In 1998, the same year that the pioneering death-metal band Death released their final album, The Sound of Perseverance, Madonna released her ethereal trip-hop pop single, “Frozen.” At some point between Madge’s VH1 dominance and Schuldiner’s cancer-related death in 2001, the death-metal firebrand recorded his own version of the song — unreleased until now.
The track, an instrumental, features Schuldiner playing the song’s Middle Eastern–influenced music and vocal lines on his guitar to a drum machine. It sounds plaintive, understated, and unlike any other music for which Schuldiner is famous.
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The recording surfaced when Schuldiner’s nephew, Chris Steele, discovered a CD-R of the song and played it in his car stereo, as seen in an Instagram reel. “Found this today going through some things,” Steele wrote. “Chuck recorded this in the early stages of his battle with cancer, I remember it well. Chuck sitting in his bedroom with his [B.C. Rich Stealth guitar] and a drum machine. I’m not sure how many people outside of the family and a few friends have heard this but it’s all yours: Chuck’s version of Madonna’s 1998 single ‘Frozen.’ 🤘🏻”
Schuldiner formed his first band, Mantas, in 1983 – the same year Madonna’s self-titled debut was burning up the charts. He and his bandmates drew inspiration from the same New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands that influenced Metallica to invent thrash metal and took the sound a step further with Schuldiner’s demonic, guttural growling. Death’s 1987 debut, Scream Bloody Gore, was a death-metal landmark. Schuldiner and his bandmates fine-tuned and tightened the sound on subsequent albums, hitting a high water mark on 1991’s Human, which landed at Number 70 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time.
The artist, who also recorded with the groups Voodoocult and Control Denied, was diagnosed with brain cancer in 1999. He died of complications from the disease at age 34 in 2001. A new authorized biography of the artist, Born Human: The Life and Music of Death’s Chuck Schuldiner, by David E. Gehlke will come out this month.
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