Death: Ranking All 7 Studio Albums
4. Spiritual Healing (1990)
In the wake of Death’s first two releases, death metal had suddenly become a massive movement in the band’s home state of Florida. Between Leprosy and its follow-up, Spiritual Healing, beloved powerhouses like Obituary and Morbid Angel had emerged, soon resulting in an underground scene angrily bubbling away on the US East Coast.
In order to stand out in a subsect that they had helped to cultivate with their early work, Death went more avant-garde on their third record, resulting in a technically-inclined yet still-aggressive opus.
The end result is an eight-track extravaganza that feels like “death metal ver. 2.0”, maintaining the subgenre’s guttural growls, low-end riffing and constant anger at its heart, but sneaking in tiny hints of prog with shifting time signatures and eclectic themes like drug addiction, televangelism, abortion and schizophrenia.
Thus, Spiritual Healing is a brilliantly bizarre and enigmatic beast: it’s too progressive to just be death metal, but it uses enough of the genre’s conventions that it’s not entirely progressive, either. Between the harsh elitism of Scream Bloody Gore and the conceptual intricacy of Human and beyond, there lies the magnificent limbo of Spiritual Healing.