Like the horror section at the local video store, or the spot outside the mall where kids would cut class to smoke cigarettes, the music recorded by Chuck Schuldiner with Death between 1987 and 1998 exists as a safe haven. For those drawn to these seven studio albums by the pioneering death metal band, the music became a fortress to guard against the mainstream, a place where a lot of outcasts gathered to find their identity.
Because no two records featured the same lineup, and because each one built so steadily on the sound of the last, every era in Schuldiner’s brief career attracts its own set of devotees. There are those who stand by the early material, like 1987’s Scream Bloody Gore, with its weed- and beer-scented basement atmosphere. These were the songs Schuldiner wrote at his mother’s house in Florida after hearing the UK extreme metal band Venom and feeling “scared, blown away, amazed”—in that order. The music is bludgeoning and immediate. And the lyrics, from the moment they escaped his teenage mind, inspired death metal bands for eternity to summarize zombie attacks and the plots of slasher flicks in the goriest ways imaginable.
Others came on board with mid-era material like 1991’s Human, which traded violent thrills and thrashy riffs for more sophisticated interests. In these songs, Schuldiner, then in his mid-20s, took his first stabs at imagining what adulthood might look like beyond your general torture and zombie apocalypse. His lyrics explored more existential horrors, the everyday evil of emotional betrayal and misuse of power; he began playing with musicians like Cynic’s Sean Reinert and Paul Masvidal who took inspiration from jazz and progressive rock, accompanying the songs with spacier textures, in dazzling time signatures.
As the provocative, blunt-force metal that Death helped popularize in the ’80s was gaining an audience outside its loyal scene—with heavy bands signing to bigger labels, getting rotation on MTV, and, in the case of Cannibal Corpse, appearing in a blockbuster comedy—Schuldiner quickly lost interest. He was sensitive and soft-spoken, with a slight lisp and gentle Southern drawl, but he was also intense, impulsive, and unafraid to speak his mind—the kind of person you’d want on your side in an argument. He cycled through bandmates and bailed on tours, rallied against the media and burned bridges. Occasionally, his rebellion was more lighthearted. When he appeared at MTV’s Headbangers Ball in 1993 alongside peers donned in tees with pentagrams and illegible logos, he can be seen wearing a shirt with no text, just a few adorable kittens.