Hosts: Neil & Chris

This week, Neil brings his childhood death metal obsession to the table with Carcass's 1993 landmark Heartwork. While Chris was discovering Oasis in his thirties, Neil was already deep in the extreme underground, waiting outside record shops for this very album. It's a personal favourite that represents a pivotal moment when death metal got melody, production values, and, crucially, a guitar tone worth chasing for five full studio days. Recorded at Liverpool's legendary Parr Street Studios with producer Colin Richardson, Heartwork transformed Carcass from grindcore extremists into architects of melodic death metal, proving that brutality and beauty aren't mutually exclusive.

The conversation explores the underground tape trading scene that birthed this music, the John Peel discovery engine that brought it to bedrooms across the UK, and the cultural gap between extreme metal then (five people in a pub) and now (arenas and industry). With guest guitarist Michael Amott contributing some of the most exquisite melodic work ever captured on extreme metal record, this album pushed boundaries while maintaining surgical precision.

The album opens with the title track Heartwork, featuring that iconic HR Giger biomechanical heart sculpture on the cover. Buried Dreams and Carnal Forge showcase the dual guitar harmony work that influenced everyone from Arch Enemy to Bring Me The Horizon. The production choices, recorded across multiple rooms at Parr Street (guitars in the smallest demo studio, drums in the biggest live room, bass in a stone dungeon built from Yorkshire stone) created spatial depth rare for extreme metal. Colin Richardson's decision to avoid triggered kick drums kept it organic. The full dynamic range remaster (FDR edition) from Earache reveals just how much air and separation lives in this supposedly wall-of-noise genre.

Heartwork didn't just define melodic death metal, it proved extreme music could mature without losing its teeth. The album peaked at 54 in the UK charts (unheard of for this sound in 1993) and sold 81,000 copies, modest numbers that belied massive influence. It's now in Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Metal Albums and Decibel's Hall of Fame. More importantly, it showed that underground bands grafting in tiny venues could craft something artistically ambitious, lyrically sophisticated (medical metaphors for existential themes, not zombie nonsense), and sonically meticulous. This is the album that taught a generation of extreme bands that melody and brutality enhance rather than dilute each other.

Perfect for: Extreme metal fans, guitar tone obsessives, Colin Richardson completists, anyone who remembers tape trading and John Peel sessions, and folks who believe dinosaurs should absolutely eat people who argue about Wikipedia dates.