Believe it or not, this is the less violent version of the album cover.
Burning from the inside out
Bloody foam spews from your mouth
Smell the putrid stench of flesh
As it burns you to your death
- Charred Remains
Bloody foam spews from your mouth
Smell the putrid stench of flesh
As it burns you to your death
- Charred Remains
One of the pioneering bands in Death Metal, Autopsy was formed by Chris Reifert, the former drummer for Death. They're known for being co-Trope Codifiers for several facets of Death Metal alongside bands like Possessed and Death such as gruesome album art, Harsh Vocals, and lyrics relating to death and gore. They're also notorious for changing sounds once an album and founder Reifert's numerous side projects. They've been noted as an influence in many death metal bands, including Cannibal Corpse and Deicide. They broke up in 1995 for some of the members to start a new band called Abscess but reformed for live shows in 2009, and are back to recording as of 2011.
Albums
- Severed Survival - 1989
- Mental Funeral - 1991
- Acts of the Unspeakable - 1992
- Shitfun - 1995
- Macabre Eternal - 2011
- The Headless Ritual - 2013
- Tourniquets, Hacksaws, & Graves - 2014
- Skull Grinder - 2015
- Morbidity Triumphant - 2022
- Ashes, Organs, Blood and Crypts - 2023
Members
- Chris Reifert - Drums and Vocals (1987 - Present)
- Danny Coralles - Guitar (1987 - Present)
- Eric Cutler - Guitar (1987 - Present)
- Greg Wilkinson - Bass (2021 - Present)
Autopsy provides examples of the following tropes:
- Epic Rocking: Their 2011 album, Macabre Eternal, has Sadistic Gratification, which lasts 11 minutes long.
- Gorn: Just look at the page quote above.
- Harsh Vocals: Reifert's vocals have always been mix between a scream and a guttural howl.
- I Am the Band: While three quarters of the band have been present since the inception of Autopsy, Reifert is both the face and main creative force in the band.
- Indecipherable Lyrics: Downplayed. While Chris enunciates fairly clearly compared to many other death metal singers, his often frantic delivery and tendency to slur words together still make him difficult to understand.
- Lead Drummer: Chris Reifert, being the drummer and the lead vocalist, as well as the band's leader as previously noted.
- Long Runner Lineup: Even counting the break from 1995-2009, everybody but the bassist has remained constant for the entire life of the band.
- Metal Scream: Reifert is somewhere between Type 1 and Type 2.
- New Sound Album: Constantly. The debut Severed Survival was fast and thrashy, while Mental Funeral was much more slow and doomy, and has had the largest lasting impact on the genre. Third album Acts of the Unspeakable moved more in the direction of Grindcore and Shitfun was basically Hardcore Punk. This move caused the formation of Abscess, which was a continuation of the same sound. Since they returned to music with Macabre Eternal in 2011, their sound has remained fairly constant, being a mixture of all their classic material with slightly more modern production.
- Nobody Loves the Bassist: While the rest of the band's lineup has remained consistent since its foundation, it's had a High Turnover Rate of bassists. They had already gone through two bassists by the time Severed Survival was recorded, and every album before their breakup had a different bassist than the last. Their longest-lasting bass player was Joe Allen, who was with the band from 2010 to 2021.
- Start My Own: Chris Reifert formed Autopsy, following the release of Death's debut, Scream Bloody Gore.
- Transatlantic Equivalent: They are America's counterpart to the Dutch band Asphyx. Both play a raw and dense form of death metal with slow doom passages, broke through in the late 80s/early 90s, are famous for having unconventional sounding vocalists whose styles became influential to very niche specific forms of the genre (Chris Reifert and Martin van Drunen, though the latter wasn't their only singer), and have many songwriting parallels. The relationship between the groups is so close that there is a side project called Siege of Power which is quite literally Asphyx with Chris on vocals, as all the other members are either in Asphyx or very closely related to them.
