Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
Thrash metal did not die in the nineties. It was demoted. In 1990 it had four bands in the American album charts, a European festival circuit that could fill fields, and a teenage audience that bought records on the strength of a logo. By 1996 it had none of those things, and the men who had built it were in studios in Los Angeles being told by producers that the seven-minute song with the clean intro was the problem. All of that was the previous chapter, which ended at the top of the mountain. This one is about the walk down, which took about five years, and the long climb back, which took about twenty.
It is worth saying at the start that the fall was not caused by one record, one band or one city in Washington state, whatever the pub argument says. It was caused by four things happening at once: the genre's biggest band changing what it sounded like, a new American rock music arriving that made speed look like a costume, the collapse of the club circuit that had fed every thrash band its first two hundred shows, and the bands themselves running out of ideas at exactly the moment they needed one. Any two of those would have hurt. All four at once emptied the room.
The record that won everything
Metallica released their fifth album on 12 August 1991. It has a black sleeve with a coiled snake you can barely see, no title on the front, and twelve songs with an average length of five minutes. Bob Rock produced it at One on One in North Hollywood over about eight months and something like a million dollars, which was roughly ten times what Master of Puppets had cost. He made the band play together in a room, made Hetfield sing rather than bark, and stripped the arrangements until every song had one idea instead of five. "Enter Sandman" was the first single. "Nothing Else Matters" was a ballad with a string arrangement by Michael Kamen. The album went to number one in ten countries, spent four weeks at the top of the Billboard 200, and on 28 May 2025 the RIAA certified it twenty times platinum in the United States.
Judged as a record it is very good, tighter and better sung than anything the band had made. Judged as an event it removed the roof and then took the roof away. Every A and R man in America now had a template for what a heavy band should sound like: mid tempo, big chorus, clean vocal on track four. The genre's own audience split. Half of them followed Metallica out and never came back to the fast stuff. The other half decided that the band had betrayed them, which was unfair to the record and entirely fair as a description of what happened next, because within three years Megadeth, Anthrax and Testament had all made albums that slowed down and reached for a chorus, and none of them sold like the black album, and most of them were worse than what those bands had made when nobody was asking.
The room empties
Nirvana released Nevermind six weeks after the black album, and it reached number one in January 1992. The usual telling has grunge killing thrash, and there is something in it, but the mechanism is not the one people describe. Grunge did not take thrash's fans so much as it took thrash's slot: the loud guitar band that a seventeen-year-old buys to annoy his parents. Soundgarden and Alice in Chains both came out of the same clubs and both had Sabbath riffs, and they arrived with something thrash could not offer by 1992, which was that they were new. A kid who wanted the fastest, angriest, least commercial music available in 1985 bought Bonded by Blood. In 1992 he bought Dirt, or he skipped rock entirely and bought a death metal record from Florida.
The quieter killing was economic. Thrash had been built on a mid-level touring circuit: five hundred to fifteen hundred capacity clubs across America and Europe, booked by promoters who took heavy bands because heavy bands sold beer on Tuesdays. Between 1992 and 1996 a large part of that circuit closed or switched formats, radio stopped playing anything with a double kick, and Headbangers Ball, on MTV since April 1987, was cancelled in January 1995 after nearly eight years. A band like Forbidden or Heathen, good enough to headline four hundred people in six countries, suddenly had nowhere to play between the local bar and the festival stage they could not get on. Most of them did not survive it. Forbidden split in 1997. Heathen had already stopped. Vio-Lence broke up in 1993. Death Angel had ended in 1991 after a tour bus crash in Arizona in 1990 that put their drummer out of action for more than a year, and Exodus stopped in 1993 after Force of Habit, an album so confused it contains a cover of "Low Rider".
Grunge did not take thrash's fans so much as it took thrash's slot: the loud guitar band that a seventeen-year-old buys to annoy his parents.
