List out your version of extreme music's lineage. No single lineage is correct, but seeing a handful of different paths will be interesting. Here's mine.


The Damned > Circle Jerks > Minor Threat > Siege > Repulsion/Napalm Death > Death > Morbid Angel > Cannibal Corpse


These bands represent milestones in progression to me in ways similar bands don't. And it seems Cannibal Corpse is the threshold after which more extreme bands begin to be gimmicks. I throw in Slam Death, Goregrind, and some grind into this bucket. It's not really musical, it's just about the extremity.

What's your lineage look like?

The black metal version:
Blues > rock 'n' roll > garage rock > Black Sabbath > Motörhead > Discharge > Venom > Slayer > Hellhammer/Celtic Frost > Bathory > Sarcófago > Mayhem > Darkthrone > Blut Aus Nord

The death metal version:
Blues > rock 'n' roll > garage rock > Black Sabbath > Judas Priest > Motörhead > Venom > Slayer > Hellhammer/Celtic Frost > Possessed > Death > Napalm Death > Morbid Angel > Cannibal Corpse > Cryptopsy > Portal

Well that seems like an arbitrary and subjective cutoff point. I'm sure Napalm Death, Morbid Angel and especially Cannibal Corpse sounded gimmicky and anti-musical to people who grew up on The Damned, yet here you are recognizing those bands' musical qualities and tying them together by a lineage. Similarly, the progression from Cannibal Corpse to Disgorge to Defeated Sanity to Encenathrakh is concrete and measurable. It sounds like you just chose to exclude that type of music because you personally don't like it.

I see your point. It definitely is subjective, but not necessarily arbitrary.

After CC I see things progress in excess but less so in innovation. Slam took the guttural vocals in death and made them more extreme. But it wasn’t a new layer. Just my opinion.

How do you see it?

From Cannibal Corpse (or more accurately Suffocation) there were several degrees of innovation in the technicality and intensity of death metal. Cannibal Corpse have always had some lingering thrash influence and they hold onto that even today; it's part of what makes them unique. But you can still get into more "extreme" music by following the train of bands that are 100% adhering to death metal principles of atonality and rhythmic complexity.

• Suffocation - While metal has always had plenty of technical skill and extreme metal has always had technical atonality in its guitar solos, Suffocation and similar bands started incorporating that technicality into main riffs on the lower register of the guitar, paired with labyrinthian tempo and time signature shifts and more overt rhythm changes (alternating between tremolo and open trilling, alternating between open strings and palm-muting, etc.). Cannibal Corpse do this too nowadays, but they picked up on it just a bit later than Suffocation did IMO.
• Defeated Sanity - eventually the people who grew up listening to Suffocation say "I can do better than that" and amp the technicality up significantly across all instruments. You have different blast beat techniques (gravity blasts, alternating hands on the snare between the blast to maintain speed) that increase the tempo, and the simpler, slower parts are even heavier in contrast. The production gets a lot airier and louder with modern techniques, you no longer have that "scooped mids" sound that we associate with 90s OSDM.
• Nithing - this album just came out a month ago and I think it's a good example of the current frontier of "extremity" in the classic sense. The guitars are tuned extremely low but are still playing very very technical (and repeated) riffs all over the fretboard. We start to encroach on something that sounds truly otherworldly and maybe even ceases to be easily recognizable as death metal. Even heavier and louder production. We see the integration of modern dissonant death metal influence in the leads and guitar playing, reinterpreting a separate strain of death metal that only really took off in the past 10 years. If it truly became a pointless game of extremity after Cannibal Corpse, then theoretically an album that sounds like this should have been able to come out in 1993 right after Butchered at Birth, but it took another 30 years of iteration to get to this point.

Well, this is fun actually!

Children Of Bodom -> In Flames -> Dark Tranquility -> Hypocrisy -> Vader -> Entombed -> Bloodbath -> Anaal Nathrakh

So you can't hear any musicality in Defeated sanity or Origin?