For instrumental music with no vocals, try: Wide Eyes, Invent Animate (their instrumental versions), Modern Day Babylon, I Built the Sky. These aren’t quite Death Metal, but they have really complex guitar and drum pieces.

For with vocals: Sea in the Sky, Ignea, Unleash The Archers, Corelia (also has instrumental version of their 1 album)

Katatonia… Devin Townsend… Hangman’s Chair… Pallbearer

I guess these aren’t really death metal. But they all crush, IMHO.

(I ain’t got much else… I’ve grown to love the growl!)

Try out Ashenspire, their album Hostile Architecture was my album of the year in 2022. They aren’t death metal per se, but they are heavy as shit. Best description is prog metal jazz infusion with spoken word poetry.

I wonder if AI vocal removal would be able to handle that

A lot of metal bands do instrumental releases

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR1qON1IN1zBN4eo7DFL4IYRwZeuKTvWP&si=xY2lo5ha-8070b2P

There’s a fair few that straddle the line between death growls and clean vocals. Check out Agalloch, Insomnium, Words of Farewell, and Before the Dawn. There’s also of course Amon Amarth, still gorwly but usually clear enough to understand.

I’d start looking up “melodic death metal” that’s a good place to start for what you’re looking for.

Check out Night Verses

Power metal is more traditional metal but with clean vocals (no growls). Bands include DragonForce, Angra, Helloween, Stratovarius

There’s also progressive metal, where the emphasis is more on the intricate instrumentals, so some banda don’t do growls. It is usually less heavier than traditional metal. Bands include Dream Theatre, Liquid Tension Experiment, Symphony X, Tessaract, Haken, frost*, Porcupine Tree

It probably wouldn’t fit your thrash and death metal tastes, but sludge metal and doom metal are a lot less likely to have screaming or annoying vocals in them. I personally really don’t like screaming even though I like metal, haha.

Otherwise, acoustic metal is where you want to land. It can be hard to find in my experience, though.

thisi might be a bit of a stretch but the harder Nu Skool Breaks stuff might fit.

Break-core is also nice and noisy but might be a bit too detailed and less rocky.

I felt the same way as you initially when I got into the genre, but Between the Buried and Me made me develop and appreciation for growling vocals. They’ve got a lot of really intricate and technical guitar work, which is what made me keep listening.

For (mostly) entirely instrumental track, animals as leaders is good, and I absolutely love Polyphia (they play at different times signatures for an interesting sound), and Power Glove is amazing if you like metal covers of video game music.

As for genres, look into symphonic and progressive metal bands, they might be more your style.

Try out the band called Scale the Summit

Maybe try symphonic metal. Bands like nightwish, within temptation maybe?

Elder

Dvne

Bossk

Keygen Church

Julie Christmas

Cult of Luna

Sgàile

Nightwish

Skiltron

Glorryhammer

Creeper

No real death in that list though - the vocals are part of the genre

Animals as Leaders, Thessa, Pomegranate Tiger, Myth of I, and Fractalize are great ones.

Stoort Neer and Vildjharta both have some really good instrumental albums.

Gore., Monolord, '68, and The Damned Things are all a little less heavy than what you might be looking for, but they are all great and have mostly clean vocals.

Polyphia and Chon are also both incredible but probably fall a little closer to something other than Metal.