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Are you a giant death metal nerd? Then you need to hear these four very obscure demos from great death metal bands that never really got the recognition that they deserve.

I am a little baffled that Anthropomancy and their 1993 demo doesn’t have more of a cult following or at least that the name hasn’t come up in the conversation of early ’90s death-doom.

Formed in 1989, Anthropomancy started out as a thrash band but eventually slowed things way down and dropped a single demo in 1993, aptly titled Demo 1993. The demo is four tracks that clock in at about 45 minutes total, all of which are absolutely soaked in that miserable, grey-sky death-doom sound that the UK was so good at producing during that era of death metal.

What really stands out to me about this demo is how confident and deliberate the songwriting is. There’s no real filler, there’s no meandering atmospherics for the sake of it. Each track feels very tightly constructed despite being pretty long because it’s death-doom, and they use minimal elements to build these massive, hypnotic atmospheres that really keep you engaged.

From the mournful acoustics and chant-like vocals of “Journey Song,” to the ghostly layering and séance-like intensity of “Gutted,” to the straight-up unhinged violence of “Body Infestation,” and finally the funeral doom abyss that is the 17-minute closer “Mourner’s Lament,” every moment of this demo feels very intentional. They just lock into a vibe and really let it consume you.

It’s not flashy — it’s a lot more hypnotic than it is driving death metal — but it’s devastatingly effective. What makes this demo even more insane to me, at least, is that most of the band didn’t really go on to do anything else in metal, at least not that I could find. The one exception is drummer Jenny Andrews, who played in another band called Covenant that put out one demo in 1992.

Otherwise, this was a one-and-done affair for everybody else involved. And that probably explains why Demo 1993 didn’t take on a bigger legacy — there was no post-Anthropomancy project to keep the name alive, no momentum, nobody really went on to do anything else, so the conversation just kind of died. It was just one solid demo and then silence for the rest of eternity.

Demo 1993 was reissued once by Rotting Misery in 2018 across 300 copies pressed to vinyl. It was never on CD, it was never issued digitally — the only reissue that it got was again this one vinyl pressing. But I did notice that the reissue was listed online as featuring an interview with the band included in an issue of the Deprived No. 2 zine in 1994.

So I dug up some scans of that interview and — hey — we’ve got a little information on Anthropomancy, at least from the perspective of vocalist Andy Richardson, who the interview was conducted with. When asked in that interview if he’d describe their sound as doomy, Richardson responded:

“I think it’s fair to describe our sound as doomy but it’s more than that, I hope!! Words I would use are miserable, gothic, beautiful (in places), dodgy, rip-off (but who isn’t these days!!).”

And yeah, the guy clearly has a sense of humor. When asked about the band’s plans for the year, he said: “First and foremost, the plan is to make sure the band survives another year. Anything on top of that is a bonus. Of course we’d like to get a record deal, sell 5 million copies of the subsequent LP, make loads of cash, and retire to Norway. I’m not entirely convinced that it’s going to happen quite that soon, so I’ll settle for a few gigs with some bigger bands.”

We may never really know what happened to the members of Anthropomancy after this, but Demo 1993 deserves way more recognition than it’s gotten. It’s a hidden gem of early ’90s death-doom, and with any luck it’ll find its way into the right hands for a much wider release someday.

I hate to be the “I liked their first demo best” guy, but I genuinely think that Burning Inside‘s 1995 demo is the best thing they ever did. And if I had to sum up why in three words, they’d be drummer Richard Christy.

This demo feels like ground zero for Christy‘s rise as one of death metal’s most recognizable and respected drummers. A couple years after this tape dropped, Christy would go on to join Death and Control Denied in 1997, Iced Earth in 2000, and then eventually he’d go on to form the criminally underrated band Charred Walls of the Damned in 2009.

But in 1995 he was just totally tearing it up in Burning Inside, and the guy was a freak behind the kit. He’s relentless, he’s technical, he’s brimming with energy — and you know if you listened to Death and Control Denied and Iced Earth and Charred Walls of the Damned, you would know that.

This 1995 demo from Burning Inside feels like early tech-death with a deeply human feel. There’s nothing sterilized, there’s nothing over-edited (if edited at all). It sounds like a band trying to keep pace with the drummer who’s about to outgrow the scene entirely. It’s loose and frenzied but still sharp where it counts.

Burning Inside went on to release two full lengths — The Eve of Entities in 1999 and Apparition of the Beast in 2001 — and an EP in 2007 before ultimately calling it quits. And let me be clear, that stuff is still really good. It’s well-written, it’s well-produced, it’s well-performed, and it’s definitely worth your time. But nothing after that demo really captured the wild, unrefined intensity of the band, in my opinion.

The demo just feels different. This 1995 tape sounds like a band pushing itself to the limit in real time. It’s not trying to be clean or polished — it’s trying to survive itself. And that tension is what makes it so incredibly gripping to listen to.

