After my recent survey of modern black metal, a death metal follow up was all but inevitable. Commercially speaking, death metal seems to be in a healthier place than black metal, with bands like Blood Incantation threatening to transcend the genre in terms of their brand reach. Tastes in death metal also seem to behave a little more coherently than black metal, with certain styles trending in and out of favour in reliable phases. Black metal by contrast seems to cohere around key artists more than a specific style (that’s been the case since the protracted hipster wars to my mind at least). The albums featured on my black metal list, in my not-at-all humble opinion, represent some of the best that metal music has had to offer in recent history, but scanning over it again, there’s no particular rhyme or reason to the picks. Each artist being from different scenes, traditions, and schools of thought.
Death metal, by contrast, is clearly mappable, oriented around distinct regional hubs. For that reason, a “bet you haven’t heard these albums” list feels slightly redundant. A lot of these releases have been picked up by many outlets in the underground besides this one. But I’ve tried to throw in some more obscure offcuts along the way. Any better known picks are included because frankly they should be bigger than they are. I intend to continue highlighting works of similar quality for the simple reason that it’s important to stop and take note of our surroundings outside of the relentless review cycle and AOTY roundups. The excess of content we are served every day is exhausting and requires increasingly ruthless curation practices, but equally pausing to take note of anything that has stood the test of time (even just a few years) helps to remind us that things can still happen in music. And in that same lawless spirit, this list sprawls out to an awkward thirty two entries, because fuck you.
Antagonyze: Interpretations of the Unknown Wilderness (Chile)
Released 2024 on Chaos Records
The Chasm’s surrealist, questing death metal is tempered by Antagonyze’s tighter approach to songwriting, which is efficient almost to the point of utilitarian. But within this restrictive space they find room to articulate lavish melodic doom licks alongside a more ponderously spaced out, undulating riff style, bound together by the cement of straightforward, linear thrash sequences. Each stylistic impulse is neatly juxtaposed with its surroundings, bound together by a reliably disruptive pacing, constantly complicating the picture even as competing moods and themes attempt to bed in.
Blood Oath: Lost in an Eternal Silence (Chile)
Released 2023 on Caligari Records
The more time I spend with this album the better it gets. A cornucopia of delights embedded in classic Floridian progressivism. But alongside the Atheist and Death quotations sits a darker entity of gothic heraldry. Blood Oath construct a telos within their music, a sense of journeying from one point to another across terrain littered with intrigue and strife. The music is coloured with detail at the atomic level but complete at the macro level, holistic when regarded at the initial bird’s eye view presented to the listener.
Chaos Inception: Vengeance Evangel (USA)
Released 2025 on Lavadome Productions
Similar to Krisiun, this is essentially upgraded thrash in that the tracks display a clear, linear progression underpinned by a central, driving riff. But Chaos Inception are more technical in their mindset and flamboyant in their compositional aspirations, as dark, regal melodic content emerges to supplement the otherwise violent barrage of atonal mastery that frontloads each track. There are angular moments across this album, breaks in momentum to allow for the elaboration of more elongated riffs, but for the most part the momentum does not let up, making for an intense but tightly realised album. Blink and you miss it.
Condemner: Male Patratis Sunt Atra Theatra Parata (USA)
Released 2024, independent
Although conceptually inspired by Catholic torture methods during the Inquisition, this album is the death metal equivalent of the disillusion of the monasteries during the English reformation. It strips away any ornamentation, the elaborate facades, any indulgence beyond what is strictly necessary, and brings death metal back to its barest rudiments, free of any extravagant technical riches. In this regard it may be spiritually closer to early black metal of the Profanatica variety, but equally indebted to Ledney’s former bandmates in Incantation. It’s a brief, clarifying provocation to showier death metal entities, an attempt to reach back to the essence of the genre through a form of drone or ambient death metal.
Conjureth: The Parasitic Chambers (USA)
Released 2023 on Memento Mori
Melding the foreboding atmosphere of Finnish death metal with the choppy riff tessellation of Deicide circa ‘Legion’, the second album from Conjureth may not move the dial much beyond their debut, but it provides some welcome elaboration, and easily puts the majority of OSDM bands to shame as far as construction and delivery is concerned. The album has a massive sound, but still manages to throw the fine gradients of quick exchanges and switch ups into sharp relief. In this sense it could be framed as a neat companion piece to Cruciamentum, faster, more direct, but in the same alignment in terms of aesthetics and delivery.
