Describe your first death/grind experience

Do you remember the first time you ever heard genuine death metal & grindcore? Well I certainly do. My initial death metal experience came way back in 1989 when I was an obsessive early-teenage thrash metal fanatic who stayed up late once a week to record the only metal radio program that Sydney had to offer at the time. The presenter used to start playing progressively more intense material as the show proceeded & one night, right near the end of his shift, he dropped Death's "Pull The Plug" from their classic 1988 album "Leprosy". I couldn't believe how dark the riffs sounded & Chuck Schuldiner's vocals were like nothing I'd ever heard before. I couldn't stop laughing at first because it was just so far outside of my regular comfort zone but I was definitely intrigued & wanted to come back for more. By the end of the year the likes of Morbid Angel & Carcass had ensured that death metal had ascended to sit alongside thrash at the top of my musical world; an honour it would soon gain sole ownership over in the wake of the decline of thrash metal in the 1990's.

As far as grindcore goes, I think my first encounter with it was through Terrorizer's "World Downfall" later the same year. It took me longer to come to terms with (mainly due to the fact that I had no background with hardcore punk) but once I opened up to it I found that there are few subgenres of metal that possess as much raw energy & violence. "World Downfall" is really more of a death/grind hybrid but I still regard it as sitting amongst  the top couple of grind releases still to this day.

I can't say that I recall my very first experiences with death and grind, but I do remember the time in my life, and the bands I was listening to. In those early years, Sepultura's Beneath the Remains was considered death metal, and regardless of whether that's correct, they were certainly my gateway into music more extreme than standard thrash metal. If memory serves me correctly though, the moment that I was forever changed was when I listened to Morbid Angel's Blessed are the Sick album, while reading the blasphemous lyrics and looking at the Lovecraftian artwork in the sleeve. It felt incredibly wrong to be experiencing something so intentionally evil and dark, and I loved it!

As for grindcore, like you, I heard numerous deathgrind albums before I experienced the real thing. Terrorizer's World Downfall would have been early on, but I'd say Napalm Death's Utopia Banished probably came first. These no doubt led me to actual grindcore albums like Scum and Carcass' Reek of Putrefaction, and while I would have had a good laugh, I can't say that I ever truly connected with them. The first (arguably) real grindcore album that I genuinely loved was Brutal Truth's Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses. It still gets me excited today!

I remember back in 89 buying "Slowly We Rot", completely blind, just based on that cover alone.  I had never heard any death metal before I bought that and I instantly loved the overwhelming sense of foreboding and menace that came from some of the atmospheres on that record.  Tardy's vocals genuinely put the willies up me and those riffs just ate my brain.  I recall my father worked night's at a local factory and therefore I had to go to my grandparent's house to play it because he was in bed that day and I knew my grandfather had some astonishing stereo/hi-fi set up going on in the front room.  He put the record on for me and was like "Woah! That's not right.  The speaker connection must be off.." I had to convince him the record was meant to sound like that and all was fine.  I lost count of how many school/college books got that Obituary logo adorning their pages.

Grind was less of a discovery for me as I didn't bother with it for many years after initially dismissing Napalm Death upon first hearing them in the 90s.  Like above, "World Downfall" was probably the one of the first such albums I embraced with some Carcass coming along later.

Damn, sounds like I need to finally check out World Downfall...

Anyways, my first positive experience with death metal came when I was in high school and still mainly just into alt metal and metalcore. Unsurprisingly, I discovered In Flames' modern stuff and immediately started like them. While listening to something from Come Clarity or Playground Fading on YouTube, I distinctly remember seeing the striking, foreboding red sky artwork of Colony in the suggested videos sidebar and being drawn to it. I didn't know I was listening to Melodic Death Metal at the time, but I could immediately tell "Coerced Coexistence" and "Insipid 2000" were an entirely different energy than what I'd heard from In Flames before. I spent the next month rocking out to that album and, thus, a Melodeath addict was born. The prime Gothenburg shit is still some of my favorite music.

Death was the next step in my progression a few months later, and then before long I was digging into shit like Cynic, Demilich, Entombed, and Atheist.

