ENTOMBED: Left Hand Path Vinyl LP (Blue Black Merge)

Before Gothenburg made melodic death metal a genre, Stockholm was already rotting. Left Hand Path came out of Sweden in 1990 and rewrote what a guitar tone was allowed to do, that HM-2 Boss pedal buzz-saw sound is so foundational that every death metal record since has had to either use it or consciously avoid it. This is ground zero.

Entombed were barely adults when they recorded this, and it sounds like it was dragged up from somewhere genuinely unpleasant. L.G. Petrov's vocals, the Sunlight Studio production, tracks like Supposed to Rot and the title track itself, this is a record that still hits harder than most bands who've spent decades trying to replicate it. If you're building a death metal collection, you don't start anywhere else.

Genre: Swedish death metal.

Fans of: Dismember, Grave, Nihilist, Obituary, Autopsy.