Cannibal Corpse

Cannibal Corpse crawled out of Buffalo, New York, in 1988 and set about making the most extreme music they could get pressed onto vinyl. Death metal was the game: Alex Webster's bass rumbling like an earthquake, Paul Mazurkiewicz's drums going at blast speed, Bob Rusay and Jack Owen shredding in tandem, and Chris Barnes gargling the words from somewhere deep in his gut.

Metal Blade Records gave them a home, and early albums like Butchered at Birth in 1991 and Tomb of the Mutilated in 1992 built them a cult following with next to no radio or television help. "Hammer Smashed Face", off Tomb of the Mutilated, is the one that broke through to the countdowns: a lurching, crushing groove that's somehow catchy under all that grinding.

The lineup kept changing, with George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher taking over vocals in 1995 and guitarists including Rob Barrett, Pat O'Brien and Erik Rutan passing through, but Webster and Mazurkiewicz have never left. The band, now based in Tampa, has sold two million albums and kept going long enough for Violence Unimagined to hit No. 6 on the Billboard Top Album Sales chart in 2021, their first top 10.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.