Formed by a man who had just been thrown out of Anthrax, from New York, and the band who balanced the two halves of this exchange better than anybody else attempted. They are also, consistently, the most underrated group in the whole crossover story.
Dan Lilker
Lilker was Anthrax's original bass player and was out of the band by 1984, before the records that made them. He then played on Speak English or Die, which is the crossover blueprint, and formed Nuclear Assault with John Connelly essentially straight afterwards.
That sequence matters. He had been in a thrash band and in the record that invented crossover, and what he built next took both seriously rather than choosing.
Game Over
The 1986 debut is the best balanced record the exchange produced. There are real thrash riffs, properly constructed, and there are forty second hardcore blasts, and the record moves between them without either feeling like a guest appearance.
It is also funny, which almost nothing else in thrash was in 1986, and the humour sits next to genuinely serious material about nuclear proliferation without either undermining the other.
The politics
The band's name is a description of the subject matter. They wrote about the arms race, about environmental destruction, about homelessness and about specific institutions, at a level of directness that the rest of the genre mostly avoided.
Handle with Care in 1989 is the fullest statement of it, and it is the closest thing thrash produced to a sustained argument across a whole record rather than a set of separate complaints.
| Album | Year | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Game Over | 1986 | The best balanced record of the trade |
| Survive | 1988 | Heavier, and more thrash |
| Handle with Care | 1989 | The political statement |
| Out of Order | 1991 | Released into the collapse |
| Something Wicked | 1993 | The last of the original run |
Why they were underrated
Because they fell between the categories the industry was using, which is the recurring failure mode of this entire scene.
They were too fast and too funny for the serious thrash audience, too metal for the hardcore purists, and too political for either. A band that scores highly on every criterion except sitting cleanly in a marketing bracket is a band that nobody's press office knows how to describe.
Add a label with limited reach and a peak that coincided with 1989 to 1991, and the outcome is predictable.
What Lilker did next
Almost everything. Brutal Truth, who are one of the founding American grindcore bands. Stormtroopers of Death again. Exit-13, Holy Moses, and a long list of guest appearances across extreme metal.
He is one of the two or three most connected musicians in this history, and his career is a map of every direction the genre split into after 1990: thrash, crossover, grindcore and the technical end of death metal all run through him.
The genre this band sat exactly between is set out in What Is Crossover Thrash?, and the wider account is in Crossover: Where Thrash Met Hardcore.
The sound
Worth describing, because it is unlike anything else from New York in the period.
Connelly's vocal is high, strangled and instantly identifiable, closer to a shriek than to the shout most thrash singers were using, and it sits forward in the mix in a way that comes from hardcore. Underneath, the guitars are properly written thrash riffs with real construction.
The combination should not work and does, because the band never treats either half as a novelty. A song will run a thrash arrangement for three minutes and then be followed by forty seconds of pure hardcore, and both are played with the same commitment.
Why to hear them now
Because they are the most accessible entry point into this whole chapter for somebody who already likes thrash.
A listener who finds hardcore too simple and crossover too silly will find that Game Over solves both objections: the riffs are good enough to satisfy a thrash ear, the short songs are over before they can annoy anybody, and the lyrics are about something.
It is also the best available demonstration that the two genres were never as far apart as their audiences believed. Forty five minutes of that record makes the entire argument in this section of the site redundant, which is a considerable achievement for four men from Long Island in 1986.
What happened to the band
The usual, on the usual schedule. The audience moved after 1991, the label situation deteriorated, and the band stopped in 1993 having released five albums in seven years.
They have reformed several times since, played European festivals to audiences considerably larger than anything they had at the time, and released a final album in 2015 before a farewell tour. Lilker retired from touring shortly afterwards, which for a musician who had been on a stage continuously since 1981 was overdue.
Where to start
Game Over first and last. It is thirty odd minutes, it contains everything the band was for, and it is the record that makes the case for this entire corner of the genre better than any argument can.
Then Handle with Care if the politics appeal, and Survive if the thrash half is what landed.
One more thing about Lilker, which is the closest this genre has to a moral. He was thrown out of the band that became the most successful of the New York thrash groups, and instead of building a career on the grievance he spent forty years playing in whatever was most interesting at the time, across four genres, mostly for very little money. Almost nobody outside the scene knows his name and almost everybody inside it has a record with him on it, which is a better outcome than most of the people who fired him managed.
The Anthrax question
It comes up every time and it deserves a straight answer. Lilker left Anthrax before the records that made them, and the version of events that has been given publicly by both sides is that he was asked to go rather than that he chose to.
What is notable is how little acrimony survived it. He was on Speak English or Die with two Anthrax members within eighteen months, and the two bands shared bills and audiences for the rest of the decade. In a genre with as much litigation and public grievance in it as this one, that is unusual enough to be worth recording.
Sources and notes
Years and labels refer to original pressings. Line up details refer to the periods of the albums named.
