Today I was listening to a lot of tech death with my friends after we went inside from the heat. One of my friends was playing songs from his collection; I noticed that, as we progressed from the older technical death metal bands to the newer ones, the newer ones didn't really have as technical segments in their music as their older counterparts. Has anyone else noticed how tech death has been "dumbed down" so to speak?

Technical death metal hasn't really ever been something I've thoroughly delved into, but from a casual standpoint I'd say that many newer bands favour flashy instrumentals rather than actually interesting songwriting. It feels like they're more interested in what looks and sounds impressive, be it on bass, guitar, drums or whatever, rather than actually composing technically challenging song structures.

Again, that could just be because I haven't listened to the right bands.

I mean, I guess I might understand what you're trying to get at, but how much more can you progress beyond something like Necrophagist and Nile?

I don't know if this is true because I'm not exactly a huge TDM fan, but stuff like Archspire, First Fragment and Hideous Divinity don't seem dumbed down. Could you maybe be referring to a blurring of lines between technical/brutal death metal and deathcore that seems to be happening/has happened? Seems to me there is plenty of newer bands still releasing crazy complex stuff.

Came in here to mention Archspire as well. Bands like them and Cytotoxin sound as technical (if not more so) than many older tech death groups.

I have not observed this at all. If anything, the bands have gotten more technical.

Hi.

The new bands do a lot of weak sounding watery tapping licks as riffs. Not brutal!

How about Oppressor instead as a starting off point?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIzk3eEHJow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxrM0ER_0aM

along with early Cryptopsy and maybe Suffocation, plus bands who set the scene like Atheist/Pestilence/Death/Cynic, or Nocturnus and Timeghoul.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Your post seems to suggest that you're talking about pure technicality. If it is the case, then I think you're wrong. Today's technical death metal is not less technical than older tech death. If you are talking about composition, song-writing, creativity, etc. than yeah, maybe some of the newer bands are in there more for the technicality and wankery than actual good music...

This is basically the difference between death metal that is technical and the modern shred/wank with blast beats and growls. I definitely prefer tech death the old way, as shredding aimlessly doesn't add anything to the song most of the time. It's a vehicle to showcase virtuosity rather than writing interesting music. As such, there are often more technical parts in the songs than bands like Atheist and Atrocity would have used, but framed in a more basic song structure. It's a bit more complex than the OP framed it, but that's how I see/hear it.

Yeah, I have not noticed this at all. It begs the question of what you and your friends were listening to.

tech death has developed to be just flashy instrumentals. imo the spirit of the old bands i.e. making stuff that's weird/unconventional/challenging has gone on to a lot of the more dissonant stuff like ulcerate/howls of ebb/irkallian oracle/etc.

There's still interesting stuff out there. Irreversible Mechanism, basically every band with Dominic Lapointe in it, Idk if it's considered tech death but stuff like Alkaloid.

I don't really find those to be on the same technical level outside Nocturnus (The Key, man what an album) and Atheist.

That said I've never heard of Timeghoul or Oppressor (my first listen to them: not bad!) so if you could give a starting off point for Timeghoul I'm all ears.

I absolutely love Necrophagist, I think Suicmez is (was?) an exceptional musician, but his song structures are surprisingly basic for something claiming to be tech death: verse chorus repeat interlude repeat etc (but fuck it, Beethoven still used classical sonata form and was still badass). And I always feel it's kind of the other way round for Nile - super-creative songs but is any of it really that technical?

Technical just refers to the playing technique, not the composition (which the word "progressive" applies to).

That first Necrophagist album sounds pretty overproduced, like guitar pro files instead of a person actually playing.

2017 had some exceptional releases in the genre, and I'm not talking about vapid stuff like Archspire. Sutrah, Opticleft, Coma Cluster Void, Lithopaedion, The Hallowed Catharsis, all highly recommended.

Ulcerate's Shrines of Paralysis comes to mind, which makes me think technical death metal is getting deeper and more intricate. Ulcerate, Wormed, Gorguts, Defeated Sanity, 7H Target and many more bands really pushed the envelope in the last decade. More importantly they haven't only gotten more technical, but they've gotten heavier as well.

Sutrah is one of the greatest things to come out in god knows how long. Dunes is aural bliss.

Yeah, as a fan of tech death old and new, I simply struggle to find this sentiment to be true. While there were some nutty bands in the early 90s, I promise that the technicality has been far surpassed these days (almost to an overindulgent degree at times).

Much like every other subgenre out there, though, there are diamonds in the rough. Bands like Inferi, Virulent Depravity, Irreversible Mechanism, Sutrah, Dark Matter Secret, etc., they have all proven their worth imo. I had trouble coming to terms with the modern style of tech death at first, being a big fan of the early 90s strain of bands, but I've since come around. When you take the time to check out the monstrosities that exist, you'll realize that you have bands laden in delicious melodies and fantastic song structures.

This thread is super vague, like what do you even mean by "older technical death metal bands"?