The real tragedy here is that you can’t find the original demo anywhere. It’s not on streaming, it’s never been reissued, it was never bonus tracks on any of the records or anything like that. The only way for you to hear this is to dig up a tape rip from the depths of the internet. Same goes for their 2007 EP — that one’s also nowhere. Somebody really needs to put together a proper Burning Inside compilation because all of this material deserves to be heard.

And while Richard Christy rightfully gets most of the spotlight on the demo, the rest of the band definitely held their own. Guitarists Steve Childers and Michael Estes brought tight, inventive riffing, and Jamie Prim — handling both bass and vocals — kept the whole thing very grounded, which is no small task when Christy is going full-on octopus mode behind the kit.

Sadly, Prim didn’t really show up at all in the metal world after Burning Inside. Estes continued playing until his death in 2020, and Childers stayed active in the metal world as well until his passing in 2016. All of that is to say — go find Burning Inside‘s 1995 demo. It never quite got the recognition it deserved, but it’s still really, really good.

For every band like Anthropomancy and Burning Inside where at least you could piece together some history about who they were and what they went on to do, you get a band like Croon.

I know exactly three things about Croon: they’re from Finland, they released a single demo called #1 in 1996 on cassette, and more people really need to hear this thing.

Croon’s sole demo feels like a product of listening to the groovier aspects of death metal at the time — namely Carcass — along with some straightforward rock, as evidenced by the second song “Irritate… Enjoy,” and anything from the Gothenburg melodic death metal scene of the time. Just when you think you’ve got this demo pegged, Croon will throw something totally unexpected — like the Moog synth lines on the final track “Transcending Form of Innovation,” which sound like they could have been inspired by Cynic or Nocturnus.

Unfortunately, there’s just not much else out there about this band. Nobody in the band seems to have gone on to have a career in music aside from some scattered bands before and after Croon, there are no band photos that I could find, and there’s really no in-depth information beyond scans of the J-card from the cassette — and even that just has basic info like the track list, band name, demo name, and where it was recorded.

All that being said, #1 is still a fascinating little snapshot of what was going on in southern Finland at the time in terms of metal. If you’ve got 15 minutes and an appreciation for the stranger corners of mid-’90s melodic death metal, Croon is 100% worth your time.

Eructation was a short-lived death metal band from Gothenburg, though they never quite fit into the Gothenburg metal mold. Their Demo #1, released in 1992, could easily be mistaken for a professionally produced EP. The sound quality is frankly outrageous for a demo tape, thanks in large part to the mix by Sonny Wadstedt — a name that surprisingly doesn’t appear much elsewhere in metal production history.

What makes Demo #1 so compelling is how confidently it refuses to conform to what was going on in Sweden at the time. This is during the golden age of buzzsaw death metal and the emerging Gothenburg melodic death metal scene, and they didn’t lean into either. There’s no Boss HM-2 chainsaw tone or syrupy twin leads here.

Instead, what you get is something far more progressive, rhythmically dense, and pretty bass-forward for death metal at the time. Sonically, Eructation lands somewhere between the angular intensity of Atheist or early Pestilence and the oppressive weight of early Morbid Angel. It’s technical without being flashy, atmospheric without really using any keyboards at all, and aggressive without feeling forced. In a scene that was already fragmenting into well-defined substyles, Eructation carved out their own strange little space and then disappeared.

Eructation never reunited, and its members just kind of faded into obscurity — leaving behind a single demo and little else, or so everybody thought.

In 2016, Spanish label Memento Mori unearthed more from the band’s short-lived existence with the compilation The Fumes of Putrefaction. It included the original demo, five never-before-heard tracks from late 1993 that were originally intended for a 1994 EP, and two additional songs from the band’s final 1995 recording sessions.

The 1993 tracks offer improved clarity and performance, though they trade some of the demo’s thick, crushing atmosphere for a slightly thinner production. Still, these tracks continued to prove that Eructation were never trying to fit the mold of Swedish death metal. They remained a strange outlier in the scene.

The final two songs recorded in 1995 round out the compilation and mark the last known recordings from Eructation. “Sadistic Mind” sees vocalist Mattias shifting slightly away from his earlier David Vincent-style growl and bringing a more distinct, personal edge to the performance with some varied vocals that weren’t really present earlier in the band’s material.

The drum production on both this track and “Invincible Dream” is very crisp and sharp — easily the best-sounding drum mix across the compilation. Unfortunately, the bass is a little harder to make out, only occasionally surfacing in “Sadistic Mind.” Still, these two tracks could have easily stood on their own as a solid two-song EP or 7-inch. They’re focused, aggressive, and a fitting close to the band’s short but very unique journey.

Unlike everything else I’ve talked about here, The Fumes of Putrefaction is actually available on streaming services, and you can hunt down a physical copy of it relatively cheap. So start there, and then go into the more obscure stuff I was talking about. It’s all worth a listen — but The Fumes of Putrefaction is definitely going to be the easiest find of this particular lot.