Entombed: The Sunlight Sound

There is a sound you can identify in under a second, before a single riff resolves, before you know the band or the record or the year. It arrives like a chainsaw being started in a stairwell: a scooped, saturated, all-treble-and-all-bass roar that seems to have no clean edges anywhere on it. Metalheads call it the buzzsaw. Producers call it the HM-2 tone. And more than any other band, the group that welded it to death metal for good was a handful of teenagers from the Stockholm suburbs who called themselves Entombed.

I have spent a lot of my life in front of loud guitars, and I still find the Entombed tone genuinely startling. It should not work. By every rule of engineering it is a mistake — a cheap distortion pedal with every knob pinned, run into a studio that was never meant for this. That the mistake became a genre is one of the better jokes in heavy music, and Entombed told it first and told it best.

Nihilist, and the sound of a decision

The band started as Nihilist, formed in 1987 by a clutch of Stockholm kids barely old enough to be in the rooms they were playing — Nicke Andersson on drums (and, crucially, on riffs), Leif Cuzner and Uffe Cederlund on guitars, Alex Hellid, Johnny Hedlund on bass. Nihilist recorded a run of demos between 1988 and 1989 that circulated through the international tape-trading network, the pre-internet nervous system that carried extreme metal across borders when no shop would stock it. Those demos are already recognisably the thing: down-tuned, mid-paced, filthy.

When Nihilist folded in 1989 over the usual band politics, most of the members simply reconvened under a new name. Entombed was born, and with it the record that fixed everything in place: Left Hand Path, released in 1990 on Earache. L-G Petrov had come in on vocals, a low, clear, almost conversational growl that sat differently from the American cookie-monster style. The title track opens with a slow, dread-soaked crawl and a lead melody lifted, cheekily, from the score of The Serpent and the Rainbow. Then the buzzsaw hits, and Swedish death metal has its founding document.

One pedal, one studio, one producer

The tone did not come from nowhere, and it did not come from expensive gear. It came from a Boss HM-2 Heavy Metal pedal, a stompbox Boss had released in 1983 and more or less given up on, run with all four controls — level, distortion, and the two-band EQ — turned fully clockwise. The setting has a nickname now, “all knobs to the right,” and there are forum threads thousands of posts long dedicated to reproducing it. In 1990 it was just what these kids did because it sounded enormous and they were teenagers.

The other half of the equation was a room. Sunlight Studios, run by engineer and producer Tomas Skogsberg, was a modest facility in Stockholm where Skogsberg captured that pedal without trying to tame it. He let the low end bloom and the top end saw. Nearly every band that mattered in the early Swedish scene passed through Sunlight and came out sounding related — Dismember, Grave, Unleashed, Carnage, Entombed themselves. The city built a house style the way Gothenburg would build its own a few years later, and the studio was the house. If you want to hear the counter-argument — melody where Stockholm had murk — the Gothenburg sound is the other pole of Swedish death metal, and the two cities effectively split the country’s extreme scene between them.

What makes the Entombed records more than a gimmick is the writing underneath the fuzz. Andersson wrote riffs with a rock-and-roll sense of momentum that most death metal lacked. Listen past the distortion and you find hooks, grooves, actual songs. That instinct would soon take the band somewhere nobody expected.

Death ’n’ roll, and the swerve that split the fans

Clandestine followed in 1991, a colder and more technical record, recorded while Petrov was briefly out of the band (Andersson himself handled much of the vocal). Then came the swerve. Wolverine Blues in 1993 dragged the buzzsaw sideways into something the press instantly labelled “death ’n’ roll” — the Entombed tone bolted onto riffs that swaggered like Motörhead and the Stooges. Purists grumbled. The band did not care, and history has been kind: Wolverine Blues is now regarded as one of the most influential heavy records of the decade, the moment death metal remembered it was allowed to groove.

That restlessness defined the rest of the run. DCLXVI: To Ride, Shoot Straight and Speak the Truth in 1997, Same Difference in 1998 (their most divisive record, almost an alternative-rock swerve), then a steadier return to form across the 2000s with Uprising, Morning Star, and Inferno. The band never sat still, which is why they matter beyond a single tone. A group that only had the buzzsaw would be a footnote; Entombed made the buzzsaw the starting point.