Opeth's Blackwater Park was the album that threw a wrench in my listening habits and eventually got me to appreciate harsh vocals. While Opeth was hardly "true Death Metal", something I would learn later, going through Blackwater Park, Ghost Reveries, and Watershed was an exciting time for me. 

My first true test of Death Metal was with The Faceless. I downloaded Planetary Duality and thought it was laughable and, at the time, never wanted to listen to anything like it ever again. It took me quite a while to warm up to the super heavy stuff. 

Eventually I found Gojira, In Flames, and Fallujah's Dreamless, which would give me a niche of Death Metal that I really enjoyed. 

If it wasn't already apparent, I've never been a fan of anything with "Grind" in the genre name. Cattle Decapitation's The Anthropocene Extinction was my first big leap into the brutal stuff and while I didn't think it was too bad it didn't click with me. 

I've come a long way in terms of stomaching the many Death Metal sub-genres, but it's still the genre where I draw the most lines in the sand for what I'll immediately like or dislike. 

It's a long story. When I was first starting my epic metal taste, I almost didn't want anything to do with death metal, because I was younger and knew that my parents wouldn't approve of me taking my melodic epic metal taste somewhere so controversially brutal. But there are a few symphonic/power metal bands I listened to at the time that have (melodic) death metal tendencies in an album or a few, or some songs throughout their discography: Dragonland's "Astronomy" ("gloomier, more Stygian and packed with crunching guitars; both furiously fast and bone-grindingly heavy" with death growls in a couple songs and a horror-themed instrumental suite), Within Temptation's "Enter" (a symphonic gothic death-doom album), Epica, After Forever (two symphonic metal bands with some gothic elements and death growls), and Ayreon (a few songs, or at least segments within songs, have a bit of death growling; "The Banishment" ("Oblivion"), "Cosmic Fusion" ("Death's Grunt"), and "Loser").

It wasn't until those folk/melodeath bands I mentioned in the "first experience" thread for The North (Eluveitie, Wintersun, and Battlelore) that I ended up joining the melodic side of The Horde, with more melodeath bands coming into my epic metal arsenal such as Dark Tranquillity, Children of Bodom, Scar Symmetry, Arch Enemy, and Amon Amarth. When I made my grand switch to a heavier modern side of metal, did I leave The Horde behind? NOPE. While moving into The Revolution, I reached further horizons in The Infinite and The Horde, finding a more extreme side of progressive metal and more variations of death metal than just melodeath (technical death metal, death-doom, and technical/symphonic deathcore). The Horde is still strong within me!

Now about grindcore, that's NOT really a genre I would listen to, like standard death metal. Too extreme and controversial, especially the more offensive stuff of goregrind and pornogrind. Though some of my favorite bands like Lamb of God and The Dillinger Escape Plan had some grindcore elements when they first started...

I had a couple brief exposures to Death metal and other music with death growls in my earlier metal days and never liked it, but I'll never forget the experience that changed that.

I found the album Come Clarity by In Flames at my library. I had never heard of the band, but the album cover looked surprisingly metal for a library so I got it. I remember getting home and giving it a listen, and instantly being in love with that opening riff on Take This Life. Unfortunately at the time, I was really disappointed when the screaming kicked in; I still couldn't handle that vocal style. So, I ripped the album to my laptop and didn't listen to it again for a long time.
Then came a time in my life when I was very angry and upset with something. I needed something really dark to listen to, and I once again decided to give In Flames a chance. At that time, it finally clicked with me. The screaming was not off putting or devoid of talent or whatever; it was fueled by the rawest of human emotions, a bestial display of passion, pain, anger. I listened to the album all the way through and I loved every second of it. 

Ever since then, I pretty much prefer harsh vocals to clean. Death metal and Death Doom are my favorite subgenres, along with the heaviest of Thrash.

I think most metal fans go through a similar transition. I took to the likes of Metallica and Slayer quite quickly, but Sepultura were initially too much for me due to Max's gruff style. Once I accepted his vocals I quickly found myself loving them, and it wasn't long before Morbid Angel, Death and Deicide were banging out of my speakers.