Pre-debut metal demos?

I look these up very often.  On my Nocturnal Rites binge today, I had no idea that they started as a death metal act.

Cool.

As the regulars will know, I recently did a deep dive into the early years of death metal and listened to some excellent demos from the likes of Possessed, Death and Autopsy. I find demos to be extremely interesting records of band's early development and how they put their sound together, especially interesting with bands like the above and the early black metal bands such as Mayhem who were developing new sounds and ended up being massively influential. The very early Metallica demos with Dave Mustaine still on board are very interesting too. 

Unfortunately demos aren't catalogued on Metal Academy so there is no facility to rate them and if you want to review them you have to do it through a forum thread. If you are interested Rex, here's the link to the death metal thread I made with several demo reviews within it: https://metal.academy/forum/10/thread/1230

I've always been open to demo recordings due to my having spent many years in the underground tape trading scene. They're certainly not for everyone but personally I find some of these crude self-funded releases to contain a level of freedom & authenticity that a lot of bands fail to ever achieve again. Of course, a good portion of demo tapes are complete balls too so you've gotta take the good with the bad.

There were a few reasons we elected not to include demos at Metal Academy. The visual component of the site is very important to Ben & I believe that we have one of the best looking metal websites on the web as a result. Including obscure demos would surely have diluted the site aesthetics given how difficult it can be to secure high quality images of the cover artwork, not even considering how low grade a lot of the artwork is in the first place. Also, the task of adding all of the releases to the site is huge enough without throwing in the zillions of demos & singles as well. I think it was the right decision but that doesn't mean that we can't add the more significant demos on occasion if they're deemed to be important enough to the development of the scene.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't a plea to include demos.  The first music site I joined wouldn't allow EP's or bootlegs.  But this makes for a decent discussion since there are so many.