1993’s Individual Thought Patterns concludes with the line, “You know so much about nothing at all,” and a minute-long call-and-response furore between soloing guitar and bass. It does not resolve, but rather fades out. This was no accident. Death’s fifth album saw mastermind Chuck Schuldiner embroiled in a raging, cyclical appraisal of the endless circles of damaging pretence human beings have perverted the cycle of life itself with. “Your existence is a script,” he roars on opener “Overactive Imagination”, later warning: “Your script will run short of ideas.” Long gone were the profoundly Floridian death-metal themes that soaked 1987’s Scream Bloody Gore with mutilated fantasia, still occasionally bleeding into the burgeoning existentialism of 1991’s Human. The deceptively complex “Nothing Is Everything” was not, as it would seem, encouraging nihilism. When Schuldiner howls “Just imagine how it might feel/To be denied of what life has to give/Behind mental shadows they must live,” he’s demanding empathy on behalf of those “living like us and sharing our day/In another world very far away.” Individual Thought Patterns may very well be the first death-metal record to concern itself with exploring the makeup of otherness in terms of mental health and even orientation. “So you preach about how I’m supposed to be,” Schuldiner grizzles on closer and fan favourite “The Philosopher”, deciding: “Yet you don’t know your own sexuality.” The frustrating continuum at the album’s core extended to its personnel, which proved to be the most rarefied in Death’s notoriously unstable history. Individual Thought Patterns was the first album to feature drummer Gene Hoglan, and was the last to include bassist Steve DiGiorgio, whose unprecedented usage of fretless bass within the confines of death metal had already helped nudge Human further and further towards a new genre classification entirely. Completing Individual Thought Patterns’ overarching birth and death of realisation, it was also the first and last record to involve guitarist Andy LaRocque—though his infamously improvised guitar solos swirled, somewhat perfectly, into the classically duelling six-strings of 1995’s Symbolic and 1998’s The Sound of Perseverance.