Necronomicon – Necronomicon (1986)

Certain releases provide useful waypoints, or nodes on the mesh through which history navigated a path, and Necronomicon with its self-titled shows us where 1986 had left the underground edge of metal: adopting technique from the new proto-underground, but still keeping a foot in bouncy speed metal land and unwilling to go fully to the tremolo style of Slayer or the epic song structures of Hellhammer.

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North From Here: The Story of Sentenced by Matti Rieki

Sentenced burst into existence like a moment of drunken exuberance but then vanished just as quickly, appearing with Shadows of the Past in 1991 to ride the Demigod and Darkthrone style of dark mid-paced death metal to its conclusions, then peaked with the magnificent North From Here two years later, but by the next album, became some kind of gothic hard rock that drove away death metal fans in droves.

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White Nights – Solanaceae (2021)

No one quite knows what to call this new genre. Take stoner doom, add in Sisters of Mercy and Killing Joke, then modulate it with small amounts of black metal, shoegaze, and atmospheric punk music and you get deathrock, a spacy style that reduces focus on vocals to let guitars dominate but aims for ambience more than a repeatable, definable message.

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