Death Metal Trivia
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50 free Death Metal trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Death metal grew out of thrash in the mid-1980s, when a handful of teenagers in California and Florida decided Slayer was not heavy enough. Within a decade it had its own labels, its own festivals, a rivalry with Norwegian black metal, and a Jim Carrey cameo. This quiz covers who coined the name and why, the bands that built the template, the Florida scene, the labels that cashed in, the vocal and drumming techniques, the bans and Senate speeches aimed at Cannibal Corpse, and the sprawl of subgenres from melodeath and death-doom to slam, deathcore and war metal. Every answer comes with an explanation, so you leave knowing the history as well as the riffs.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What are death metal's harsh vocals commonly called?
Death growls
Death growls are a trained technique, not just shouting: vocal coach Melissa Cross, whose 2005 video The Zen of Screaming teaches harsh singing, has shown more than 250 artists how to scream without wrecking their voices.
Q 02Death metal vocals are jokingly compared to which Sesame Street character?
Cookie Monster
Cookie Monster vocals sound like a joke, but done badly they are no laughing matter: in 2007 a Dutch hospital reported treating several singers of the style for swelling and polyps on their vocal cords.
Q 03Which drumming technique, alongside double kick, defines death metal's rhythm?
The blast beat
The blast beat was named by the grindcore band Napalm Death, but punk and hardcore drummers had been playing it for years before metal took it up.
Q 04Venom, whose first two albums shaped extreme metal, came from which English city?
Newcastle
Newcastle's Venom also named a genre by accident: their 1982 album Black Metal lent its title to the whole black metal style that followed.
Q 05Which Slayer album does AllMusic credit with inspiring the entire death metal genre?
Reign in Blood
Reign in Blood lasts barely 29 minutes, and its release was held up over the opening track, 'Angel of Death', about the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele.
Q 06Which 1985 debut is often cited as the first true death metal album, two years before Death's own?
Seven Churches
Seven Churches was recorded over spring break in 1985, because the band's singer and lead guitarist were still 16-year-old high school students.
Q 07Under what name did the pioneering band Death start out?
Mantas
Mantas became Death in 1984, and a later bandmate said the founder chose the new name to turn his older brother's death into 'something positive'.
Q 08Who is widely recognized as the 'Father of Death Metal'?
Chuck Schuldiner
Chuck Schuldiner shrugged the title off, telling an interviewer in 1999, 'I'm just a guy from a band', and that he thought of Death simply as a metal band.
Q 09What was the title of Death's 1987 debut album?
Scream Bloody Gore
Scream Bloody Gore had to be recorded twice: the label threw out a first attempt made in an ill-equipped studio and sent the band's founder and his 17-year-old drummer to Los Angeles to start again.
Q 10Which Brazilian band broke through worldwide with Beneath the Remains in 1989 and Arise in 1991?
Sepultura
Sepultura cut Beneath the Remains in Rio on night shifts, talking through translators to an American producer who took a cut-price fee because he was curious about Brazil.
Q 11Obituary, Morbid Angel and Deicide are the core of which state's death metal scene?
Florida
Florida's scene grew up around a single Tampa studio, Morrisound Recording, where producer Scott Burns gave band after band its thick, heavy sound.
Q 12What was Morbid Angel's 1989 debut album?
Altars of Madness
Altars of Madness began an alphabet by accident: the follow-up happened to start with B, and Morbid Angel have deliberately titled every album with the next letter ever since.
Q 13Which 1991 Death album became a hallmark of technical death metal?
Human
Human was partly an act of revenge: after his bandmates toured Europe without him, Death's founder replaced them all, bringing in two members of the jazz-minded band Cynic.
Q 21Loudwire describes which death metal vocal style as a 'breeee' sound?
Pig squeals
Pig squeals run through Job for a Cowboy's 2005 EP Doom, the only record the band made in that style before turning to a straighter death metal sound.
Q 22Who says he coined the term 'death metal' for a high school English assignment?