Why the buzzsaw beat the technicians

It is worth sitting with the strangeness of what happened here, because it runs against the usual story of how genres develop. Most extreme music evolves toward more — more speed, more notes, more precision. The American death metal scene of the same period was a technical arms race: Florida bands like Death, Morbid Angel and Deicide pushed toward cleaner production and more elaborate playing, chasing a kind of demonic virtuosity. Stockholm went the other way entirely and won a different prize. The buzzsaw tone flattens technicality; when every note is buried in the same wall of saturation, filigree is pointless. What survives that tone is the shape of a riff, its weight and its groove, and so the Swedish writers learned to write riffs you could feel in your chest from across a car park.

That constraint turned out to be a gift. A band forced to write for a tone that erases detail has to make every riff count as a physical event, and the best Sunlight-era records are wall-to-wall with them. It is the same principle that makes a good punk record work, and it is why so much of this music has aged better than the flashier stuff from the same years. Fashion moves on from technique; it rarely moves on from a riff that makes a room lurch.

There is a documentary-worthy detail in how the tone spread, too. Because the HM-2 was a discontinued, unfashionable pedal, second-hand prices stayed low for years — until the Swedish revival of the 2000s and 2010s sent collectors hunting, at which point a fifty-kroner junk-shop stompbox turned into a coveted grail worth many times that. Boss eventually noticed and reissued a Waza Craft version explicitly marketed at the metal crowd that had kept the original alive. A corporation quietly re-manufacturing its own abandoned mistake because a generation of death-metal kids refused to let it die is about as pure a picture of scene power as you will find.

The split, the tragedy, and the legacy carried forward

The Entombed story turns messy in its later chapters, in a very metal way — a name dispute. Founding drummer Andersson had long since left to form The Hellacopters and pursue his rock-and-roll obsessions. By the 2010s the surviving members had split into two camps arguing over the Entombed name, and Petrov ended up fronting Entombed A.D., which released a run of records including 2014’s Back to the Front. Alex Hellid held the original name for archival and reissue work. The whole thing was resolved, painfully, by circumstance: L-G Petrov died of cancer in March 2021, aged 49. The voice on Left Hand Path was gone, and with it the argument lost most of its heat.

What survives is the influence, and it is enormous. The HM-2 tone is everywhere now — you hear it in modern hardcore, in the whole “caveman” death metal revival, in bands who were not born when Left Hand Path came out. Danish groups carry it directly: Baest built a career on a knowing, muscular update of exactly this template, and their success is a straight line drawn from Stockholm 1990. Watch enough young bands and you realise the Entombed tone has become a kind of folk instrument, passed down, no longer owned by anyone.

One more piece of the puzzle deserves crediting: the Earache label out of Nottingham, which signed Entombed and much of the early extreme scene and gave these records international distribution at a time when no major would touch them. The buzzsaw tone might have stayed a Stockholm secret without a label willing to press and ship it across Europe, and the trans-North-Sea connection between Swedish bands and British metal infrastructure is an underrated part of how the sound spread. Danish and British metalheads of my generation heard Entombed because a small English label bet on them, and that bet paid off across an entire genre.

The city that made it

Stockholm in the late 1980s was not an obvious cradle for the most extreme music in the world. Sweden was prosperous, orderly, famous for pop craft and social democracy — the least apocalyptic country imaginable. Part of what gave the early death-metal scene its charge was exactly that friction: teenagers in a safe, grey, well-organised suburb reaching for the most violent sound they could make, half in earnest and half as a two-fingered gesture at the tidiness around them. The music-school infrastructure that produced ABBA and a thousand chart hits also produced kids who could actually play, which is why even the murkiest Sunlight records have real craft under the dirt. The buzzsaw was ugly on purpose, but it was ugliness made by people who knew precisely what beauty sounded like and chose against it. That is a specifically Swedish kind of rebellion, and it is stamped all over these records.

Live, and where the sound lives now

Entombed on stage was always a blunter, faster thing than the records — Petrov an unshowy frontman who let the riffs do the shouting, the buzzsaw somehow even more physical through a PA. I have caught the death ’n’ roll era on Danish and Swedish stages, and the thing that stays with you is how much the crowd sings the riffs rather than the words. That is the mark of a band whose real vocalist was the guitar tone.

If you want to feel the lineage in person, the Stockholm rooms still carry it. A club like Debaser hosts the descendants most weekends, and the scene that Sunlight Studios started has never really stopped. Skogsberg kept working; the pedal kept selling; and somewhere right now a teenager is pinning all four knobs to the right and discovering, with delight, that the mistake still sounds like the end of the world.

That is the Entombed legacy in one sentence. They took a cheap pedal nobody wanted, ran it too hot in a small room, and accidentally invented a sound so complete that thirty-five years later we are all still chasing it. Left hand path indeed.