Left Hand Path

This is the record that made "Swedish death metal" mean something. It was taped at the end of 1989 at Sunlight Studio in Stockholm, in less than a week. The title track, "Drowned" and "Bitter Loss" had been written days before the session, and guitarist Uffe Cederlund has since called those three unfinished and sloppy. The band had no permanent bassist at the time, so the two guitarists and drummer Nicke Andersson took turns playing bass from song to song; even they are not sure who played what. The guitars are placed oddly too, with Cederlund's tracks panned hard left and right and Hellid's kept in the middle. Lyrics were rewritten in the studio, with Andersson standing behind the singer holding a lyric sheet and pointing at the line to sing. Earache released it in Britain in June 1990 and Combat in the United States that December. It holds the extremity of the British grindcore label's roster and the songwriting of the Florida bands at once, with punk momentum and doom-weighted passages running through it. The sound was named after the country and imitated past counting. The running order here is the original's as printed.