Blackened Death Metal

Blackened death metal is a hybrid of death metal and black metal that took shape in the late 1980s and 1990s as the two styles cross-pollinated. It retains death metal's low-tuned riffing, guttural vocals and abrupt tempo changes while importing black metal's tremolo picking, chord voicings, blast-beat intensity and Satanic or occult subject matter; performers such as *Behemoth*, *Dissection* and *Belphegor* may also adopt corpse paint. Sweden's *Dissection* steered the fusion towards melody, while *Behemoth* carried it from black metal roots to a death metal framework that achieved substantial commercial success in the 2000s.