Cryoxyd: This World We Live In… (France)
Released 2025 on Dolorem Records
Mechanical death metal combines clinical industrialism with prog informalities paced out in oddly pulsing sequences. Cryoxyd use repetition to great effect, building tension with flowing, meditative passages that lurch into soaring waves of melodic euphoria. Although Pestilence, Death, and late 80s technical thrash are all obvious antecedents, their influence is felt more at the aesthetic level, with Cryoxyd leaning into an older vision of futurism. Materially the music is oddly eclectic in terms of melodic signatures, resulting in an album with an unusually broad expressive range by death metal standards.
Dipygus: Dipygus (USA)
Released 2024 on Memento Mori
We’re a little too trigger happy with Autopsy comparisons sometimes, as is often the case with canonised saints with an outsized influence over death metal. Dipygus aren’t so much inspired by Autopsy as they are an extension of their universe. Taking the playful, ponderous rhythmic approach, expanding the doom segments into uglier, more jagged terrain with wandering, probing riffs. But also recycling Autopsy’s flair for classic metal melodies, tortured and refashioned into forms befitting of the surrealist horror ecosystem conjured by their riff philosophy. It’s all here in this enthralling expansion pack. A clear continuation of this style, but one that adds much to the vocabulary which instantly marks it out from the usual dime-a-dozen knockoffs.
Heruvim: Mercator (Ukraine)
Released 2025 on Redefining Darkness Records
Although many of the riffs pivot between Pestilence circa ‘Spheres’ and Demilich, the overall demeanour of this album is atmospheric doom metal. It carries a great weight within its architecture, lurching between choppy, technical surrealism to open, drab melodic contours with a fretful momentum. The material is in constant churn, the music splitting itself apart only to rebuild anew, no energy is wasted, no build in tension squandered, an emergent unity clarifying atop the otherwise anomic picture.
Infernal Thorns: Christus Venari (Chile)
Released 2025 on Personal Records
Choppy, frantic death metal channelling the energy of Deicide with a more populist flair derived from Behemoth. Although the morass of churning styles gives Infernal Thorns a degree of freedom, they exhibit a far more disciplined approach to songwriting than many aesthetically comparable “Wacken metal” entities. The music binds itself around catchy crowd pleasing refrains, but Infernal Thorns demonstrate confidence in the strength of their vision to shine above these showstopper moments. There is an episodic, memetic flow to these pieces, as ideas and themes are carried from one moment to the next, software transferred to new hardware. A structurally complex entity encrusting a degree of carefree dramatic flair.
Infrahumano: Depths of Suffering (Spain)
Released 2025 on Lavadome Productions
Despite the rough presentation, this is big death metal. Death metal of broad scope, darkly orchestral. But it’s a darkness that emerges not from melancholic, drably melodic riffs, but a more ambient gloom, as if we are in the presence of some vast, unknowable entity of mythology. The somewhat lo-fi mix (by modern death metal standards) only elevates this perception, as the physical simplicity of the riffs adopts an obscurantist, mystical, alien like quality. At the surface level the music feels urgent, immediate in its delivery, but lurking beneath is a malevolent sense of permanence, an older, arcane consciousness threatening to emerge.
Lethal Prayer: Sacrilege Infernus (USA)
Released 2025, independent
Released independently, kept off any streaming site (including YouTube), and only available on CD by emailing the band themselves, the circumstances behind the release of this triumph of layer-caked death metal made for an interesting statement on underground principles in the 2020s, however much this sabotaged its chances of reaching a wider audience. The music itself is a storied showcase of “metal” in the truest sense. Brutal, technical, progressive, playful yet artistic, arguably this album rewards the more experienced listener familiar with the material and traditions Lethal Prayer are quoting here. But this broad stylistic sweep is fully digested into a triumph of knowledge and experience as much as artistic flair. Random prog gestures sit happily alongside the blunt axe of caveman death metal, a self-generating complexity.
Mefitis: Offscourings (USA)
Released 2021 on Hessian Firm
It’d be remiss not to include the boys from Oakland here. Although this and their debut ‘Emberdawn’ released in 2019 did kick up a bit of reaction across the underground, to my mind it was nowhere near commensurate with the quality Mefitis were actually reaching for, which is nothing short of revolutionary within the black/death metal oeuvre. Tonally unique, structurally complex, each song is like a five course meal, and it may have been a little too much to expect such compositionally dense music to raise its head above the parapet. But from everything I know of underground trends, avant-garde, tonally complicated extreme metal seems to retain a loyal following, sadly not one that managed to pick up on exactly what Mefitis were doing here. The follow up, 2024’s ‘The Skorian // The Greyleer’, recorded across two separate sessions, whilst a welcome addition to the lexicon, was perhaps a little too disjointed to net a new audience even if their dedicated followers found much to appreciate in it.
