Just to be clear; are you wanting heavy metal music that’s only instrumental? Or are you wanting heavy metal music where the vocalist doesn’t sound like a small angry demon with a cold that just got karate chopped in the throat?

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)

You might like some of Haken’s heavier stuff. They’re primarily prog but they go hard, too.
Try the album Vector and the album Virus.

From Virus i recommend you try the song Prosthetic
and the song Messiah complex V: Ectobius Rex
From Vector I recommend you try the song Puzzle Box
and the song Veil

Their new album Fauna is really good and has a good mix of different styles which includes heavy elements as well.

Come back if you like them I will recommend more!

🤘 Haken! 🤘

It’s also okay if you don’t like prog, i recognize it’s too different for some. lol

So you just want instrumental? Check out Buckethead.

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

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

Give a listen to Testament! IMO the music is thrash so heavy it borders death metal, and the singer ventures into growling only occasionally. My gateway drug into Testament was their Titans of Creation album.

I mostly listen to death-doom rather than strict death metal, but there’s a fair bit of that out there. My two faves in the genre:

Draconian has clean female vocals alongside growled male.

Swallow the Sun has a wide range of vocal styles, but getting increasingly cleaner pretty much every album (along with clean female vocals on a lot of tracks).

Again, this is death-doom so a lot of the stuff will be a little slower-tempo than straight death.

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

So there’s a lot of ways you can go with this. You can definitely find instrumentals of death metal bands, but you can also try something new.

Haggard is one of the best in symphonic metal, and while there’s still a stitch singer, imo they’re MUCH easier to understand.

Native Howl has slayer played by some country boys on banjo and guitar. They also do a bunch of their own stuff that sounds pretty wild. “Thrash grass” is one of their better albums and pretty accurately describes their flavor of fusion (thrash metal played in the style of bluegrass)

Older Arch Emeny stuff is also quite good, and having a pretty lady growling at me is a novel experience. Angela gossow also shows up in metalocalypse so that’s instant bonus points

Dethklok does pretty well at straddling the line between melodic/symphonic/death metal, and if you like the metal without Nathan explosion you can check out Brandon Small’s other stuff where he isn’t growling like a cartoon character.

Last but certainly not least is The Lord Weird Slough Feg. Exquisite technical metal wrapped up in an 80s/90s power metal package. I simp for Slough Feg wherever I can because it’s EXCELLENT metal that doesn’t get nearly enough recognition

Hm, Animals as leaders? But it’s not very thrashy.

I am also not a fan of super growly vocals. There’s a lot of stuff I love musically but the vocals put me right off. I’d listen to bands like Opeth and Beyond the Buried and Me more often if the growls weren’t present.

If you’re looking for metal with cleaner singing, I second the suggestions for Unleash the Archers and Nightwish. I can also recommend Blind Guardian, though the singer’s voice is polarizing. One of my favorite metal singers is John Bush from Armored Saint. He also did a few albums with Anthrax in the 90s.

For instrumentals, I can’t recommend much aside from guitar virtuosos like Steve Vai. Occasionally bands will release instrumental versions of their songs as B-sides, bonus discs, etc. Might be worth checking into.

You might like a lot of stuff by The Sword.

Example

There are vocals but they are smooth and crisp rather than the xtreme death metal habit of trying to eat the mic.

Not a metalhead, but I do enjoy Bongripper from time to time. Mostly instrumental stoner metal.

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.