“It was Nicke’s band, really,” Hedlund explains. “I was just the bass player. But we didn’t agree on certain things. I think it was the right decision, still. I think that if we had been in the same band, I doubt that it would have been a good band, because we had very different ideas on how to play music and what the vocals should be like and what the live show should look like. Then, all of a sudden, professional aspects came into it all, because we were growing and we had to make decisions that we never had to make before, and everything just turned into a totally different situation.”
“You’re kids and you do stupid things,” concedes Andersson. “And I think, to be quite honest, we didn’t wanna play with Johnny anymore, so we broke up and formed again like four days later, which is fucking nasty. It’s really brutal. I could have been like, ‘Hey, it’s not working,’ because we had different ideas. It’s cowardice, that’s what it was.”
Entombed, the new group formed by Andersson, was essentially Nihilist sans Hedlund. The music, lyrics and personnel all remained unchanged—even the band’s logo was ultimately the same font as Nihilist’s old logo with a new set of letters. Hedlund, meanwhile, recruited fellow musicians from the Bajsligan to form his new outfit Unleashed.
“I liked the music we played in Nihilist; I really enjoyed it,” says Hedlund. “There were just small things here and there that I would want the band to stand for, and Nicke wanted his band to take a different direction. I also knew for a fact that if you’re gonna start a band that’s gonna last for some time, not only is there a business aspect of it that you have to consider, but you have to find the right person for the job. So you will have to get along, and not only get along, but get along very, very well. There was no doubt in my mind that I would find the right people, and the first lineup was complete in November of 1989.”
By then, the late Nihilist had inspired numerous Swedish youth to form new high-velocity, brutally heavy metal acts throughout the country. The earliest of these was fellow Stockholm band Carnage, which was founded by guitarist Michael Amott in early 1988.
“Before that, I was in a more hardcore band called Disaccord—kind of a mixture between thrash and hardcore,” says Amott. “The band had come from the hardcore scene, but I had brought in a metal edge with more heavy metal guitar-type stuff. But when I wanted to go for the more death metal approach, they weren’t happy with that, so the next day I formed Carnage.
“And I just couldn’t find any people that were into it,” Amott continues. “There were just problems all around finding like-minded musicians, because either people were into the punk hardcore scene or they were into the more traditional thrash scene; by that time I hated thrash because I was totally death metal, so I turned my back on thrash and I just hated everybody who listened to Metallica. At that time, Metallica had just released …And Justice for All, and seeing little kids in …And Justice for All t-shirts just made me angry. When you’re a teenager, music is really important for your identity. So I was making my own Master t-shirts and Repulsion badges and stuff like that.”
Before long, Amott recruited fellow guitarists Johnny Dordevic and Johan Liiva Axelsson, and drummer Jeppe Larsson, and recorded their first demo, the grinding The Day Man Lost in early 1989. Unsatisfied with the results, Amott actively courted more proficient musicians. His first choice was Fred Estby, drummer of fellow Stockholm natives Dismember, who also began in 1988. Over a period of only 18 months, the group recorded a pair of demos, Dismembered and Last Blasphemies, both showcasing the buzzing guitar swarm established by Nihilist. But when Estby left Dismember in October 1989 to join Carnage, the original lineup of the band soon fell apart.
Carnage, however, quickly returned to the studio in mid-‘89 to record their second demo, the far more intricate Infestation of Evil, which, like the early work of Dismember and Nihilist, featured a subtle sense of melody that much of the grindcore and death metal scenes had yet to explore.
“To me, that was kinda the natural thing to do, because as much as I was into the American death metal stuff like Repulsion and Master, it was really monotonic sounding with a lot of pretty simplistic riffs,” says Amott. “I always liked the way Metallica and Megadeth took more melody into their music, and I first got into extreme metal through thrash, so I guess I brought that with me. With Nihilist and Carnage, I think a lot of the melody came from trying to incorporate horror film music, basically ripping off melodies from The Exorcist and The Omen soundtracks and stuff like that. We’d buy those horror movie soundtracks and basically try to play the melodies on the guitar. Usually, you’d get the melodies a little bit wrong. It’s hard to create the big string arrangements with just a rhythm guitar behind a little melody—usually it would come out a lot more simplistic and fucked-up sounding. There’s probably money due to some composer somewhere.”
