Human

It gives some sense of Death’s achievements to say that their fourth album was a transitional effort for them, and a stunning leap forward for the genre as a whole. Founder Chuck Schuldiner brought in new collaborators on every record, and for Human he recruited guitarist Paul Masvidal and drummer Sean Reinert — already working on their own project, Cynic — and bassist Steve DiGiorgio. The songs were fierce and thrashy, but the grinding primitivism of the early albums was gone, replaced by soaring, grandiose guitar leads and ever-shifting, sometimes almost swinging rhythms. This was progressive metal in the most literal sense; Schuldiner and company were moving forward, and pulling the rest of the genre along behind them.