There's been so many different waves of "Technical Death Metal" throughout the decades that the post seems very open ended

Keep in-mind that there was a time when bands like Death, Atheist & Gorguts were considered "Tech Death"

And in that case, modern Tech Death bands are far more "Technical" than any of those groups

or when you mean "older technical death metal bands" you mean bands like Cryptopsy, Suffocation, Dying Fetus & Nile?

or do you mean tech death of the early 2000's like Necrophagist, Spawn of Possession and Origin?

Please give more examples of what you mean by "older bands" and what newer bands have "dumbed down" tech death?

Honestly, modern tech death (arguably what started with Deeds of Flesh, Necrophagist, and Origin and later expanded into the really wanky stuff a lot of metalheads love to hate) and old school tech death (like Nocturnus, Atheist, Suffocation, etc) are basically different genres at this point. I think it's fair to argue that it isn't as compositionally impressive or interesting as it was in the early 90s but stuff like Archspire, Decrepit Birth, and Origin and such are pretty much objectively faster, flashier, and more technically difficult to play than those old bands. Not liking the new breed of tech death is totally fair but saying it's "dumbed down" and less technical is like looking at Picasso's Blue Period and saying "Man this isn't nearly as blue as anything Michelangelo painted".

I usually think of Brain Drill as the definitive modern tech death band.

Agreed with BH above that old and new are basically different genres.

Genuinely curious: Why? Is it a popularity thing? I have a hard time seeing this band as anything more than a joke. They sound like the dime-a-dozen noodly "how many sweeps can we fit into a measure" tech-death bands that started popping up after Necrophagist. Sounds closer to Yngwie Malmsteen than death metal. There are so many technical death metal bands out there that manage to sound relatively unique while remaining technical, yet it's mostly relatively cookie-cutter Necrophagist-sounding bands that get revered in the metal community. Of course this is just my worthless opinion - what makes Brain Drill the definitive modern tech death band for you?

I agree completely. If anything, old school tech death sounds watered down by comparison with today's best in the genre.

If I can speculate on his behalf, I'd say I sort of agree with him because Brain Drill is like the furthest extreme you can readily find when it comes to the excessively flashy modern style. Great songwriting is neither their forte nor their intent, it's all about just cramming together as much shit as possible, it's just massively dense walls of sweeps and blasts and inconsequential screaming and that's absolutely all they're trying to accomplish. It's a technical showcase more than anything. Not saying Brain Drill is any good, mind you, but they're one of the most visible and extreme versions of that variant.

And kind of a side note here, but Necrophagist really gets a bad rap. They sort of started this modern style but they never really played it the way it is now. Give a listen to something like Rings of Saturn or Brain Drill and then go back and listen to Onset of Putrefaction and it sounds like fuckin Deicide in comparison. It was just ridiculously fast death metal like what Nile was doing at the time (it's easy to forget just how ahead of their time Necrophagist really was, I wrote that sentence before remembering that Nile didn't even have their second album out until the year after Onset debuted) but with hugely melodic neoclassical solos. Epitaph was more melodic but they had a really strong emphasis on hooks even then. Bands in that style take more cues from Origin than anybody else I'd say, because they were more about the sheer technical density that spawned into the shitty sweepcore more than Necrophagist ever really was.

If anything it has diversified into a few different substyles imo.

Super flashy, sweeping, shred oriented (often neoclassical) i.e First Fragment, Archspire, Beyond Creation
Dissonant, atmospheric, post i.e. Gorguts, Ulcerate, Artificial Brain
Deathcore crossover i.e. Rings of Saturn, Aversions Crown, Lorna Shore
Tech slam/bdm i.e. Dying Fetus, Katalepsy, Abnormality
Tech melodeath i.e. Inferi, Arsis, Quo Vadus

Of course there are several bands that blur these lines. The only thing that is missing from contemporary tech death afaik is that sweet 90s thrash influence & organic production.

These days, I've ditched the phrase "technical death metal" because everything is easy and non-technical if you know how to do it..

I hear ya man, I stopped calling things by their appropriate names too. Basketball is just ball, because everything is a basket if you can make the shot.

Compared to, say, 90s Death's tech-death material or any Nocturnus album, modern tech-death seems quite a bit more technical even if you don't like it.

Absolutely. But take away the ProTools and give them the same amount of time a band like Nocturnus had to record and let's see what they can do.

I agree with the lack of a notable thrash backbone but there are some new bands that perform tech death with really natural sounding production. Some acts that might be of interest:

Blood Incantation
Cosmic Void Ritual
Cth'ilest

Though to be fair, it appears this production style only applies to bands playing Timeghoul/Demilich-influenced death metal. If anyone knows of any Breeding the Spawn/Erosion of Sanity-type OSDM please point them my way. I miss this type of tech death!

I'm doing my part on the production side: real drums/guitar/amp recorded with microphones (no triggers/samples on the drums), and songs recorded in a full take with no post-editing trickery like overdubs, punch-ins, quantization, copy/paste, etc.