Destruction: The Third Pillar

The third of the three German bands, the most musically able of them from the beginning, and the one whose career contains the sharpest collapse and the most complete recovery.

Weil am Rhein

Not the Ruhr. Destruction came from Weil am Rhein, a small town on the Swiss and French border at the far south western corner of Germany, which is about as far from Essen and Gelsenkirchen as it is possible to be and still be in the same country.

Schmier on bass and vocals, Mike Sifringer on guitar, Tommy Sandmann on drums. Sentence of Death in November 1984 is the first of the German thrash releases and it is the sharpest: real riffs, real arrangements, and a guitarist who could already do things his contemporaries could not.

Sifringer

The reason to care about this band. Sifringer wrote riffs that nobody else in Europe was writing: angular, harmonically odd, frequently built on intervals that resolve somewhere unexpected, and always more constructed than the wall of sound approach that Kreator and Sodom were using.

Eternal Devastation in 1986 is the clearest demonstration, and it is the most musical record the German scene produced in that period.

Release from Agony

The 1987 album is the band's most ambitious: a third guitarist, arrangements that go where nobody expects, and a cover by Joachim Luetke that looks like nothing else in metal. It is also the point at which things started to come apart.

Within two years Schmier was out, and what followed is one of the strangest episodes in the genre.

The wilderness

Destruction continued without their singer, under a shortened name for part of the period, and released records that the band's own audience disowns and that Sifringer has spoken about with visible discomfort since.

That lasted most of the 1990s. Then in 1999 Schmier returned, and the band that reformed has been consistently good ever since: All Hell Breaks Loose in 2000, The Antichrist in 2001, and a steady run of records through to the present.

Where they sit

Third of the three by fame and arguably first by musicianship, which is a familiar position for a band whose guitarist was better than the scene required.

Kreator have the most consistent career and the most consequential record. Sodom have the purest one and the commercial breakthrough. Destruction have the best riff writer and the messiest history, and their good albums are as good as anything either of the other two made.

Sifringer left the band in 2021 after forty years, which effectively ends the original line of the group even though the name continues.

Where to start

Eternal Devastation first, which is the most rewarding and the best written. Then Sentence of Death for the historical point, then The Antichrist for the recovery.

Skip the nineties entirely. Everybody involved would tell you the same.

The scene they belong to is set out in Teutonic Thrash, and the label that carried their contemporaries is covered alongside the fourth German band.

Schmier

Marcel Schirmer has one of the most recognisable voices in European metal: a high, cutting rasp that sits somewhere between Petrozza's low growl and an actual shout, and it is the sound most people picture when they picture German thrash even though it is the least typical of the three.

He also plays bass while singing it, at those tempos, which is a coordination problem most vocalists would decline. And he has been a visible advocate for the whole scene for four decades, turning up in documentaries, guesting on other people's records and generally doing the promotional work that Sodom and Kreator have mostly left alone.

His departure in 1989 and return a decade later split the catalogue into three clear phases, and the audience has never had much difficulty saying which two it wants.

What the early records sound like

Sharper and more legible than their German contemporaries, which is the point worth making about this band.

Kreator and Sodom fuse everything into a mass. Destruction separate: you can follow both guitars, the bass is audible, and the arrangements have shape. That makes the early albums a considerably easier entry point for a listener coming from the Bay Area records, and it is why Destruction have always had a following among people who find the rest of the German scene impenetrable.

The reunion era

Twenty five years of consistent output since 2000, which almost nobody predicted from a band who had spent the previous decade in the state described above.

The records are fast, well made and reliably good rather than surprising, and the band tour constantly. That is a perfectly honourable position for a group in its fifth decade, and it puts them in the small category of founding thrash bands whose current material a new listener could reasonably start with.

Where they sit against the other two

A final comparison, because the three German bands are always discussed together and the differences are real. Kreator are the writers: the catalogue has the most range and the recovery has been the most complete. Sodom are the purists: never slowed down, never softened, and the one commercial breakthrough the scene had. Destruction are the musicians: the best riffs, the sharpest arrangements and by some distance the messiest history.

A listener who has heard Kreator and Sodom and assumes they have heard German thrash has missed the band with the best guitarist in it.

One last note for anybody working through the catalogue. The band's own numbering is confusing: Sentence of Death is technically an EP, the German and American pressings of it differ, and several titles were reissued with extra tracks in the 2000s. The reissues are generally the ones to have, because the originals are scarce and the bonus material is usually the demos.

Sources and notes

Years and labels refer to original pressings. Line up details follow the band's published accounts.