What is "death metal"

n. (context music English) A subgenre of heavy metal typically employing moderate to fast tempos, heavily distorted guitars, deep growling vocals, blast beat drumming and complex song structures with multiple tempo changes, often having violent or dark lyrics.

Death metal is an extreme subgenre of heavy metal music. It typically employs heavily distorted and low-tuned guitars, played with techniques such as palm muting and tremolo picking, deep growling vocals and screams, aggressive, powerful drumming featuring double kick or blast beat techniques, minor keys or atonality, abrupt tempo, key, and time signature changes and chromatic chord progressions. The lyrical themes of death metal may invoke slasher film-stylized violence, religion (sometimes Satanism), occultism, Lovecraftian horror, nature, mysticism, mythology, philosophy, science fiction, and politics, and they may describe extreme acts, including mutilation, dissection, torture, rape, cannibalism, and necrophilia.

Building from the musical structure of thrash metal and early black metal, death metal emerged during the mid-1980s. Bands such as Venom, Celtic Frost, Slayer, and Kreator were important influences on the genre's creation. Possessed and Death, along with bands such as Obituary, Autopsy and Morbid Angel, are often considered pioneers of the genre. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, death metal gained more media attention as popular genre niche record labels like Combat, Earache, and Roadrunner, began to sign death metal bands at a rapid rate.

Since then, death metal has diversified, spawning several subgenres. Melodic death metal combines death metal elements with those of the new wave of British heavy metal. Technical death metal is a complex style, with uncommon time signatures, atypical rhythms and unusual harmonies and melodies. Death-doom combines the deep growled vocals and double-kick drumming of death metal with the slow tempos and melancholic atmosphere of doom metal. Deathgrind, goregrind and pornogrind mix the complexity of death metal with the intensity, speed, and brevity of grindcore. Deathcore combines death metal with metalcore traits. Death 'n' roll combines death metal's growled vocals and highly distorted, detuned guitar riffs with elements of 1970s hard rock and heavy metal.

Death Metal is the fourth album by Swedish death metal band, Dismember. The fourth track, "Let The Napalm Rain", opens with a sample from the movie Apocalypse Now.

Death Metal is a split album by the bands Helloween, Hellhammer, Running Wild and Dark Avenger. It contains the only recorded material of the German band Dark Avenger.

The album offers an interesting snapshot of the ebullience and creativity of the Central European metal scene during the end of the early-1980s. At that time Running Wild had yet to develop their " pirate metal" schtick and considered themselves a black metal band. Helloween were more of a thrashy speed metal act rather than the melodic power metal vehicle into which they would soon develop. Hellhammer were the darker and heavier band of the foursome and would later be regarded as pioneers and inspiration for generations of European extreme metallers.

Running Wild's tracks appear as bonus tracks in their 1995 album Masquerade; Helloween's tracks appear in the second disc of the 2006 re-mastered and expanded edition of their 1985 album Walls of Jericho; and Hellhammer's tracks appear on the 1990 re-issue of their 1984 EP Apocalyptic Raids.

Death Metal is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character appears in the Marvel UK imprint. He first appeared in Death³ #1 and was created by Dan Abnett and Dell Barras.

Death metal is an extreme subgenre of heavy metal.

Death metal may also refer to:

• Death Metal (Dismember album), 1998
• Death Metal (split album), a 1984 split album by the bands Helloween, Hellhammer, Running Wild and Dark Avenger
• Death Metal (comics), a character from the Marvel UK imprint of Marvel Comics