MESHUGGAH Destroy Erase Improve CD (1995)

Before anyone had a word for it, Meshuggah were doing it. Destroy Erase Improve is the 1995 record that broke progressive metal's brain and quietly invented an entire genre, even if the genre wouldn't catch its own name for another decade.

This is the Swedes at their most visceral and unhinged, before the machine-locked precision of Chaosphere and Nothing fully took hold. Fredrik Thordendal's alien guitar work, Tomas Haake's inhuman polyrhythmic drumming, and Jens Kidman's nuclear bark are all here in embryonic form, but there's a rawness to DEI that the later records traded away for surgical coldness. Tracks like Future Breed Machine and Acrid Placidity still hit like something that shouldn't be physically possible. The metal underground owes this record a serious debt it hasn't fully paid.

1995 full-length album on CD. Swedish technical groove metal. For the collection, for the education, for the moments when regular heavy just isn't doing it.

Fans of: Gojira, Strapping Young Lad, Pantera, Decapitated, SikTh, Periphery.