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There are so many great ’90s death metal bands that you have definitely never heard before. For every Cannibal Corpse and Morbid Angel of the world, there’s some band whose demo tapes or even EPs and full lengths never really got widely circulated at the time of their release. And unfortunately, thirty-something years later, a lot of those physical copies are gone or just, you know, destroyed in somebody’s garage or whatever the case is.

These releases aren’t on streaming services, they’re not on Bandcamp. Basically, the best that you could do is just kind of hope you could find some really awful YouTube rip of it or some really low-quality download on some weird website.

Fortunately, I am a giant nerd and I love digging around to find these bands. So all that being said, here are five super obscure ’90s death metal bands that you have definitely never heard before but you really should.

Bludgeont

Bludgeont is pretty much a ghost when it comes to ’90s death metal and I wish they weren’t. Here’s what I’ve pieced together about this band based on what very little I could find of them on the internet.

Bludgeont appears to have been active between 1992 and 1996 and put out one self-titled demo shortly before they broke up. And the demo feels like a cross between Deicide and Six Feet Under. It’s really good. How this demo has not been reissued or at least reached a slightly bigger audience in the age of the new wave of death metal, or at least the YouTube algorithm pushing things, is totally beyond me. And here’s where things get pretty interesting. If you look up Bludgeont on Metal Archives, it just lists the one demo.

And originally when I was trying to find more information about Bludgeont, I came across a second YouTube video that had three songs allegedly recorded prior to the demo that the band released in 1996. That video that had the unreleased song cited a SoundCloud page run by Bludgeont guitarist and vocalist Chris Young, which is still around despite not having been updated in 11 years.

That page has all the music Bludgeont seems to have ever released, plus the following description written by Young which at least sheds a little light on who this band was. My name is Chris. Back in 1992, my friend Ken and I put together a band called Bludgeont. We wanted to start a death metal band and the influences for us were Napalm Death, Morbid Angel, Deicide, etc.

“We started up in 1992 and the band finally broke up at the end of 1996. We played many shows with big death metal bands including opening for System of a Down and Napalm Death back before System was big. We primarily played in Corona, California but also frequented Los Angeles at The Whiskey, The Waters Club in San Pedro, and many other places. These were the best days of my life for sure.”

And if anyone from Bludgeont happens to find this video or if you know someone who is still in this band, let them know that their demo still holds up really strong 30 years later. And in the event you were wondering, no this demo isn’t available anywhere outside some YouTube rips of the original tape. Someone really should reissue this.

Know Death

Know Death was one of a few bands I was actually working with about a year ago on a reissue label that never quite got off the ground. The guys in the band were wonderful to work with, pretty easy going, and just so we’re all clear, when I got things remastered, I gave the bands back their masters and the touched-up artwork and everything.

I really hope that they do something with them or at least find a label that can do something with them. Time and money are luxuries that I simply didn’t have at the time, and I thought I had more. It is what it is. Anyway, let’s talk about Know Death.

So Know Death was a Kentucky-based trio featuring bassist and vocalist Joe Prewitt, guitarist Barry Burgan, and the late and great Doug Withrow on drums. Know Death issued one demo dubbed Buried Alive in 1993 that sounded like it was straight out of the ’90s Floridian death metal scene and was comprised quite literally of fan favorite tracks.

In 1992, Know Death played their “Pick Your Nose” K-N-O-W-S show at Bogarts in Cincinnati, Ohio to about 700 people. The concept was simple enough. Know Death would rip through all the songs they had for an eager crowd, and the crowd in turn would vote on the songs they wanted to see get recorded for the demo.

Hence the name of the show, Pick Your Nose. The fans voted, Know Death had their four songs for the demo, and they recorded their only demo. It really sucks too because I’ve heard the songs that didn’t make the demo as well, and it only adds to my sadness that Know Death didn’t continue on. Especially considering how strong and downright groovy not only this demo is, but the songs that didn’t make it again were just total crushers.

Unfortunately, Know Death never quite got past their first demo. Life got in the way for Withrow, Prewitt had just become a homeowner, and Burgan simply got burnt out on music. Withrow tragically passed away in 2014, while Prewitt has carried on with a new band called Eisengeist. As for Burgan, all I can say is that Prewitt was really vocal about him picking up a guitar again when we used to have our phone calls.

Parracide

Parracide was one man, a drum machine, a guest guitarist, and quite possibly some of my favorite artwork that I think I’ve ever seen on any death metal demo. Parracide was a Rhode Island-based death metal project by multi-instrumentalist Bob Cardente alongside guest guitarist Bill Pinchins. The project only had one demo called A Future of Suffering released in 1995 before they just totally disappeared.

