An instrumental in this genre is a test. Strip out the vocal and there is nothing to hide a weak arrangement behind, no shouted hook to carry a passage that does not work, and no lyrics to distract from the fact that the riffs have run out.
Which is why the good ones are usually the best writing on the record they sit on, and why almost every band that attempted one only managed it two or three times.
Metallica, Orion, 1986
Eight and a half minutes, and the most complete instrumental the genre produced. It has a genuine middle section rather than a solo over the verse riff, a bass line that steps forward and carries the melody, and a slow passage that would be sentimental in anybody else's hands. It was played at Cliff Burton's funeral.
Death Angel, The Ultra-Violence, 1987
Ten minutes of instrumental thrash as the title track of a debut album, written by cousins in their teens with a drummer who was fourteen at the sessions. It has no business holding together and it does, largely because the band had been playing together since primary school and could turn on a beat without discussion.
Testament, Musical Death (A Dirge), 1988
Alex Skolnick given space to write rather than to solo, and the clearest evidence that the Bay Area's second wave had a harmonic vocabulary the first wave did not. Melodic without being soft, and the arrangement goes somewhere.
Metallica, The Call of Ktulu, 1984
Nine minutes, closing Ride the Lightning, and the record on which the band's ambition first becomes undeniable. The build is patient in a way that a twenty year old band had no reason to be capable of.
Slayer, Cryptic Slaughter era experiments and the rest
Slayer barely bothered with instrumentals, and that is informative rather than a gap. Their whole method depends on Tom Araya's delivery as a rhythmic element, and removing it removes a voice from the arrangement rather than clearing space in it.
Megadeth, Into the Lungs of Hell, 1988
An instrumental opener, which is a different device: it sets a temperature rather than making an argument, and it does that job better than almost anything else in the genre.
| Track | Band | Album | Year | Length |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| "The Call of Ktulu" | Metallica | Ride the Lightning | 1984 | Nine minutes |
| "Orion" | Metallica | Master of Puppets | 1986 | Eight and a half |
| "The Ultra-Violence" | Death Angel | The Ultra-Violence | 1987 | Ten |
| "Into the Lungs of Hell" | Megadeth | So Far, So Good... So What! | 1988 | Three and a half |
| "Musical Death (A Dirge)" | Testament | The New Order | 1988 | Four |
| "To Live Is to Die" | Metallica | ...And Justice for All | 1988 | Nine and a half |
Why Metallica dominate this list
Because they were the only band in the genre who consistently wrote with the ambition an instrumental requires, and because they had Cliff Burton.
Burton came from a background that included classical theory and the bass as a lead instrument, and he pushed the band towards arrangements with movements rather than sections. Three of the four best instrumentals in this genre have his fingerprints on them, and the fourth is a tribute to him assembled from bass lines he had written.
After 1988 the band largely stopped, which is its own kind of evidence.
What an instrumental proves
Two things, and they are the reason this list is short.
The first is that the band can write. A vocal covers an enormous amount: a weak transition is forgivable if there is a hook over it, and a repeated section is unnoticeable if the words are different. Take the voice away and every structural decision is exposed.
The second is that the band can arrange for two guitars. In a normal thrash song the two parts frequently double each other and the interest is in the riff. In an instrumental they have to converse, and a great many bands who were superb at riffs turned out to have nothing to say when the conversation was the point.
The corners of this genre where the writing is best and the audiences were smallest are collected in Underground Thrash Albums You Missed, and the wider survey is the essential albums list.
The instrumentals that are not really instrumentals
A category worth separating out: the short instrumental introduction, which almost every band in the genre used and which does a completely different job.
An intro track sets a temperature. It is ninety seconds of acoustic guitar or feedback or a sound effect, it is not a composition, and its function is to make the first riff of the first real song land harder. Metallica used one, Slayer used one, half the German bands used one, and it is the single most imitated structural device in the genre after the half time drop.
These are frequently good and they are not what this list is about. The distinction is whether the piece would survive being played on its own, and an intro almost by definition would not.
Where the instrumental went afterwards
Thrash largely stopped writing them after 1990 and the technical bands that followed picked the format up, which is the natural home for it.
Death, Atheist, Cynic and the whole technical death metal tradition use instrumental passages and whole instrumental pieces routinely, because that music is already built around composition rather than around a vocal hook. The modern thrash revival has mostly not returned to the form, with the significant exception of Vektor, whose long form pieces carry substantial stretches with no voice at all.
Which suggests the instrumental was never really a thrash device. It was an ambition device, and it appeared in this genre exactly when and where bands were reaching past what the form required of them.
Two more worth finding
Beyond the famous ones, two pieces reward the search. Sepultura's "Inquisition Symphony" from Schizophrenia is an acoustic and electric instrumental by a band who at that point could barely afford strings, and it is the first sign that they were going to be more than a fast Brazilian band. And Coroner's instrumental passages, scattered across their catalogue rather than isolated as tracks, are arguably the best writing in the whole technical wing.
Both make the same point in different ways: an instrumental is where a band tells you what it could do if it were not busy being a thrash band, and the answer is frequently more interesting than anybody expected.
Sources and notes
Track lengths are approximate and refer to original pressings. Cliff Burton died on 27 September 1986.
