One year after the release of The Sound of Perseverance in 1998, Death mastermind Chuck Schuldiner would receive an official diagnosis of brain cancer and pass away in 2001. One suspects he may have been cognizant that not all was well during the making of Death’s seventh and final record, because The Sound of Perseverance is an exceptionally pained album intent on breaking free from the constraints of a figuratively flawed body—lyrically and musically. The zenith of both is fully encapsulated by “A Moment of Clarity” towards the album’s end. Lead guitarist Shannon Hamm’s solo, which barrels uninterrupted from 2:20 to 3:50, is not so much a typical spotlight as a classical arrangement. The existential angst that propels the themes of The Sound of Perseverance already sets it apart, but its resulting form was cumulatively reactionary: Schuldiner retained the unearthly high-pitched screeching he cultivated on 1995’s Symbolic to avoid throat injury, a style of vocalizing diametrically opposed to the low-slung growls that continue to define the genre. Most songs are in excess of six minutes (“Flesh and the Power It Holds” clocks in at over eight). Schuldiner and Hamm regularly favor melodious lead lines over doubling riffs. Bassist Scott Clendenin is not only as audible as the guitars, but frequently engages in flights of counter-melody and gregarious fills—even introducing fan-favorite “Spirit Crusher” alongside The Sound of Perseverance’s coup de grace of uniqueness, drummer Richard Christy. Christy’s inexorably inventive and bafflingly intricate playing took Gene Hoglan’s work on Symbolic and ran ahead of it, marrying jazz sensibilities to then-unheard reaches of metaled technicality—a stylistic feat that would not be further explored by the genre until 2002 when Chris Pennie similarly elevated The Dillinger Escape Plan’s Irony Is a Dead Scene. Just as he’d pioneered the potential of death metal with 1987’s Scream Bloody Gore, Schuldiner’s last creative will and testament arguably primed the fuller realization of mathcore, melodic death metal, and technical death metal during the next decade—remaining a landmark in metal’s evolution that has yet to be emulated, let alone equaled, in terms of contextual scope and importance.