Florida might be most famous for family-friendly theme parks and fun in the sun—but in 1989, in a cheap Tampa-area motel room, the band Death was hard at work on one of the state’s darker contributions to American culture. It was there the four-member band and its manager stayed while recording the seminal 1990 album Spiritual Healing.
Death’s third studio album evolved its sound beyond its thrash metal roots into something slower, heavier, more melodic, more distinctly “death metal,” with lyrics that focused less on bloody gore and more on the darker corners of society and the human soul. Alongside contemporary offerings from the bands Morbid Angel, Obituary, and Deicide, it helped solidify the then-nascent Tampa Bay scene as the capital of American death metal.
Death metal is hardly a conservative art form. Yet the lyrics on Spiritual Healing paint a right-wing culture warrior’s nightmare vision of America at the time—a society overcome by violence, abortion, crime, drug addiction, crack babies, and commercialized, cynical religion.
Improbable as it might seem today, this message and musical style received something close to mainstream appeal. Songs from Death and its fellow Tampa Bay death metallers would receive generous airplay on MTV and even show up in a few Beavis and Butt-Head episodes.
While Death might not be the first thing people associate with the Sunshine State anymore, there’s no separating Death from the state that birthed it. A 2012 rerelease of Spiritual Healing includes a few “joke and jam” tracks of the band, recording in a warehouse without air conditioning, trying to play while suffering the early stages of heat exhaustion.
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