Thrash Metal

Steel at full speed

The loudest machine shop of the 1980s, thrash metal, runs on one tool, and that tool is the rhythm guitar, not the voice and not the solo. Tuned low, distorted hard and muted against the bridge, the riff comes down as a burst of separate, percussive strikes built on chromatic runs and the tritone rather than a tidy scale, so that every song becomes a chain of riffs welded end to end, each one stripping the gears of the one before it. The drums answer with double bass and a beat lifted from hardcore punk. Melody is allowed. Prettiness is not.

Behind the rhythm guitar the bass is often played with a pick just to keep pace, the lead guitar breaks in to shred and gets out again like a cutting torch drawn once across a seam, and the singer runs from a raw shout to an outright rasp while the lyrics sneer at the world instead of celebrating anything in it. Nothing here is a hymn. It is a shift on the line.

What separates thrash metal from its neighbours is articulation at speed. Picture a rivet gun run the length of a steel girder, every rivet seated and hammered flat before the next one fires: that is the thrash riff, and the whole genre is an argument about how fast the gun can travel before the rivets stop holding. Hardcore punk went faster and let the notes smear into a wall. Traditional heavy metal kept every note clean and surrendered tempo to do it. Thrash refused both trades and paid in calluses, attrition and a decade of nights in the van.

Thrash metal's border wars

Forged in the first half of the 1980s in four furnaces at once, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York and West Germany, the core of the style took a German accent of its own from Kreator, Sodom, Destruction and Tankard. The ring of thrash metal bands widened as fast as the tapes could travel. Sepultura in Brazil, Voivod and Annihilator in Canada, Coroner in Switzerland and Onslaught in Britain ran the blueprint off their own presses. At the far edge the precision engineers of Watchtower bent the girder toward progressive metal with Energetic Disassembly in 1985. Technical thrash had its own shelf before the decade was out.

The border crossed most often by mistake runs along speed metal. Through most of the 1980s both names were stamped on the same records, and the line between them was drawn only afterwards, in the 1990s. The older, cleaner cousin kept heavy metal's twin melodies, its gallop and its expressive singer, while thrash metal fed the melody into the press, flattened it into rhythm and traded the singer for a bark. Exciter with Heavy Metal Maniac (Shrapnel, 1983) and Agent Steel with Skeptics Apocalypse (Combat, 1985) stand on that side of the fence.

On the other flank lies hardcore, and one word causes the pile up. In the early 1980s punks used thrash for fast hardcore itself, which is why a 1982 compilation of New York punk bands was called New York Thrash, and why the faster punk strain later took the name thrashcore to keep clear of the metal. Where the two scenes truly fused, the result is crossover, a name lifted straight off the sleeve of Crossover, the 1987 album by the Houston punks of D.R.I. The two floors did not stay apart for long.

Born of studio time left over from Anthrax's Spreading the Disease, the four men of Stormtroopers of Death, two of them from Anthrax, spent four July days in 1985 cutting Speak English or Die for Megaforce, a record that tore down the fence between the hardcore floor and the metal floor and left it lying in the mud. The last two borders are generational. Possessed's Seven Churches (1985) sits so exactly on the seam where death metal was pulled out of thrash metal that both genres claim it.

Groove metal went the other way, taking the thrash riff, slowing it and making it swing: the same girder, lowered a floor and left to rock on its chains, a formula the heavyweights of Pantera fixed on Cowboys from Hell in 1990. Too slow and too bouncy means the wrong side of the line. The van does not stop there.

Where to start

Eight thrash metal albums, from the Bay Area textbook to the revival, are the fastest way onto the road. Every one still runs hot. The whole road, from the first demo tapes onward, runs through the complete history of thrash metal.

• Exodus Bonded by Blood Torrid/Combat, 1985

  Recorded in summer 1984 and held back almost a year while advance tapes burned through the underground, the textbook a generation of Bay Area bands learned the trade from.

• Slayer Reign in Blood Def Jam, 1986

  Produced by Rick Rubin and running under 29 minutes, a blast furnace at full pour that set the standard thrash and death metal bands had to meet.

• Dark Angel Darkness Descends Combat, 1986

  The speed limit of its year, smashed through on Gene Hoglan's first studio album with the band and later stripped bolt by bolt by death metal's next wave.

• Testament The Legacy Megaforce/Atlantic, 1987

  Proof that thrash could carry melody without going soft, with Alex Skolnick, eighteen at the sessions, stringing singing leads like tempered wire across Eric Peterson's darker rhythm work.

• Sodom Agent Orange SPV/Steamhammer, 1989

  The German school at full tonnage, heavier than anything the trio had made before, hardcore punk in its veins and the band's first German chart entry, at number 36.

• Sepultura Beneath the Remains Roadrunner, 1989

  Cut overnight in Rio with Scott Burns producing, thrash and death metal welded inside the same riff, and the record that drove the Brazilian quartet out of the underground.

• Megadeth Rust in Peace Capitol, 1990

  The technical ceiling of the classic era, Marty Friedman and Nick Menza's first album, riffs milled fine with the melody left in, and number 23 on the Billboard 200.

• Power Trip Nightmare Logic Southern Lord, 2017

  Thirty two minutes that drag crossover and hardcore back into the pit by the collar, the revival's proof that the old machine still runs hot off the line.