The Best Thrash Album Covers

A thrash sleeve in 1986 had one job and about two hundred pounds to do it with, and the constraint produced some of the most memorable artwork in popular music alongside a very large quantity of airbrushed skulls.

What follows is the ten that work, why they work, and the specific reason this genre's artwork looks the way it does, which has more to do with printing costs and record shop racks than with anybody's taste.

Why thrash sleeves look like that

Three practical constraints, all of them invisible now and decisive at the time.

The first is the rack. A twelve inch sleeve is seen edge on or at an angle from four feet away in a shop, competing with two hundred others. It has to read instantly, which pushes towards high contrast, a single central image and a legible logo.

The second is money. Most of these were paid for out of a recording budget that had already run out, which meant an illustrator working fast, frequently in airbrush because it was quick, and almost never a photographer.

The third is the audience. The sleeve was doing the job that a marketing department does now: telling a fifteen year old in a shop what the record sounds like before he can hear it. Subtlety was not a virtue.

Slayer, Reign in Blood, 1986

Larry Carroll's painting is the best sleeve thrash produced and one of the few that would survive being hung on a wall. It is a collage rather than an illustration, dense with figures, closer to Hieronymus Bosch than to anything in metal, and it refuses to give up its detail on first look. Carroll went on to do three more for the band.

Sodom, Persecution Mania, 1987

Andreas Marschall's work for the German bands gave that scene a visual identity as distinct as its sound, and this is the strongest of them. Military imagery rather than occult, which matches what Sodom were actually writing about, and executed with a precision the music deliberately lacks.

Megadeth, Peace Sells... but Who's Buying?, 1986

Ed Repka's Vic Rattlehead in front of a ruined United Nations building. It is a political cartoon rather than a horror image, it matches the lyrics exactly, and it created a mascot that has now appeared on every album the band has made.

Voivod, Dimension Hatross, 1988

Drawn by the band's own drummer, which is almost unique in this genre, and part of a coherent visual universe developed across five albums. Nothing else in metal looks remotely like it.

Kreator, Pleasure to Kill, 1986

Crude, dark and genuinely unpleasant in a way that most horror artwork is not, because it looks like it was made by somebody who meant it rather than by an illustrator working to a brief.

Metallica, Master of Puppets, 1986

A field of white crosses with strings running up out of frame. It is the simplest idea on this list and the one that states the album's theme without a single figure or a drop of blood, which in 1986 took some nerve.

Destruction, Release from Agony, 1987

Joachim Luetke's sculptural, medical, faintly clinical work, which is a completely different register from anything American and prefigures a great deal of later industrial and extreme metal design.

Death Angel, Act III, 1990

Restrained, graphic and confident, and evidence that by 1990 a thrash sleeve no longer had to shout to be identifiable.

The artists who defined the look

Four names cover most of what this genre looks like, which is a remarkable concentration for a scene spread across two continents.

Ed Repka did Megadeth, Possessed, Death, Atheist and dozens more, and his airbrushed, high colour, mascot driven style is what most people picture when they picture a thrash sleeve. Larry Carroll did the four best Slayer covers and came from outside the genre entirely. Andreas Marschall gave the German scene its identity. Away, Voivod's drummer, built a private visual world and never worked for anybody else.

What is missing from that list is a photographer. Almost no thrash album of the 1980s put a photograph on the front, and the reason is the rack test: a band photograph does not read from four feet away and an illustration does.

The bad ones

A great deal of it is genuinely poor, and pretending otherwise does the good work no favours. The airbrushed skull with flames behind it was a genre unto itself. Several bands used the same illustrator, the same palette and the same composition within eighteen months of each other. And the standard collapsed almost completely during the 1990s restyling, when sleeves went abstract and grey to match the music.

The revival brought the artwork back before it brought the music back, which is telling. A generation who had found these records second hand liked the sleeves first, and modern bands who work with Ed Repka or in his idiom are making a deliberate visual argument about what kind of record they have made.

The records themselves are surveyed in the essential albums list, and the albums that built whole worlds rather than single images are in Thrash Concept Albums.

The logo, which is half the design

Any account of this artwork that ignores the band logo is missing the more durable half of it, because the logos have outlived most of the sleeves they appeared on.

A thrash logo has a specific job: it must be readable at a distance on a shop rack and illegible enough at close range to feel like a badge. The Metallica logo with its extended M and A does both. The Megadeth script, the Anthrax block, the Slayer sword letters and the Kreator claw are all doing the same work, and every one of them still sells shirts forty years later.

The German bands went further into spikes and the American bands stayed more readable, which maps onto the difference in the music. And the logos are the one part of this visual tradition that never went out of fashion; even during the 1990s restyling, when the sleeves went abstract and grey, most of the bands kept the mark.

Sources and notes

Artist attributions follow the credits on original pressings, which are incomplete for several releases of this period. Years refer to original pressings.