This is the section of the complete history of thrash that fans skip, and it is the one that explains everything after it. A genre can survive bad records. It cannot survive having nowhere to play them.
Pantera and the new tempo
What replaced thrash in the heavy rooms was not grunge. It was Pantera, and the difference matters. Cowboys from Hell arrived in 1990 out of a Texas band with a glam past and a guitarist, Dimebag Darrell, who had absorbed every thrash record made and decided that the riff was more useful at half the speed. Vulgar Display of Power, released in February 1992, is where the method becomes a genre. The tempos sit around a hundred beats per minute, the guitar tone is dry and scooped, Phil Anselmo shouts rather than sings, and the songs are built around a single riff hammered until it becomes physical. It is thrash's rhythmic vocabulary played slowly enough that a whole room can move to it at once.
Exhorder, from New Orleans, had got there first and got nothing for it. Slaughter in the Vatican came out on 23 October 1990 on Roadracer, the American imprint of Roadrunner, and The Law followed on Roadrunner in 1992, both of them audibly the same idea, both of them released into a market that had already decided which Southern band it wanted. The band broke up in 1994 and spent twenty-five years being cited as an influence by people who had outsold them a hundred to one. That is the fairest summary of the nineties available: being right early was worth nothing.
Machine Head read the room correctly. Robb Flynn had been the guitarist in Vio-Lence, a band that played as fast as anyone in the East Bay, and when he formed Machine Head in 1991 he threw the speed away. Burn My Eyes, released by Roadrunner on 9 August 1994, shipped more than four hundred thousand copies and stood as the label's best selling debut until Slipknot arrived in 1999, and it did that with grooves, a hip hop cadence in the vocals and almost no double kick. Groove metal took the audience, the tours and the record deals, and the thrash bands watched it happen from inside their own contracts.
The restyling
Sepultura are the exception that keeps the decade honest. Arise in 1991 was the last of their fast records. Chaos A.D., released in the autumn of 1993, cut the tempos, opened the drums out, put a Brazilian percussion piece in the middle of the album and a Dead Kennedys cover at the end, and lost nothing at all. It is heavier than Arise, not lighter. Roots, three years later, pushed further into tuned-down riffs and percussion recorded with the Xavante people in Mato Grosso, and it is the record that a hundred nu metal bands stole from, which is not the album's fault but is part of its story. Max Cavalera played his last show with them at Brixton Academy on 16 December 1996, his departure was announced the following month, and the band never recovered the same weight.
Everyone else's restyling went less well. Anthrax replaced Joey Belladonna with John Bush of Armored Saint in 1992 and made Sound of White Noise, which reached number seven in America and is genuinely a good record with a singer who could carry a tune the old material never needed. What followed was the problem. Stomp 442 in 1995 and Volume 8: The Threat Is Real in 1998 are the sound of a very good band being managed off a cliff. Elektra put Stomp 442 out and then declined to promote it, the band got off the label, and Volume 8 appeared in July 1998 on Ignition only for Tommy Boy to end the distribution deal and Ignition to go bankrupt under it. Beyond, the label after that, went under as well. Testament went dark and slow on Low in 1994 after Alex Skolnick left, which at least suited them, then chased death metal on Demonic in 1997, which did not.