Though Carnage’s primary form of promotion remained tape trading within Sweden and abroad, the group performed the occasional show whenever possible.
“We didn’t really play that many shows because we really didn’t have that many opportunities,” says Amott. “What people don’t appreciate is, back then, that kind of music wasn’t accepted. People just thought it was noise. All the metal people hated it and the punk kids didn’t like the long hair. So we couldn’t play the hardcore punk venues and we couldn’t play the heavy metal venues. So when we got some gigs, we’d support thrash bands, because they were the most accepting.
“When Nihilist would invite us over to Stockholm to play, and we’d go up there and there would only be two other bands that were playing with us,” the guitarist continues. “We’d play and we would just watch each other’s set ,wondering why we weren’t selling any of our t-shirts. Basically, you’d know everyone in the crowd. But it was so fresh then, and the cool thing is that I never thought of this as a career, really. I just wanted to play, because all of these American underground death metal bands that I was into, they didn’t have any record deals, so I didn’t think that was an option. We were playing so extreme that I thought we were just gonna keep on making demos. I didn’t really think that there was any market for it. I couldn’t even imagine looking at a vinyl album with a band like Testament—they just seemed like a totally different scene, just having an album out.”
The scene seemed like an alternate universe to another another extreme metal act in the small suburb called Taby, just north of Stockholm. In early 1988, frontman Johan Edlund got the group off to a regrettable start, initially naming the band Treblinka after the Nazi concentration camp in Poland where approximately 870,000 Jews were murdered during World War II.
“We’re not very proud of taking that name, and I’m very happy that we changed it,” admits Edlund. “I know why we took the name. It had nothing to do with our music, so that was a stupid idea.”
Soon Edlund sensibly renamed the band Tiamat and began developing a sound initially derived from other Swedish death metal bands, namely Nihilist.
“I think if someone should have credit for starting this whole thing it must be Nicke from Nihilist,” says Edlund. “I remember he was the one that was really getting into it and ordering tapes from American bands. And I remember he had a Morbid Angel demo very early, and he just convinced us all that this was the new thing, and we believed him.”
Still, after only a single 1988 demo, Tiamat evolved into something atypical of the Swedish scene.
“We were quite outside the Stockholm scene,” says Edlund. “Although we were in the scene, because we knew all the guys and partied together and shared the same musical tastes, we sounded a little bit different. After the first demo, what we wanted to do was more go black metal, and we decided quite early to be a black metal band. I guess we realized that we couldn’t really compete with Nihilist. We thought that what they are doing is very good and they played a lot better than us. So we tried to find something that would fit us better.”
As black metal was simultaneously gaining momentum in Sweden’s neighboring countr
y of Norway, Edlund adopted the stage moniker of Hellslaughter, donned spiked armlets and black-and-white corpsepaint, and incorporated more atmospheric elements, such as keyboards and acoustic guitars, into the band’s approach.
“For me, black metal had a lot to do with the lyrics and the image of the band more than the sound,” Edlund explains. “That’s why I’d consider early bands, like early Venom and Mercyful Fate, black metal. But I remember we were always arguing over this with the Nihilist guys. I mean, they would never sing about Satan, for example, where we didn’t want to sing about gore and zombies, so I guess that was the difference.”
To one band located about 300 miles southeast of Stockholm, on the Swedish island of Gotland—the largest of the Baltic islands—gore and zombies held a greater appeal. Simply christened Corpse by guitarist/vocalist Jörgen Sandström, the teenage group lived far from the capital’s death metal nirvana.