Moral Putrefaction: Moral Putrefaction (India)
Released 2024, independent
Essentially the best Immolation album since ‘Shadows in the Light’. The oddball, tugging rhythms, Vigna’s unique approach to lead guitar, choppy and frantic yet oddly symphonic, tremolo riffing exploding out into choppy breaks as if the music is moving in multiple directions at once, it’s all here. It would be tempting to call this derivative, but Immolation copies are so much rarer than Suffocation, Incantation, Autopsy et al. precisely because their style (at their peak at least) was that bit more of an outlier. And Moral Putrefaction do such a convincing job of tying it all together in their own way. To the point that anyone desirous of more elaboration on this unique approach to death metal will find value in spending time with this album.
Morticula Rex: Autumnal Rites (Italy)
Released 2021 on Satanath Records
This one I haven’t actually returned to since its release, but I’m happy to say the material holds up upon revisiting. In some sense a continuation of early Paradise Lost. Richly melodic in the traditional sense, but also unapologetically melodramatic, flamboyant, and downbeat in its delivery. Morticula Rex do deploy some up tempo passages drawn from Nordic death metal at times reminiscent of Unleashed in their simplicity, but this only serves to highlight the opulence of the melodic passages. The vocals manage to emphasise the dramatic stakes without ever overcooking it, keeping the tone fraught yet grounded. A fine balance of subtlety vs. extravagance.
Mortify: Fragments at the Edge of Sorrow (Chile)
Released 2022 on Chaos Records
This is a fantastic example of world building through music. Each microcosm is simple enough in essence, but each connects up into a wider, expansive universe of cinematic death metal. Gloomy yet understated, haunting yet physical, it’s an album that rewards nose to tail listening due to the sheer extent to which Mortify articulate themes and ideas across each piece. With simple, repeated refrains building into broad, sweeping guitar leads that stretch themselves across the music, only to close it back in with the development of more frantic, urgent material, the spaces within the music pulsing between the restrictive and the open, an elastic momentum that accrues tension from these exchanges in atmospheric and compositional intent.
Oraculum: Hybris Divina (Chile)
Released 2026 on Invictus Productions
The bludgeoning simplicity of early Bolt Thrower, siren wailing, toneless guitar leads and all, is elevated to a place of epical grimness via a sharp melodic flair that, although hardly complex in situ, is delivered with a degree of conviction and intention that immediately marks this release out from garden variety cavernous death metal. Oraculum build tension through deliberate pacing, taking their time to develop each passage. As a moment of climax is reached, it then cascades out in tumultuous bursts of relentless, muscular energy, aided by the characterful, bottom heavy mix. Bringing a sense of occasion to the table, this is death metal reaching back to the epics of antiquity to convey a sense of unknowable mysticism.
Pestilength: Solar Clorex (Spain)
Released 2024 on Debemur Morti Productions
The strength of Pestilength lies in their ability to transfer the older language of death/doom into a modern context in a way that avoids both mere replication and an over reliance on swelling chasmic dirge at the expense of any chewable content. Rather than simply bludgeoning the listener with funereal aplomb, this music reaches for the eldritch via unpredictable riff shapes, rendered naked and knowable in their laboured delivery, but always adopting unexpected or unsettling forms, holding onto refrains for longer than is comfortable before dwelling on a convoluted link phrase of opaque but never redundant teleology. It pushes and teases at the borders of blackened death/doom whilst performing a rearguard action, firming up the foundation of this style, raising as many questions as it does answers.
Plague Bearer: Summoning Apocalyptic Devastation (USA)
Released 2023 on Nameless Grave Records
Blends Immolation’s dense but grandiose riff style with the looser dramatic flair of black metal. Raw, physical, yet oddly symphonic in the way it unleashes high melodic content in contrast to the choppy machinations occurring at the ground level. Each track is constructed around a solid theme, and slowly builds out from there, making the flow of these pieces cyclical rather than linear, as a kind of push and pull between the sacred and the profane is represented within the workings of the music itself. Physically death metal, but spiritually black metal.
