Unlike now, even Slayer and many of the key influencers from the eighties were out of favour, and it fell to Pantera, Fear Factory and Machine Head to reinvent the steel. 1993 also saw the release of Chaos AD by Sepultura, an album which distilled thrash to its base elements and engaged with the politics of its day in a stripped-back, truly confrontational manner. It came at a historical moment after Metallica’s 'Black' album and Nevermind when heavy music was reconsidered, reconstructed and found a new kind of populism.

What Carcass reached with Heartwork was a pinnacle of phenomenal production, unashamed musicality and track-by-track cohesiveness. Not only that, it is time to place Heartwork where it belongs in the pantheon of classic British rock albums and one of the only extreme metal albums that deserves such recognition. Since Surgical Steel is being heralded as a corrective to Swansong’s deviation from their righteously extreme path and as the true successor to Heartwork, it feels right to look at the new album through the lens of Heartwork.

It completes the circle, as its throwback cover imagery of their 'tools of the trade' suggests. But the album that follows is clinical and unremitting, virtuosic as much as it is vitriolic. Its bombastic harmonies and cinematic sweep is actually strangely incongruous even with their later, more commercial work. Surgical Steel opener ‘1985’ - though it references the year of the band’s formation − couldn’t be sonically further removed from that time. Their next two albums crystallized into an increasingly melodic death metal sound which reached its apogee with 1993’s Heartwork − their masterpiece − released almost to the month of Surgical Steel twenty years ago. Their subsonic origins with Reek Of Putrefaction (1988) and Symphonies Of Sickness (1989) were served up out of miasmic lo-fi production and they fast became cult John Peel favourites. As influential as they were unpalatable, Carcass literally embodied ‘goregrind’: blood-spattered grindcore dispatched in churning blasts of medical horror. You can call Surgical Steel a comeback album, but it amounts to nothing less than a vicious, glorious recapitulation of their musical cycle you might call it an extreme music revolution. ‘Tomorrow belongs to nobody’ they’d sneered, and so it came to pass. Death.’ if their career hadn’t been curtailed by the (unjustifiably) much-maligned Swansong album and the band breaking up shortly afterwards in 1995.

‘Grave To The Grind’ might have been the death cry of Carcass, as resonant as ‘Birth.

Carcass cry of fear