Slowly We Rot

This is the record that defined Florida death metal by weight rather than by speed. It was made at Morrisound Recording in Tampa with Scott Burns producing — tracks one to eight in 1988, the rest in March 1989 — and R/C Records released it in 1989. What marks it most is John Tardy's voice, which gives up almost all intelligibility and sits stretched out somewhere between a moan and a scream. "Internal Bleeding", "'Til Death" and the title track run distinctly slower than the death metal around them, and the drag in the riffing is the weight. At a moment when fast death metal was becoming the norm, choosing slowness and a dragging texture is what set this band apart. The running order here is the 1989 original's as printed; Spotify has no plainly-named entity for it, so the player on this page is the reissue.