Protrusion: The Last Suppuration (USA)
Released 2026 on Sevared Records
An ancestor of Gorguts circa ‘Considered Dead’, this pleasingly authentic rerun of percussive death metal augments the choppier elements of thrash into a richer stew of longform riffing, allowing the rhythm to determine the phrasing and cadences in lieu of a sustained tonal centre. That being said, guitar leads do leverage highly traditional melodic forms, reaching for the gothic grandeur of early Gorguts even if Protrusion’s approach is somewhat more direct. The thin production allows for a more substantive message to manifest at the spiritual level. There is real meat on the bones, something so often lacking in contemporary death metal which attempts to paper over such gaps with unwieldy guitar tones. Here, a substantive architectural framework is left to prop up a well realised aesthetic without the aid of such cheat sheets, gravitas emerging between the eerily spacious gaps of this music.
Putred: Megalit al putrefacției (Romania)
Released 2025 on Memento Mori
Romania’s Putred banked album number three earlier this year (review incoming), but it was this, their second, that initially caught my attention. Deliberately paced out in slower, plodding runs which allows the riffs to bed in somewhat. In a climate of overly stuffed mixes and surplus technical showmanship, there is a degree of tension in Putred’s less-is-more approach. The riffs themselves are simple yet weighty in their malevolent intent. The lead melodies are full of personality, brief but frequent they appear almost conversational against the sparse rockface of the rhythm section. Equally, there is a heaviness to this material in spite of the relatively thin production, proving that heaviness itself is often more about performance – how you attack your instrument – than any fiddling at the effects pedal or mixing desk.
Rotheads: Slither in Slime (Romania)
Released 2022 on Memento Mori
This album only gets better with age. Somewhere between a haunted Gorement, a complicated Carnage, Grave with soul, the drab aspects of classic era Swedish death metal are apportioned off into a doomier direction, decorated by simple yet infectiously mournful lead guitar work that is somehow cognisant of and working in conjunction with their brutalist backdrop. The result is immersive, cinematic death metal, packed with odd, explorative tangents despite the oddly clarifying unity of the finished product.
Sadistic Drive: Anthropophagy (Finland)
Released 2020, independent
The cassette version of this released on Headsplit Records simply states that it was “recorded at Maniac Mansion during a global pandemic March – April 2020”. Never forget how weird that time was. La Caverna Records (who also released the CD version) introduced me to this entity back in 2019 with their debut demo ‘Street Cannibal Gluttony’, a kind of surrealist reimaging of Autopsy. For this, their debut album, they took a more direct approach and cleaned up the songwriting, making for a slightly less charming experience, but a more spacious, airy slab of unadulteratedly violent death metal rises to the fore regardless. Absurd humour, farcical riffing, both collide with more direct breakdowns of chugging power chords, drums practically falling over themselves to work this material into some kind of rhythmic discipline. Undoubtedly one of the more fun – yet no less horrific – releases on this list.
Sepulcrum: Lamentation of Immolated Souls (Chile)
Released 2023 on Chaos Records
Sepulcrum’s latest offering ‘Lacerator’ is also hot off the press (reviewed here), so I decided to return to their debut for this list, which holds up every bit as much. Violent, thrashing, dense death metal, technically precise but not “technical” in the stylistic sense, there is something raw and authentic in the presentation that marks it out from standard old school fodder. A tight, internally consistent whistlestop tour of death metal in its formative days, most explicitly Floridian in demeanour despite the gloomy implications of the album’s title.
Serpent Ascending: Hyperborean Folklore (Finland)
Released 2022 on I, Voidhanger
The quintessential morning wood band, formed after Jarno Nurmi split with Tommi Grönqvist, leaving him to continue the Desecresy project solo. After a debut in 2016 that perfectly melded atmospheric death metal with the dark majesty of melodic black metal, this album takes things in a brighter direction. It references the arcane mythology of a Septic Flesh (I’ll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognise Septicflesh), but the tone is much brighter, the songwriting more linear. It owes as much to Greek black metal as it does classic heavy metal, folk, and melodic death metal. Listening to this album is akin to reading epic poetry, right down to the sparsity and rawness of the presentation, giving it a lived-in feel so often lacking in the majority of explicitly epic/folk metal tomes.
Sněť: V Bažinách Vědomí (Czechia)
Released 2026 on Me Saco un Ojo records
My boys are all grown up. Following a solid but rather derivative debut in 2021 (you guessed it, Incantation and Autopsy), Sněť upped their game this year for the long awaited follow up. The framework remains much the same, squelchy, mid-paced death metal evocative of mildew, mould, and other generally unwelcome organic growths. But they introduce a degree of surrealism, a quirky, oddball exterior that seems to fill in the blanks left by their earlier material. The improvements may be cosmetic, but the drab ornamentation lifted from Demigod, Demilich, or Depravity is a welcome upgrade on the swaggering muscle of mid-tempo Bolt Thrower references.
