Heavy metal, as we all know, is a global phenomenon that traverses international borders with effortless efficiency, but that hasn’t stopped certain countries, or even specific cities, from honing in on a particular metallic strain and making it their own.

Why, there’s New Wave of British Heavy Metal, for example, or the San Francisco Bay Area Thrash Scene, or even the colorful concentration of hair metal bands that descended on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip during the 1980s.

Sometimes the very same heavy metal sub-genre can find a unique form of expression on separate continents – for example, death metal, which had numerous bands flourishing in the state of Florida, in Brazil and, for the purposes of our gallery today, Sweden.

So many important and influential bands were spawned from this Scandinavian country in the early 1990s that Swedish Death Metal has become one of the most widely recognized examples of these regional movements within the larger scope of heavy metal around the world.

And that’s why we felt it appropriate to zero in on this brief but amazingly fruitful period in which the classic Swedish Death Metal formula was devised, and before it was improvised and expanded upon in all kinds of different sonic permutations.

How specific was our selection process?

Well, you won’t find Entombed’s unbeatable “rot ‘n’ roll” triumph Wolverine Blues here; nor Edge of Sanity or Opeth’s groundbreaking progressive advancements; nor even those wildly popular melodic death metal titans from Gothenburg, At the Gates, Dark Tranquillity, In Flames – that’s another gallery for another day, perhaps.

Today, we give you the most brutal, authentic and essential albums that defined Sweden’s original death metal sound: the 10 Classic Swedish Death Metal Albums You Should Own.

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