| Band | Record | Year | What changed | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Metallica | Metallica | 1991 | Mid tempo, one riff per song, Bob Rock | Excellent record, ruinous precedent |
| Sepultura | Chaos A.D. | 1993 | Slower, tribal percussion, hardcore edge | The one that worked |
| Anthrax | Sound of White Noise | 1993 | New singer, alternative rock production | Good, then three albums of drift |
| Testament | Low | 1994 | Downtuned, no Skolnick | Underrated, then lost the plot on Demonic |
| Kreator | Outcast | 1997 | Industrial samples, gothic vocals | Their worst album, and they say so |
| Slayer | Diabolus in Musica | 1998 | Drop tuning, nu metal rhythms | The one Slayer album nobody defends |
| Megadeth | Risk | 1999 | Dance beats, radio rock, no thrash | Indefensible |
The bad records, named
Being diplomatic about the late nineties does nobody any favours, least of all the bands, who have mostly disowned these albums themselves. Risk is the low point. Megadeth had spent the decade doing the slow slide well, Countdown to Extinction in 1992 reaching number two in America with real songs on it, Youthanasia in 1994 holding the line, Cryptic Writings in 1997 shading into radio rock. Then Dave Mustaine, acting on Lars Ulrich's suggestion that he should take more risks, made an album with electronic loops, a dance beat and a title that told the reviewers what to write. It came out on 31 August 1999 with Dann Huff producing. Marty Friedman announced his departure the following year. In January 2002, in rehabilitation after a hospital stay, Mustaine fell asleep with his left arm over the back of a chair, compressed the radial nerve and lost the use of the hand, and on 3 April 2002 he announced he was disbanding Megadeth. He was playing again by 2003 and back on record with The System Has Failed in 2004.
Slayer spent the decade in better shape and still fell over twice. Divine Intervention in 1994 is a hard, ugly, perfectly acceptable Slayer album made with a new drummer, Paul Bostaph. Undisputed Attitude in 1996 is a covers record of eighties hardcore songs, which is a fine idea for an EP and a stalling tactic for an album. Diabolus in Musica in 1998 is the failure: drop-tuned, bounced up, produced to fit alongside bands who had learned everything they knew from Reign in Blood. It is the only Slayer record with no defenders. They corrected it hard with God Hates Us All, released on 11 September 2001, a date the band did not choose and could not have chosen worse.
Long is the way
John Milton, Paradise Lost
And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.
Metallica themselves kept going down the same road: Load in 1996 and ReLoad in 1997 are blues rock albums with alternative haircuts, and St. Anger in 2003 is the sound of a band in therapy recording a snare drum with the springs off. Machine Head, who had read 1994 so well, misread 1999 completely and made The Burning Red and then Supercharger, two nu metal albums that nearly finished them. Almost every band that survived the decade did so by being wrong for a while first.
Germany kept the lights on
The Germans had the same bad ideas and less to lose. Kreator went industrial on Renewal in 1992 and gothic on Outcast in 1997, and Mille Petrozza has been candid ever since about how far off the road those records went. Sodom made Get What You Deserve in 1994 with a punk production so raw it sounds like a bootleg of itself. Destruction spent the whole decade without Schmier, who had been sacked in 1989, worked for a stretch as Neo-Destruction with Thomas Rosenmerkel singing, and released in October 1998 an album called The Least Successful Human Cannonball, a title that is at least honest about the outcome. Schmier returned in 1999 and the band keeps the records made without him out of its official discography.
The difference is that none of them stopped. Tankard have released an album every two or three years since 1986 without a single break, which nobody else in the genre can claim. Kreator came back with Violent Revolution in 2001, a record that sounds like a band remembering what it is for, and that album is the actual beginning of the thrash revival, two years before anyone in America noticed. The German scene had one advantage over the American one: its clubs did not close. Wacken Open Air began on 24 and 25 August 1990 in a gravel pit, six German bands and barely eight hundred people, and it grew through the exact years the American circuit was dying, keeping a touring economy alive for bands who could not have earned a living anywhere else.
The veterans come back and the kids take it
The recovery started with an illness and a funeral, which is a grim way to restart a genre. Chuck Billy of Testament was diagnosed with cancer in 2001, and on 11 August 2001 the Bay Area put on a benefit show called Thrash of the Titans at the Maritime Hall in San Francisco, for Billy and for Chuck Schuldiner of Death, which reunited Death Angel for the first time in a decade and put the old scene in one room. Death Angel stayed reunited and have been the most consistent band of the revival since. Exodus reformed properly and made Tempo of the Damned in 2004; Paul Baloff, who had rejoined them, died after a stroke on 2 February 2002 before he could sing on it. Forbidden came back in 2007, Heathen in the mid 2000s, Vio-Lence in 2019, and Testament made The Formation of Damnation in 2008 with Skolnick back in the band for the first time since 1992.