And what I really like about A Future of Suffering is how it seems that the drum machine influenced the writing. There’s no attempt to make this sound even remotely human. It’s an onslaught of high-velocity drum hits all the way through, which seems to have fueled Cardente to write some truly manic and unhinged death metal that matches that relentless energy. This demo is 4 tracks and 16 minutes of pure insanity.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t really find anything at all about this project or what happened to them. The only information I could find about Parracide outside Metal Archives and the demo on YouTube is that the trademark on the band’s logo was cancelled in 1998. Cardente seems to have completely left music after A Future of Suffering, though he did seem to play in another band called Atrocity who doesn’t appear to have ever put out anything.

Oh, and as for the artwork, that was done by Sean Carr, who you might know as the guy who did the art for Internal Bleeding‘s classic 1995 album Voracious Contempt and Oppressor‘s 1996 self-titled single, among a handful of other scattered releases. Much like Bludgeont and Know Death, A Future of Suffering isn’t available anywhere at all aside from a few YouTube rips.

Truncator

About 6 years before he was in King Diamond, drummer Matt Thompson was in a short-lived death metal project called Truncator. The band released one self-titled demo in 1993 and then broke up in 1994. The Truncator demo is a really interesting mix of old-school death metal with some almost proto-technical death metal aspects that wouldn’t come into play in metal for another 10 years.

For evidence of that, look no further than the opening track, “Acephalous,” or more specifically the lead guitar melodies in that song throughout the entire track. You can still pull up Truncator‘s old Geocities website thanks to the folks over at 00cities.org, which sheds some pretty interesting light on the band’s short-lived career.

The one thing that really intrigued me was the music section of their now-defunct website, which lists five additional songs that are nowhere to be found on the internet at all. It’s not clear if those five songs ever got released in any format, the website doesn’t say anything, Metal Archives doesn’t have them listed, I can’t find them on YouTube, so as far as I know there are just five Truncator songs that just got written and recorded and just were never released.

Truncator also had a little bit of a bio on their website talking about how they formed, saying it all happened thanks to a particularly jealous vocalist in their old band called Fit of Anger.

“Truncator, a new breed of brutal death metal, was spawned in Plano, Texas, USA. The members were all a part of another band in the Dallas area, Fit of Anger. Fit of Anger‘s vocalist got a little paranoid one day and kicked JV and DT out of the band, claiming ‘I’m tired of being stabbed in the back.’ He was referring to the fact that DT, JV, and MT would play and write other songs when the other two members were at work. He began to think they were going to start another band or something, a little something called Truncator.”

Truncator isn’t available on streaming services anywhere, but the band at least has it up on Bandcamp for a free download, so it’s better than some of the other bands on this list.

Dark Prophecies

If you think the other bands in this video were mysterious, let’s talk about Dark Prophecies for a second here. I cannot find a damn thing online about Polish death doom band Dark Prophecies, despite drummer Peter Kodzorowski playing on both of their demos. For those unfamiliar, Kodzorowski has been the drummer for the Polish progressive metal band Riverside since 2001 and was a part of the Polish death metal band Hate from 1992 to 2002. So you’d think Dark Prophecies would’ve come up in interviews or on his Wikipedia page or something, but nah, nothing.

The mystery around Dark Prophecies doesn’t just stop with Kodzorowski either. Their second and final demo On the Edge of Black Eternity from 1995 featured a guitarist only known as Ralph that also played in Hate between 1995 and 2001 before disappearing from metal, and vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Mina G Laurent, whose sole contribution to metal was on this 1995 demo. So total mysteries here.

Dark Prophecies had one demo prior to On the Edge of Black Eternity called Virgil in 1991, which you cannot find anywhere. There’s one really low-quality scan of the demo’s cover on Metal Archives, and that’s it. I can’t find a single way to hear this, I can’t find it on Discogs, I cannot find anything about it, so I don’t even know if Ralph and Laurent were also on that demo or what the case is here.

I do know that On the Edge of Black Eternity is very good, but I cannot speak at all to Virgil. This is all especially insane to me because On the Edge of Black Eternity is pretty damn good, especially for a demo. The writing is plenty engaging, the artwork looks pretty professional, the sound quality is solid, and overall this is just a pretty underrated release in the world of Death Doom.

Unfortunately, and much like every other demo that I’ve talked about in this video, On the Edge of Black Eternity is nowhere to be found online aside from YouTube. There appears to have been a reissue in 2000 via Hate Productions in Poland, though that quote-unquote label doesn’t have a website and this reissue seems to be the only thing that they ever released, so I kind of almost hesitate to call this a reissue. Of all four bands in this video, Dark Prophecies was by far the most difficult to dig anything up about, which again is a shame because On the Edge of Black Eternity is pretty good.