“We were quite isolated down there,” admits Sandström, who co-founded the group in 1986 with guitarist Ola Lindgren and drummer Jensa Paulsson. “There was only us. There were a few heavy metal bands, but none of them were into death metal. We did maybe three shows or something over the years, and they all thought we sucked and laughed at us. Nobody understood what the hell we were doing.”
And like nearly every other death metal band their age, Corpse found it difficult to keep a steady lineup intact.
“We decided to kick out our bass player [who was also named Jörgen] and it was in ‘87,” he says. “We got to play a show, but we never told our bassist about the gig. Instead we just changed the name of the band to Grave and put it on the flyers and posters.”
As Grave, the band grew heavier and more sonically accomplished, but still remained secluded in Gotland, save the six-hour ferry ride to Stockholm for the sole purpose of record shopping.
“In the beginning we hardly knew about anything beyond the underground scene in Gotland,” says Sandström. “But later on we discovered a record store in Stockholm called Heavy Sounds, and they sold demo tapes. If you were in a band you could leave your tapes with them and they sold them for you. So we decided to make five copies of the Corpse demo, and ten of the first Grave demo and handed them over. So I think Nicke and Uffe from Nihilist bought a copy each. Then we ran into them at a gig somewhere and we bought their demos, and then they introduced us to the underground scene by sending us shitloads of tapes with bands we never had heard of.”
Those tapes certainly left an impression with the band. Eschewing the buzzing approach of most Swedish death metallers, Grave soon developed a style more in line with groups from the international death metal underground.
“We didn’t really look up to them,” says Sandström, regarding the influence of his death metal countrymates. “We liked them and we became good friends with them, and we all supported each other spreading the demos and all that. And I don’t think they looked at us any different either. I mean, we were all only like 16 when we all started to play death metal, and you really don’t look up to someone your own age. We never tried to copy the other Swedish bands. We did like all of them, but our influences came from other bands. We all fucking worshiped Morbid Angel, Napalm Death and Repulsion.”
Elsewhere, young Tomas Lindberg was nearly as secluded from Stockholm, but had the distinct advantage of living in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second largest city. Located 500 miles west of Stockholm, on the coast of the country, Lindberg also had the benefit of regular access to the record collections of his older sister’s boyfriends.
“Basically, the Stooges, the Ramones, MC5 all came from them,” says Lindberg. “And after I found that out, I went a step further, to Discharge, Black Flag, and stuff like that. Then I got into Venom and Sodom and Slayer, and that’s when it got worse. I think that the first music that I really found for myself without someone else helping me was death metal. You could easily find all the thrash records and all that, but finding death metal in ‘86, I was like, ‘Wow, this is it! This is what I wanna do.’”
Only 15 years old, Lindberg adopted the moniker Goatspell and joined his first “serious” death metal band, Grotesque, with help from friend guitarist Kristian Wahlin—simply known as Necrolord—nearly two years later.
“It was mainly playing covers of Bathory and stuff like that the first year,” Lindberg explains. “You tried to set up shows yourself with your friends and a lot of friends that weren’t even into death metal because it was so new. But when you discover the whole underground thing, it’s a huge thing to grasp when you’re 16 years old. You’re corresponding with people in Japan and Brazil, but in your hometown there are only two people that are into it. That was an attraction when you got into it. It’s really special, like, ‘I like this, but no one else does.’ So what it all meant was that in three or four years, Grotesque played like four or five shows. Really, it took us two years to get going.”
Unfortunately for Grotesque, they weren’t going for very long. In November of 1989, the band recorded five songs, which collectively would be called In the Embrace of Evil, before entering Sunlight Studio a few months later to record their lone EP, the three-song Incantation for Swedish indie Dolores Records. But the band would get no further, splitting within weeks of the recording due to “internal differences.”
“It ended up in this big mess,” Lindberg admits. “When you’re so young, you don’t know how to be democratic or even polite. It wasn’t a surprising end.”
