Melodic Death Metal 101: The Gothenburg Sound

Arts & Media Music
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What is melodic death metal? Probably the best metal genre ever. Surprisingly Wikipedia does a great job of summarizing where melodic death metal came from, so I'm just going to copy that here.

Melodic death metal (also referred to as melodeath or MDM) is a subgenre of heavy metal music that combines death metal with the melodious and harmonic elements of the new wave of British heavy metal. The style originated and developed in Sweden (pioneered by At the Gates, Dark Tranquillity and In Flames) and the United Kingdom (pioneered by Carcass) during the early and mid-1990s. The Swedish death metal scene did much to popularize the style, soon centering in the "Gothenburg metal" scene.

There are three albums that are said to be the ones that started it all. These albums are: At The Gates' Slaughter of the Soul, In Flames' The Jester Race, and Dark Tranquility's The Gallery.

If you want to get your feet wet with melodic death metal these are the albums you should start with. They are what modern bands now draw their inspiration from. They are all great from start to finish.

Modern Melodic Death Metal

Here are some newer melodic death metal bands you might also enjoy.

I'll continue to link more bands in the future but I think this is solid start. I'm also going to be posting this on the crit.tv forums.

@SoulFallen @Kat @Alamar #deathmetal

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Check out Ne Obliviscaris - Portal Of I

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Those guys are great but I would classify them more as progressive/ technical death metal rather than melodic death metal.

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I would classify them as melodic death metal with prog and technical metal mixed in.

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Other notable mentions are

^ And these are just the ones from Sweden!

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Those are solid picks as well, I forgot about CoB. lol

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Gardenian is also an original Gothenburg band formed 1996 in Gothenburg Sweden.

I'd also like to point out The Haunted is thrash and Hypocrisy is death metal.
The haunted was formed by the Bjorler brothers of ATG after their split and carries some melodic influence but it's thrash tbh. And Hypocrisy, while being a Gothenburg band, only barely touches on melody and mostly relies on hardcore punch.

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Their earlier stuff is, but the the newer works are more melodic.

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more melodic, but primary genre still being death.

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While I'd agree that their recent stuff is more melodic it's still more death metal at its core (not to say that it's bad at all, A Taste of Extreme Divinity is an awesome album).