CARCASS: Heartwork Cassette

Before Heartwork, death metal had a ceiling. Then Carcass blew the roof off it. Released in 1993, this album is the pivot point where surgical brutality met actual melody, and the genre has been trying to catch up ever since. Bill Steer's guitar work here is the kind of thing that makes people quit bands because they realise they'll never be that good.

Heartwork isn't just an influential record, it's a living document of what happens when a band refuses to stay in the lane everyone put them in. From the grinding opener "Buried Dreams" to the riff cathedral of the title track, this album invented an entire subgenre while it was just trying to write songs. If you've got a passing interest in melodic death metal, this is the ground zero. If you're already a devotee, you know why it's on cassette in your collection.

UK origin. Genre: melodic death metal, death metal. Original release 1993.

Fans of: At The Gates, Entombed, Bolt Thrower