Underneath the famous dozen sat a rank of bands who were signed, distributed, reviewed and touring, who made records as good as several of the classics, and who are now remembered as also-rans for reasons that have nothing to do with the music.
Three of them are worth the whole article, and what happened to each is a different way of not quite making it.
Sacred Reich
From Phoenix, Arizona, with no local scene to speak of, and formed by teenagers who were writing seriously about American foreign policy before they could legally drink. Ignorance in 1987 is a young band's record in the best sense: urgent, angry, technically limited and completely sincere.
The American Way in 1990 is the more accomplished album and the less exciting one, which is a pattern that will recur. The band slowed down, wrote better songs and lost some of the thing that made the debut matter.
What happened: the timing. Their best commercial moment arrived in 1990 and 1991, which is the worst possible window, and by 1994 the audience had gone. They reformed and made a genuinely strong album in 2019, which almost nobody expected.
Flotsam and Jetsam
Also from Phoenix, and the clearest case of bad luck in the genre. Doomsday for the Deceiver in 1986 was reviewed with the highest rating Kerrang! had ever given, six K's out of five, which was an event at the time.
Then Jason Newsted left to join Metallica, three months after Cliff Burton's death. A band whose principal writer and bass player departs for the biggest group in the genre does not recover quickly, and Flotsam spent the following decade making decent records that nobody was waiting for.
Heathen
Bay Area, melodic, ambitious and chronically unlucky. Breaking the Silence in 1987 is one of the most tuneful records the scene produced without going soft, and Victims of Deception in 1991 is more ambitious still and arrived into the single worst year an ambitious thrash record could have arrived into.
The band effectively stopped for fifteen years. They came back in 2010 with a record that is better than it has any right to be.
| Band | Best record | Year | What went wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flotsam and Jetsam | Doomsday for the Deceiver | 1986 | Lost their writer to Metallica |
| Sacred Reich | Ignorance | 1987 | Peaked commercially in 1990 |
| Heathen | Victims of Deception | 1991 | The worst possible release year |
| Forbidden | Forbidden Evil | 1988 | A crowded field, a year late |
| Vio-lence | Eternal Nightmare | 1988 | Line up collapse |
| Defiance | Product of Society | 1989 | No promotion |
What second tier actually means
Not lower quality. Read the right hand column of that table: a bass player leaving, a release date, a label with no budget, a line up that fell apart. None of those are musical failures.
What separates the tiers is almost entirely distribution and timing, and the proof is that when access became free, the reputation gap started to close. Bands from this rank are now cited routinely by musicians and by a generation of listeners who found them without any of the barriers that kept them obscure at the time.
Where to start
Sacred Reich's Ignorance first, because it is the most immediately enjoyable and because a band of seventeen year olds writing about the arms trade is exactly what this genre was for.
Then Doomsday for the Deceiver, which is a genuinely strange record with an epic streak that most thrash bands would not have attempted. Then Heathen's Victims of Deception, which requires the most patience and pays the most.
Where all of this material eventually reached a mass audience, briefly, is the subject of Thrash Metal on MTV, and the full account of the run is in The Golden Years.
The rest of the rank
Three bands carry the argument and half a dozen more belong in it.
Forbidden were technically the best of the East Bay second rank, with two guitarists who could genuinely play and a singer with range; Forbidden Evil arrived a year late into a crowded field. Vio-lence were the angriest, and lost their line up. Defiance and Mordred made good records with no promotion behind them. Laaz Rockit spent a decade being almost there.
In Europe the same rank exists and is even less documented: Deathrow, Assassin, Living Death and Darkness in Germany, Xentrix and Acid Reign in Britain.
Why the second tier matters
Because it is where you find out what a scene actually sounded like. The famous bands are famous partly for being exceptional, and a genre judged only on its exceptions is not being judged at all.
The second tier is the genre's working standard: bands with a real label, real distribution and real touring, making records that are good rather than transcendent. That standard turns out to be remarkably high, which is the real argument for spending time down here. A period in which the ordinary bands were making Ignorance and Forbidden Evil was a period in exceptional health.
The reunions
Almost every band in this article is active again, which was not remotely predictable twenty years ago.
Sacred Reich returned in 2019 with Awakening, which is genuinely strong and not a nostalgia exercise. Heathen came back in 2010 and again in 2020. Forbidden reformed twice. Flotsam and Jetsam have never really stopped and released some of their best work in the last decade.
What changed is that the circuit came back. The European festivals and the revived club network give a band of this rank somewhere to play and an audience that has found the records through streaming rather than through a shop that never stocked them. Several of these groups are now playing to more people than they did in 1989, which is a strange and pleasing outcome for a set of careers that were widely written off.
Sources and notes
Years refer to original pressings. Jason Newsted joined Metallica in late 1986. The Kerrang! rating for Doomsday for the Deceiver is as reported at the time.
