The decade the genre is supposed to have died, in which a substantial number of bands kept working and several made records better than their reputations allow. This is who survived, how, and what they made.
The ones who never changed
Overkill released an album every eighteen months through the entire decade, to steadily smaller crowds, and changed nothing at all. Horrorscope in 1991 is one of the best things New Jersey ever produced and it sold a fraction of the previous record.
Sodom never slowed down for anybody. Tankard carried on writing about beer with total consistency. Vader in Poland got better every year. None of them were being offered a restyling, which is a substantial part of why none of them accepted one.
The ones who changed and came back
Testament went downtuned on Low, lost the plot completely on Demonic, and then made The Gathering in 1999 with Dave Lombardo on drums and James Murphy on guitar, which is genuinely excellent and is where the recovery starts.
Kreator spent five years on industrial and gothic influenced records they now disown, then returned in 2001 with Violent Revolution and have not made a weak album since.
The ones who left
Metallica stopped playing thrash in 1991 and have been something else ever since. Sepultura restyled successfully and then split. Anthrax changed singer and drifted. Megadeth chased radio and produced the worst record any major band in this genre has made.
The ones who stopped
Most of them. Exodus, Death Angel, Forbidden, Vio-lence, Heathen, Sacred Reich and dozens more simply ceased operating between 1992 and 1997. The labels dropped them, the circuit closed, and the members got jobs.
Almost all of those bands are active again now, which is a considerably better outcome than anybody expected in 1996.
| Band | What they did | The record from the decade |
|---|---|---|
| Overkill | Never changed | Horrorscope, 1991 |
| Sodom | Never changed | Tapping the Vein, 1992 |
| Vader | Got better | De Profundis, 1995 |
| Testament | Changed, then recovered | The Gathering, 1999 |
| Kreator | Changed badly, then recovered | Nothing, until 2001 |
| Metallica | Left the genre | Not thrash |
| Megadeth | Chased radio | Countdown to Extinction, 1992 |
| Exodus and most others | Stopped | Nothing |
What the decade was actually like
Small. A thrash band in 1996 was playing to two hundred people in a room that had held two thousand in 1990, with no press coverage, no radio and a label that either did not exist or had lost interest.
The European festival circuit is the reason several of these bands survived at all. Wacken, Dynamo and their equivalents kept booking thrash bills throughout the decade to audiences that never went away, while the American club circuit disappeared entirely. Bands who could fill a tent in Germany had an income; bands who could not fill a club in Ohio did not.
What to hear from it
Horrorscope first, which is a great record that happened to arrive in the wrong year. Then The Gathering, which is the sound of a band deciding to be themselves again. Then Vader's De Profundis, which is not really thrash and is what a band with nothing to lose was making in 1995.
What came next, made by people who had not been born when any of this happened, is in The New Wave of Thrash Metal, and the wider account is in The Fall and the Revival.
The records nobody heard
Several genuinely good albums came out in the middle of this decade and vanished, and they are worth naming because the standard account implies there were none.
Overkill made five albums in the nineties and at least three are strong. Sodom's Tapping the Vein in 1992 is heavier than most of what surrounded it. Annihilator continued. Sacred Reich's Independent is better than its reputation. Artillery reformed briefly and made a record almost nobody bought.
Outside America the picture is better still. Vader in Poland, Kreator's later recovery, and a European scene that never entirely stopped were producing material to an audience that had not moved on, which is why the reunion boom of the 2000s found bands who could still play.
Why the decade gets written off
Because the histories are written from the American mainstream, and from that vantage point the genre did disappear. Radio dropped it, the magazines dropped it, the arena tours stopped and the famous bands either left or made records their own members disown.
From a European club in 1995 the view was different: bands touring, festivals booking, records coming out. Neither view is wrong and only one of them has been written down, which is the same problem that has flattened every other part of this history.
What the survivors had in common
Three things, and none of them is artistic integrity in the abstract.
They were not on a major label, so nobody was in a position to require a change. They had modest overheads, so a smaller audience was survivable rather than fatal. And they had a European audience, which did not disappear the way the American one did.
Overkill, Sodom, Tankard and Vader all tick all three. Every band who restyled ticks none of them. That is not a coincidence and it is not a moral judgement either: given the same terms, most people would have taken the budget.
Where to start with the decade
Horrorscope, then The Gathering, then Sodom's Tapping the Vein. Three records, about two hours, and a considerably more accurate picture of the nineties than the standard account of a genre that vanished.
The reunion that ended the decade
The recovery has a date, or near enough. In 1997 Exodus reformed with Paul Baloff and recorded a live album in San Francisco to an audience who had waited a decade for it, and it is the first sign anywhere that this music still had a constituency.
Four years later Kreator released Violent Revolution, and by 2004 Exodus had a new studio record out. The nineties do not end in 1999; they end somewhere around 2001 when the first of these bands works out that the audience never actually went away, it simply had nowhere to go.
Sources and notes
Years and labels refer to original pressings. Judgements are editorial.
