Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1993

Melodic death metal

Emerged 1993 Origin Gothenburg, Sweden Subgenres — Vocals Growled or shrieked
Heaviness
8
Speed
8
Melody
9

Growled or shrieked. Unintelligible without a lyric sheet. The thing most newcomers bounce off.

In short

Iron Maiden-style guitar harmonies over screamed vocals. The Gothenburg scene later became the foundation of American metalcore.

How it sounds

  • Twin guitar harmonies in the Iron Maiden tradition over a death metal base.
  • Tremolo picking over melodic minor progressions with open chord voicings.
  • Screamed vocals more often than growls, with melancholy lyrics.

Hear what that means

  • The rasp, not the growl

    At the Gates - Slaughter of the Soul

    Mid-range and cutting across the guitars rather than sitting below them. Play this next to the Death passage on the death metal page and the difference is not aggression, it is pitch - this one has one.

    Open on YouTube
  • Harmonised in thirds

    Dark Tranquillity - The Gallery

    Two guitars playing the same line a third apart - a device Iron Maiden had been using for fifteen years, dropped onto a death metal rhythm section. The whole genre is in that one transplant.

    Open on YouTube
  • Where it meets power metal

    Amon Amarth - Twilight of the Thunder God

    The melody here is a chorus in everything but delivery. Put a clean singer on it and nobody would file this as death metal at all, which is the useful thing about it: it shows exactly how much of a genre lives in its vocal.

    Open on YouTube

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Each opens at the start of the recording.

The specifics

Tempo
150-220 bpm
Song length
3.5-5.5 min
Tuning
D or C sharp standard — low enough for weight, high enough that the harmonised leads stay bright instead of turning to mud.
Production
Clean and modern, with the twin guitars mixed forward and separated hard left and right so both halves of a harmony line stay legible.
Written about
Alienation, Winter and landscape, Myth, Mortality

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Two of them, harmonised in thirds. This is the Iron Maiden twin lead moved wholesale onto a death metal rhythm section, and it is the entire idea of the genre.
  • Bass Holding the root while the guitars leave it, which is what allows a harmony to be heard as a harmony rather than as two competing riffs.
  • Drums Death metal's kit and death metal's double kick, but keeping one tempo through a section so a melody has something to sit on.
  • Vocals A mid-range rasp rather than a low growl — closer to shouting than to the death metal the genre is named after, and pitched to cut across the guitars rather than sit under them.

What it isn't

That American metalcore is a kind of melodic death metal, or the reverse. They sound adjacent because one copied the other's guitar parts: Gothenburg bands wrote harmonised twin leads over blast beats in 1993, and a wave of American bands took exactly that lead-guitar idea and welded it to hardcore's song structure — the clean chorus, the breakdown, the gang shout. The riffs rhyme and the architecture has nothing in common, which is why a listener who loves one is so often bored by the other.

Told apart from

  • Death metal Melodic death metal borrowed death metal's vocals and drumming, and its songwriting from Iron Maiden. Where death metal works to avoid a hook, this genre is built out of them.
  • Melodic metalcore The confusion this genre exists inside. Both harmonise the guitars and scream over them — but metalcore adds a clean sung chorus and a breakdown, and melodic death metal has neither.
  • Power metal The same harmonised leads and the same debt to Maiden. Power metal sings them; this rasps over them.
  • Blackened death metal Also a hybrid of the two extreme branches, and the opposite one: blackened death takes black metal's atmosphere and death metal's weight, and neither half is interested in a melody you could whistle.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

In Gothenburg in the early 1990s, At the Gates, In Flames and Dark Tranquillity arrived at the same solution: death metal speed and vocals with NWOBHM melody. The 1995 album Slaughter of the Soul became the most copied metal record of the following decade — American metalcore is built directly on it.

Descended from

On the timeline

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.