Entombed - Wolverine Blues

Wolverine Blues is where Entombed traded some death metal fury for rock and roll swagger, and in 1993 it helped invent what came to be called death 'n' roll.

The Stockholm band's third album welcomed back vocalist LG Petrov alongside guitarists Uffe Cederlund and Alex Hellid, bassist Lars Rosenberg and drummer Nicke Andersson, with Tomas Skogsberg producing. Despite what some marketing suggested at the time, the title had nothing to do with comic books. It came from James Ellroy's novel The Big Nowhere, which features a killer who identifies with the animal.

The riffs are still crushingly heavy, but they groove and stomp in ways that owe as much to hard rock and classic heavy metal as to the Swedish death scene. "Eyemaster" kicks the door in, the title track settles into a mid-tempo, head-nodding swing, and "Rotten Soil" and "Hollowman" show how much punch the band could pack into a tight, hooky song. Petrov's roar ties it all together, equal parts menace and good-time abandon.

Widely imitated by a generation of bands in the years that followed, it remains one of the most distinctive extreme metal records of the 1990s, the sound of a band throwing open the windows on a genre that was starting to feel cramped.