Quite extraordinary, however, was the unlikely breeding ground for extreme music that was the European country of Switzerland. The birthplace of avant-garde thrashers Celtic Frost in the early 1980s, central Switzerland was home to a small but vocal punk scene by the decade’s end, out of which the quartet Fear of God formed in early 1987.
“In 1987, Celtic Frost’s short thrash period was already over and [the pre-Frost band] Hellhammer seemed almost forgotten, at least in Switzerland,” recalls Fear of God vocalist Erich Keller, 19 years old at the band’s inception. “Then there was the hardcore punk scene with which all of us were heavily involved, but which, in return, didn’t get involved with Fear of God too much. We were just too extreme. People used to walk out of our gigs. We didn’t really get along well with other people anyway—we were so fully dedicated to our noise and our numerous scene involvements that it left little space for others.”
Although at their onset not much faster than the speed punk of Discharge, Fear of God gained velocity with the addition of drummer Osi in late summer 1987.
“When Fear of God started out, high-speed was still fresh,” Keller explains. “There had been bands from all over playing faster and faster, and of course, this was a huge influence for us. I mean, speedy drumming and fast riffing really set the music apart from older punk and metal bands, so it was of importance. But I can’t say we wanted to be the fastest band in the world. We wanted to be as fast and tight as we could. That’s more appropriate.”
That meant 20-to-30-second bursts of grinding noise, which was nearly as rapid and devastating as early Napalm Death—and twice as politically minded.
“To us, Fear of God was a political band,” says Keller. “Political not in terms of getting practically involved with the political fights that were going on around us at the time. Being political to us meant more being straight in what you do in your daily life—becoming vegetarian, boycotting multinationals or companies that were dealing with the racist apartheid regime in South Africa, and also silly things like smashing a butcher shop’s windows. But the main thing was trying to build up a network of friends; self-managing the scene, keeping those out who tried to cash in.”
And like many of Sweden’s death metal bands, performing live was rarely an option for Fear of God. Playing no more than 15 shows throughout their existence, the band relied heavily on the underground tape-trading network to promote itself.
“I remember in the beginning I didn’t know how to directly connect one tape deck to another, so I just used the built-in microphone
,” recalls Keller. “In order to obtain the best possible result, my whole family had to keep quiet until I got finished copying.” The band released several live tapes in 1987 before eventually releasing one self-titled 7-inch in 1988. Within months, however, Fear of God met a swift demise.
“Mainly it was due to the fast-growing acceptance of what we did and the decline of other contemporary bands who, practically overnight, sold out or turned out to be complete nutshells,” says Keller. “We suddenly felt quite alone, and when we played with Henry Rollins in Switzerland, in October 1988, and firsthand experienced all that rock ‘n’ roll bullshit, like not giving us time to soundcheck properly or turning the PA down when we played, we decided right on the stage, during the set, that we’d call it off. It was also a very strange feeling to see that anonymous mass of people in front of you, little of which had come to see us or gave a shit other than, ‘Wow, this is extreme! I can shock my parents with that if I buy it.’ In retrospect, I would say that the band was about to lose its naive innocence that night, and all of us still cared enough not to let it become a tragedy. At that point in time, it was the right decision. Now, 15 years later, I still feel good about it.”
By the time Fear of God officially folded, another grinding act was rising in the equally surprising locale of Vienna, Austria.
“Here in the ‘80s, there was hardly any metal, let alone extreme metal,” says Alex Wank, a lifelong resident of the city. “There was nothing—zero. There really weren’t many people that were interested, so it was just a couple of guys and we knew each other.”
Like so many other aspiring young musicians, Wank dug deep into the underground and began corresponding with people from across Europe.
“I got all these tapes and played them for my friends,” says Wank, whose friends included Patrick Klopf, the future founder of one of Austria’s earliest death metal bands, Disharmonic Orchestra, who formed in August 1987.
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