Bay Area Thrash Bands: The Complete List

Twelve bands in one metropolitan area, several of whom would be the best band in any other city, and a standard in the second rank high enough that records nobody remembers would be classics anywhere else.

The founders

Exodus, formed 1979 in Richmond, and the band who taught the scene how to play. Metallica, who arrived from Los Angeles in February 1983 because a room in the East Bay had reacted to them in a way nobody at home had. Possessed, six teenagers who recorded a week at a converted chicken farm and named a genre on the track listing.

Those three and the rooms they played in are the whole foundation. Everything else in this article grew up watching them.

The second wave

Testament, out of a band called Legacy, with Alex Skolnick playing lead guitar with a harmonic vocabulary the scene did not previously have. Death Angel, five Filipino American cousins from Daly City who had been playing together since primary school.

Vio-lence, the angriest of them, who gave Machine Head its guitarist. Forbidden, technically the best of the second rank. Heathen, the most melodic and the most unlucky.

The deep end

Defiance, Mordred, Laaz Rockit, Blind Illusion, Attitude Adjustment, Sadus from the Central Valley and Hexx.

Blind Illusion in particular deserves attention: a band with two future members of Primus, produced by Kirk Hammett, playing thrash with a harmonic sense that belongs to nothing else in the scene.

What the Bay Area sound is

Precise. Harmonised twin leads that resolve, a half time drop written into every song so the room has somewhere to go, and production dry enough that a listener can take a riff apart while it is still playing.

That is a scene with a venue circuit and an audience of other musicians, and it shows: the competitive pressure ran towards being better rather than towards being more extreme, which is the opposite of what happened in Los Angeles and in the Ruhr.

Why so many

Three things at once. A room, Ruthie's Inn in Berkeley and the venues around it, that would put on unsigned bands on a weeknight. A radio show, Rampage Radio on KUSF from March 1982, that would play a demo tape. And an audience that turned up for bands nobody had heard of.

That combination is rarer than it sounds and it is the whole explanation. A scene is a building, a broadcast and three hundred people who keep coming back.

Where to start

Bonded by Blood first, because it is the purest and because it is the record the scene actually sounded like. Then The New Order for the melodic second wave, then The Ultra-Violence for the teenage extreme.

Then go sideways into Forbidden Evil and The Sane Asylum, which is where the depth is. The venue that made all of it possible is in Ruthie's Inn, and the full account is in The Bay Area.

What happened to all of them

The same thing, on the same schedule. Metallica left for a major and then for a different genre. Exodus lost their singer and then their momentum. Possessed effectively ended when their guitarist joined Death and their singer was shot and paralysed.

The second wave got about three years each before the collapse of 1992 took the labels and the circuit. Death Angel stopped after a bus crash in the Nevada desert. Vio-lence split. Forbidden lasted until 1997. Heathen effectively stopped for fifteen years.

Almost all of them are back. Exodus, Testament, Death Angel, Forbidden, Vio-lence and Heathen have all reformed, and several are making records as good as anything they made young, which nobody in 1996 would have predicted.

The people behind them

Two names that do not appear on any sleeve and without whom the scene is considerably smaller.

Debbie Abono managed Exodus, Possessed, Forbidden and several American death metal bands, having started in her fifties because she was driving her daughters to shows. She was one of the most important figures in the East Bay and is almost never mentioned in the histories.

And Ron Quintana, whose fanzine and whose radio show on KUSF gave the scene its press and its broadcast, and who handed Lars Ulrich the name Metallica off a shortlist for a magazine title. Neither was in a band and neither scene would have existed without them.

The bands that are not from the Bay Area

Worth clearing up, because two get miscredited constantly. Metallica formed in Los Angeles and moved north in February 1983, which makes them adopted rather than native, and the band have always been clear about it.

Sadus are from Antioch in the Central Valley, an hour east, and are usually filed with the Bay Area because there was nowhere else to file them. Machine Head formed in Oakland in 1991 out of Vio-lence and Forbidden, which makes them the scene's direct descendant rather than part of it.

What the scene left

A body of records, most of them made in under a week, and a working method that every independent heavy scene since has used. It also left a specific idea about how a band should sound: precise, legible, arranged, and playable in a room by people who have rehearsed.

That standard is the East Bay's real export, and it is audible in bands who have never heard Bonded by Blood and would not know where San Pablo Avenue is.

One last practical note. The Bay Area catalogue is unusually well served by reissues, largely because the bands are active and the labels are still trading, so almost everything named here is available and in decent condition. That is not true of the Los Angeles second tier or of most of Europe, and it is a substantial part of why this scene has stayed the best documented in the genre.

Sources and notes

Formation dates follow the bands' published accounts. Years and labels refer to original pressings.