Swedish death metal
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Scandinavian death metal concerns the death metal bands of Scandinavian origin. The most dominant countries of the genre are Finland and Sweden. Many bands that fall under this category are associated with the melodic death metal movement, thus giving Scandinavian death metal a very different sound from other variations of death metal. It's important to distinguish between "melodic metal" like Nightwish, and melodic death metal such as Entombed, Dismember, and At the Gates.
In the early 1990s, a distinctively new death metal scene arose, centered primarily around Gothenburg and Stockholm, Sweden, though also incorporating Finnish and Norwegian bands. The Swedish and Finnish bands, inspired by Bathory and other 1980s thrash metal bands, were more popular than the Norwegian bands, who were influenced strongly by black metal and included keyboards and chaotic riffs. The first wave of "Swedish death metal" consisted primarily of the bands Carnage and Nihilist, who fragmented later into Entombed, Dismember and Unleashed. These bands used a trademark "Sunlight Studios" guitar sound formed by linking together two distortion boxes to create a mechanical, electric buzz. Using tremolo picking and faster riffs than most death metal, they represented the greatest success of the genre outside America. Later, the Gothenburg sound was pioneered by bands such as At the Gates, Dark Tranquillity, and In Flames. The Swedish (and Finnish) bands used grindcore-influenced riffs and soon added prog rock-style flourishes. As the 1990s progressed, the Norwegian and Swedish scenes continued diverging, with the latter's center moving from Stockholm to Gothenburg, where New Wave of British Heavy Metal influences became prominent, and Finnish acts continued this trend into the next millennium as Finnish rock began to break into mainstream European audiences.