Jeff Becerra
Jeff Becerra says he reasoned that speed metal and black metal were already taken, and that 'death' was a word not yet attached to Venom or anyone else.
Q 23Which band released a 1984 demo titled Death Metal, with a song of the same name?
Possessed
Possessed were Bay Area teenagers at the time, and their guitarist Larry LaLonde went on to a very different kind of fame in the funk-rock band Primus.
Q 14Which label released albums by Carcass, Napalm Death and Entombed?
Earache Records
Earache Records was started by Digby Pearson in Nottingham, and its first release of note, Napalm Death's Scum, took off after BBC DJ John Peel championed the band on air.
Q 15Which label released albums by Obituary and Pestilence?
Roadrunner Records
Like its rivals it went on to bigger successes in other metal genres across the 1990s.
Q 16Deicide frontman Glen Benton is notorious for branding which symbol into his own forehead?
An inverted cross
An inverted cross, burned in about a dozen times since he was 22; he has called it his symbolic way of taking the mark of his Catholic christening off his skin.
Q 17Which Swedish melodic death metal band writes almost all its songs about Vikings and Norse myth?
Amon Amarth
Amon Amarth's name is not Norse at all: it is the Elvish name for Mount Doom in Tolkien's Middle-earth, and the band rejects the 'Viking metal' tag.
Q 18Fenriz, who said Norwegian musicians were 'fed up' with death metal, drums for which band?
Darkthrone
Darkthrone knew the scene from the inside: their 1991 debut, Soulside Journey, was a death metal album, made just before they turned to black metal.
Q 19What is the 2010s movement reviving the genre's 1980s sound called?
The New Wave of Old School Death Metal
Tomb Mold, Necrot, Undergang and Blood Incantation were among the first to gain traction, and the pandemic amplified the attention.
Q 20Which melodic death metal band has been fronted by both Angela Gossow and Alissa White-Gluz?
Arch Enemy
Arch Enemy managed an unusually friendly handover: when Angela Gossow stepped down in 2014 she recommended Alissa White-Gluz as her successor and stayed on as the band's manager.
Q 24Thomas Gabriel Fischer and Martin Eric Ain broke up Hellhammer in 1984 to form which influential band?
Celtic Frost
Celtic Frost was meant as a clean break: Fischer feared Hellhammer's savage reviews would follow him, yet both bands are now counted among the founders of extreme metal.
Q 25Which 1993 Carcass album is sometimes credited as the first melodic death metal record?
Heartwork
Heartwork swapped the band's medical-dictionary horrors for sleek, melodic riffs, and its sleeve shows a sculpture by H. R. Giger, the artist behind the creature in Alien.
Q 26In Flames, Dark Tranquillity and At the Gates define which city's metal sound?
Gothenburg
Gothenburg's three founding bands began as one circle of friends who lived along the same bus route into the city, then split into In Flames, Dark Tranquillity and At the Gates.
Q 27Melodic death metal borrows its guitar style from which earlier movement?
The new wave of British heavy metal
The new wave of British heavy metal supplied the tunes: asked what shaped In Flames, the band's founder named Iron Maiden's style of guitar playing, which he set against death metal's brutality.
Q 28Which doom subgenre did Finland's Thergothon and Skepticism pioneer by slowing death metal to a crawl?
Funeral doom
Funeral doom's two Finnish pioneers took odd paths: Thergothon split up before their only album came out, while Skepticism built its sound around a keyboard played like a church organ.
Q 29Which style name did the music press coin for Entombed's 1993 album Wolverine Blues?
Death 'n' roll
Death 'n' roll is the tag critics pinned on Entombed after Wolverine Blues, whose title came from a James Ellroy crime novel and not from the Marvel hero who appears on one of its covers.
Q 30Suicide Silence, Whitechapel and Carnifex are leading names of which subgenre?
Deathcore
Deathcore owes much of its rise to MySpace, where bands like these could share their music with fans worldwide in the mid-2000s.