Now old school death metal is the best death metal in my opinion! Death, Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel just to name a few. Now the big four in my opinion would be Death, CC, MA and Deicide but who's the best of all these bands from the era? Well y'all known Death is my favorite but i would say Morbid Angel is another very good one! My favorite album from them is The Covenant which has some really good songs like God of Emptiness and Angel of Disease but i also like Altars of Madness tho i have to listen to it again, it's been a while.
Now for Cannibal Corpse, their discography is very big and i've read them be described as the AC/DC of death metal. Think about it: both have released a lot of albums and have been considered some of the first and most sucessful in their genre. Both had two vocalists, with the second one being considered more iconic. Now i've dabbled in albums from both the Barnes era and Corpsegrinder era of CC, with the album's i've listened to being Eaten Back to Life, Butcherd at Birth, Eviceration Plague, and Bloodthirst as well as some songs from Tomb of the Mutilated, The Bleeding, and Torture. With a discography as large as them there's gotta be both some bangers and stinkers, and i will say are one of my favs but not the best.
Now Deicide i've only listened to one album, the self titled. Their second album is also considered the best selling death metal release of all time, which sounds hard to belive. Like no hate towards these guys, they've had decades to show themselves and thier talent, but it's hard to belive that album sold more than some from Death, CC, Obituary, shit even Cryptopsy. *Alright after checking my sources aka Wikipedia and the web i can't find this claim which is really fucking weird cuz i swear i've seen it somewhere! Anyways i liked the self titled, the whole multiple vocal thing, it sounds like a bunch of demons which is probably the vibe they're going with. That or maybe a bunch of damned souls screaming at me. Anyways, my fav song was Dead by Dawn and i thought it was cool how that song was based on the movie Evil Dead as well as the other songs being based on other things, like Lunatic of God's Creation which im preety sure is based on Charles Manson and his fucked up cult activities. Now i was initally not interested in listening to Deicide due to them being really anti-religous/anti-Christian but i've started to care less, it's music man, i keep my beliefs but don't let them get into my music. I also listened to that song of theirs whose music video is the vocalist Glen Benton attacking Jesus while they're all little clay figures, it was very funny.
Alright the next band i wanna talk about is Bolt Thrower. Their album War Master is preety cool, right? I like the whole Warhammer 40k theming they've got going on, it's preety sick. Also when i was visiting Belgrade i saw a mounament for war heroes that looked a bit like the one on their album Those once Loyal which i thought was cool. I would really like to see that one irl! Now when i initially learned they use the same riff on each album i thought that was silly, but i actually enjoyed how it sounded, it's overused for a reason. It does suck that they broke up, but what can you do man...
And last but not least i wanted to talk about Obituary who i've only listened to a little bit with their album Cause of Death and the song 10,000 ways to die (but tbh i was paying more attention to the awesome music video!). I don't have much to say other than that they have a very interesting style and i like it, but i'll definetly have to listen to more music from them to judge!
I wanna dedicate this section to some cool and underrated bands from this era/style that deserve more love!
Now i do wanna adress a couple of elephants in the room! Before you say "oh but these bands aren't underrated" they're not as known as the others on this list. Also im well aware Darkthrone is mostly a black metal band, but their debut Soulside Journey is death metal and a pretty good one at that, but they didn't use any unique logo at the time so i had to go with the regular one.