcist, and Torpor—as a springboard. Rather than reviewing records in isolation, the piece wrestles with the genre’s chimeric nature. Death metal, Hickman suggests, is more an energy or approach than a fixed sound. It can accommodate blastbeats and backbeats, tremolo-picked savagery and prog-fingered intricacy, even acoustic instrumentation and bongos. The common thread is not speed or distortion but a specific, difficult-to-name charge that connects Cynic, Cannibal Corpse, Immolation, and more obscure acts.

The column’s reflection arrives at a moment when extreme music’s borders keep stretching. An album built entirely on piano can scan as death metal; much European melodic death metal, Hickman argues, does not. The stance is provocative, but grounded in a long view that traces the style back to tape-trading circles of the early 1980s.

The full column is less an announcement than a listening companion. It offers brief, contextual notes on each act, but its real value lies in pushing readers beyond genre-definition fatigue. For anyone still mapping the underground, the question matters as much as the music.