Suppression: The Sorrow of the Soul Through Flesh (Chile)
Released 2022 on Unspeakable Axe Records
As if picking up where death metal left off in 1993, this rerun of Floridian death metal enriches the progressive elements but contains its more technical impulses within a tight, direct, aggressive presentation. In this sense we could say it’s not capital “P” progressive despite the obvious debt it owes to Atheist, Cynic, or Death. These exuberant tendencies are used to bookend a more savage, direct beast of thrashing death metal. Much like a lot of Chilean death and thrash metal of recent years, it provides an academically rigorous archaeological counterweight to the Disneyfied OSDM variant that swept to popularity in the previous decade.
Tenebro: Una lama d’argento (Italy)
Released 2025 on Time to Kill Records
Looking back, I can see why I struggled to keep up with the extent of quality new material at the back end of last year (something that’s not been true for a goodly long while). Released in December 2025, this album fell into that bracket. An unexpected curveball of direct, simple yet fully realised horror themed death metal that forced me to yet again sharpen my pencil. True to its conceptual subject matter, this feels like ambient or soundtrack death metal, each riff seems to create its own world, as walls of guitar noise breeze by in monolithic framing devices. Drums provide a sense of urgency, but ultimately follow the framework set by the guitars as they flow through themes in waves of ambient energy. Atmospheric death metal that still manages to embody a physically demanding philosophical core.
Thaumaturgy: Pestilential Hymans (USA)
Released 2025 on Memento Mori
This is what I mean, another backend curveball from 2025. This album is an upgrade on previous material which tended to settle into more standard chasmic death/doom fair. Reinvigorating the murky territory between black and death metal through a rigorous riff discipline, Thaumaturgy lift inspiration from the demo phase of Swedish death metal in Grotesque or Desultory, graduated into more mature territory thanks to a riff signature at once melodically sophisticated yet rhythmically original and precise in execution. Somewhere between Pestilence circa ‘Consuming Impulse’ (maniacal vocals and all) and a more blackened tone through Profanatica or Demoncy. The result perfectly marries a discomforting atmospheric undercurrent with angular, engaging percussive blows.
Transcendence: Towards Obscurities Beyond (USA)
Released 2020 on Blood Harvest
Somewhere between the dark gothic majesty of Necrophobic and the occultist absurdism of Necromantia sits this anomalous album. It moves between primitive early black metal riffing and more considered death metal exchanges most obviously lifted from the Swedish canon. It’s probably said too often, but this album genuinely feels like a lost relic of the early 90s. A warm, fuzzy organicism smooths off the rougher edges, but this doesn’t detract from the theatre. Transcendence bring a sense of occasion to this primal variant of blackened death metal, the result of their rigid focus on tight songwriting free of excessive histrionics or distracting bells and whistles.
Vile Apparition: Malignity (Australia)
Released 2025 on Me Saco un Ojo
This album achieves a convincing synthesis between the cold, mechanical clarity of brutal death metal and a more organic, undulating Lovecraftian entity. Oscillating between repetitive phrases and an almost excessive randomness, from this very confusion a sense of balance emerges. Spacey, Azagthothian guitar leads exploit the gaps created by this tense push and pull, veering from illogical surrealism to unique melodic signatures with ease. There is an attention detail here, as each moment is painted with activity and life, creating that rare thing in modern death metal: possibility.
Vile Ritual: Caverns of Occultic Hatred (USA)
Released 2023, independent
This vibrant doom entity complicates the popular cavernous model derived from Incantation with a more assertive, timeless demeanour derived from The Chasm and aided by specific moments warped from Timeghoul or Demilich. The result is a kind of progressive version of death/doom, immersive, imposing, and a decidedly unsettling place to spend one’s time.
Vorus: Desolate Eternities (Romania)
Released 2024 on Loud Rage Music
Austere death metal builds itself up from absurdly basic riff constructions, only to use this as a launchpad for loosely defined melodic material expressed in vignette format rather than fully formed sentence. This militantly rudimentary approach pays off however, as the process of world building takes place from below, a blank slate of endless possibility. Complexity is implied rather than spelt out. There is an honesty and transparency to the material allowing Vorus to smuggle in surrealist or even playful undercurrents almost by sleight of hand, the raw, barebones production only serving to highlight this intention.
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