Underneath that, a new wave of bands had decided that 1986 was a better model than 1996. Municipal Waste from Richmond, Virginia put out Hazardous Mutation in 2005 and The Art of Partying in 2007, half-hour crossover records with skateboards on the sleeves. Toxic Holocaust did the Venom and Sodom end of it. Evile from Huddersfield signed to Earache and released Enter the Grave in 2007. Gama Bomb from Newry played it fast and funny. Warbringer made War Without End in 2008 for Century Media, Havok from Denver Burn in 2009, and Skeletonwitch welded thrash riffs to black metal vocals on Beyond the Permafrost in 2007.
A new wave of bands had decided that 1986 was a better model than 1996.
Not all of it was good. The retro wave between roughly 2003 and 2012 produced a great many bands whose entire idea was the font on the logo, and by about 2011 you could hear the exhaustion: another set of Bermuda shorts, another chorus about beer and nuclear war, another band who had learned the riffs but not the reason for them. The ones who lasted, Municipal Waste, Havok, Warbringer, Skeletonwitch, lasted because they wrote songs rather than tributes. If you want the bands rather than the movement, we have the roster of who actually lasted laid out separately.
The late records that worked, and where this leaves 2026
The old bands did eventually make good records again, and the good ones share a quality: they are not nostalgic. Megadeth's Endgame, released in September 2009 with Chris Broderick on lead guitar, is the best thing Mustaine has done since 1990 and sounds like a man with something to settle. Kreator's Gods of Violence in 2017 and Hate Uber Alles in 2022 are the work of a band that got better in its fifties, which almost nobody does. Overkill's Ironbound in 2010 restarted a career that had never technically stopped. Slayer's Repentless, released on 11 September 2015, is the hardest kind of record to judge, made without Jeff Hanneman, who died on 2 May 2013, and without Dave Lombardo, and it is better than it had any right to be without being the album anyone wanted.
The record that actually changed the argument came from Dallas. Power Trip released Nightmare Logic on Southern Lord on 24 February 2017, eight songs, barely half an hour, hardcore bones and Slayer riffs, and it reached an audience that had no interest whatsoever in a genre revival. It got played in punk rooms and metal rooms and by people who owned neither kind of record. Riley Gale, the singer, died on 25 August 2020 at thirty-four, and the loss is still the largest hole in the modern scene. Nobody has replaced what that band was doing, and the several dozen groups now audibly trying only prove the point.
Slayer played what was supposed to be their last show on 30 November 2019 at the Forum in Inglewood, the end of a farewell tour of a hundred and forty seven dates, then announced a return on 21 February 2024 and played Riot Fest on 22 September 2024, which tells you something about how farewell tours work now and something about how much of the touring economy the old names still carry. The genre now sits in a stable, unglamorous, honest condition. The veterans headline festivals: Exodus, Testament, Overkill, Kreator, Destruction and Sodom all still tour, and Sepultura announced in December 2023 that they were finishing, opened the farewell run in Belo Horizonte on 1 March 2024 and have booked its last night in Sao Paulo in November 2026. Below them sits a middle tier that did not exist in 1998, bands like Havok, Warbringer and Municipal Waste who can fill a thousand-capacity room in most countries. Below that, the newest wave leans faster and more hardcore-facing than the eighties bands it learned the riffs from.
Thrash is no longer the sound of the young and angry, and pretending otherwise is the one thing that makes it look silly. What it is instead is a permanent form, like hard bop or rockabilly, with a canon, a circuit and a steady supply of eighteen-year-olds who find Bonded by Blood and decide that this is the correct way to play a guitar. That is a smaller thing than it was in 1990. It is also, on the evidence of the last twenty years, much harder to kill.
