There is a wing of this genre where the question stopped being how hard can we hit it and became how much can we get away with, and the records that came out of it are the ones thrash fans argue about most and recommend least.
Technical thrash is not thrash played faster. It is thrash with the harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary opened up: chord shapes borrowed from jazz and from nowhere, time signatures that have to be counted, bass playing that is a lead instrument, and arrangements that refuse to return to where they started.
What makes a record technical
Four things, and a record needs at least three of them to qualify.
Harmonic strangeness: chords that are not power chords, intervals that rock guitarists avoid, and progressions that resolve somewhere other than home. Rhythmic complexity: bars that are not in four, and riffs that displace against the drums rather than lining up with them. An active bass: playing against the guitars rather than reinforcing them. And structural refusal: sections that do not come back.
Speed is not on that list, which is why several of these records are slower than the mainstream of the genre and considerably harder to play.
Coroner, Mental Vortex, 1991
Three musicians from Zurich who had been Celtic Frost's road crew and who turned into the most formidable writing unit in European thrash. Mental Vortex is where the strangeness fully arrives: cold, precise, harmonically alien, and with a cover of a Beatles song that has no business working.
Voivod, Nothingface, 1989
The most important record in this category, because Denis D'Amour was not applying theory to thrash, he was writing with shapes he had found on his own, having never been told which ones were forbidden. Add Away's progressive rock drumming and a cover of a Pink Floyd song, and the result is a genre of one.
Watchtower, Control and Resistance, 1989
Austin, Texas, and the origin point of everything later called progressive metal. Bar lengths that require concentration to follow, a bass player operating at a level that embarrasses most guitarists, and a singer in the upper register throughout. Almost nobody bought it and everybody in the field has heard it.
Megadeth, Rust in Peace, 1990
The technical record that also sold, which makes it the entry point for this whole category. Marty Friedman's phrasing is genuinely unlike anybody else's in metal, Nick Menza is a jazz drummer working at thrash speed, and Mustaine's writing is at its most restless.
Atheist, Unquestionable Presence, 1991
Filed as death metal and audibly the child of technical thrash, with fusion bass playing from Roger Patterson and then Tony Choy, and arrangements that change every eight bars. It has grown steadily more admired for thirty years and deserves every bit of it.
Sadus, Swallowed in Black, 1990
Steve DiGiorgio playing fretless bass at full thrash speed, from a band out of the Central Valley who nobody was paying attention to. The bass is the reason to be here and the songs hold up on their own.
Realm, Endless War, 1988
Milwaukee, absurd instrumental ability, a singer with an unusually high clean voice, and a cover of a Beatles song that is more famous than anything else the band recorded. An oddity, and a rewarding one.
| Album | Band | Year | Country | The distinguishing feature |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Endless War | Realm | 1988 | United States | Instrumental ability, high clean vocal |
| Control and Resistance | Watchtower | 1989 | United States | Time signatures and bass |
| Nothingface | Voivod | 1989 | Canada | A private chord vocabulary |
| Swallowed in Black | Sadus | 1990 | United States | Fretless bass at speed |
| Rust in Peace | Megadeth | 1990 | United States | Lead playing and restlessness |
| Unquestionable Presence | Atheist | 1991 | United States | Fusion arrangements |
| Mental Vortex | Coroner | 1991 | Switzerland | Harmonic strangeness |
What technicality cost the genre
It is worth being honest that this wing was not an unmixed blessing.
Thrash's founding virtue was urgency. Once the question becomes how well can we play this rather than how hard can we hit it, the criteria have shifted, and some of what made the music dangerous does not survive the shift. A record can be admired without being felt, and admiration is a colder thing.
It also raised the barrier to entry. A teenager in 1984 could form a thrash band after six months of practice. By 1990 the visible standard was Marty Friedman and Watchtower, and a great many young musicians reasonably concluded that they could not compete. When death metal arrived offering a different set of virtues, a lot of them went.
Where to start
With Rust in Peace, which is technical and immediately enjoyable, and then Nothingface, which is the strangest record here and the most rewarding. Save Watchtower for later; it is the deep end and it does not care whether you are ready.
And listen for the bass on all of them. Technical thrash is the one corner of this genre where the bass player is doing something you can follow, and on Watchtower, Sadus and Atheist it is frequently the most interesting thing happening.
The full thirty record survey is in the essential albums list, and the shorter formats where a lot of the genre's best writing actually lives are covered in The Best Thrash EPs and Demos.
The European and American branches
The technical wing split geographically almost as sharply as the genre itself did, and the two halves were solving different problems.
The American technical bands came out of a musicianship culture: instructional magazines, guitar schools, Shrapnel Records, and a generation of players who practised scales. Watchtower, Sadus and Atheist are all audibly the product of people who had studied, and the complexity is in the rhythm and in the intervals.
The European branch got there from the opposite direction. Coroner had no formal training and arrived at their harmonic language by trial, and Voivod's guitarist did not know which chords were forbidden. The result is stranger and less systematic, and it has aged in some ways better, because a self invented vocabulary does not date the way a school does.
What happened to the players
A brief note on where this talent went, because it explains why technical thrash stopped being a category around 1992.
Marty Friedman left Megadeth and eventually moved to Japan. Steve DiGiorgio became the most in demand bass player in extreme metal and appeared on records by half the bands in this genre. The Atheist and Watchtower musicians drifted into jazz and into session work. Coroner stopped in 1996 and did not return for seventeen years.
What replaced them was technical death metal, which took the same virtues and applied them to a music with a larger audience. Most of the players who would have made a technical thrash record in 1990 made a death metal record instead, which is the same story as the rest of the genre in miniature.
Sources and notes
Years refer to original pressings. The boundary between technical thrash and early technical death metal is genuinely blurred and the selections here reflect that.
