Count the thrash albums released in 1983 and you get two. That is the whole year. Everything else that mattered was a demo, an EP, a compilation track or a band still four months from a studio, and the two records that did come out were made by teenagers on money nobody sensible would have lent them.
A year with two albums in it is not a scene. It is a starting gun, and the interesting thing about 1983 is how much of what followed was already decided by December.
July: the first one
Metallica's Kill 'Em All arrived on Megaforce in July, funded by a second mortgage on a house in New Jersey after every label in America had said no. It was cut at Music America in Rochester, New York, in May, by a band that had driven across a continent to record for a company which did not exist when they set off.
What it settled is the template. Palm muted downpicked rhythm guitar, songs built as sequences of riffs rather than around choruses, a barked vocal, and a running order with no ballad on it. The Four Horsemen, Whiplash, Seek And Destroy: every band that formed in the following eighteen months was working from this record whether they admitted it or not.
It is also, heard now, audibly a first album. The production is thin, the drums are a distant clatter, and Dave Mustaine's writing is on four of the songs by a man who had been dismissed from the band in April and put on a bus back to Los Angeles. That awkwardness is part of why it works. Nothing on it sounds settled.
December: the other one
Slayer's Show No Mercy came out on Metal Blade on 3 December, five months later and made in a completely different spirit. The band paid for it themselves, out of Tom Araya's wages as a respiratory therapist and a loan from Kerry King's father, and it sounds like it: cheaper, rawer and considerably nastier than the record from July.
Where Metallica were building something, Slayer were frightening people, and the distance between the two records in 1983 is the distance between the two halves the genre would spend the next decade arguing about. Die By The Sword and The Antichrist have almost no interest in structure and total interest in impact.
| Date | Band | Record | Label | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| July | Metallica | Kill 'Em All | Megaforce | The first thrash album, and the template |
| 3 December | Slayer | Show No Mercy | Metal Blade | The second, and the other half of the argument |
Two albums, five months apart, and between them the whole argument the genre would have for a decade.
What was actually happening instead
The year's real work was on cassette. Exodus were playing this music in Berkeley and had been since 1982, without a record; Slayer's own Aggressive Perfector demo is what got them onto Metal Blade in the first place; and Sodom in West Germany had a demo out in 1982, a year before either American album, which is worth remembering whenever the genre's history is told as a purely Californian story.
Metallica themselves had moved from Los Angeles to El Cerrito in February, which is the single most consequential thing that happened in 1983 and produced no record at all. The demo No Life 'til Leather, made the previous summer, was still doing more work in the tape trading network than either album managed in shops.
The singles, which is where the year hid
Because the album count is two, the year has to be read off its seven inches. Anthrax made their first appearance on record in 1983 with a single on Megaforce, Soldiers Of Metal, months before the debut album that arrived in January 1984. That is New York announcing itself, and almost nobody noticed at the time.
Raven, who had relocated from Newcastle to the United States, put out All For One, and the tour that followed matters more than the record: Jon Zazula welded the two album titles together and sent Raven out with Metallica opening, as Kill 'Em All For One. That tour is how the East Coast met this music, in a series of rooms holding a few hundred people.
North of the border, Exciter released Heavy Metal Maniac, faster and more brutal than almost anything from Britain that year, and Canada spent the rest of the decade being the scene everybody forgot to mention.
The neighbours, which are not thrash and matter anyway
Two bands from outside the genre shaped 1983 more than most things inside it, and neither released a landmark that year. Venom's Welcome To Hell and Black Metal were already two and one years old respectively, and they were what a Californian teenager played to work out how far the imagery could be pushed. Motorhead were still the standing demonstration that a band could play at punk tempo with metal equipment and be thrown out by neither audience.
The New Wave of British Heavy Metal was in its final useful year and its records were being imported into California and copied badly by people who could not yet play them. What thrash sounds like in 1983 is Diamond Head misremembered at speed by teenagers with worse equipment, and that is not an insult. It is how the style got made.
Why so few records, when so many bands existed
The bottleneck was never the music. Dozens of bands were playing this material by the end of 1983 and could have filled a release schedule twice over. What did not exist was anybody willing to press it.
A record in 1983 required a pressing plant, a distributor and somebody to carry the cost until the shops paid, and no company in America believed there was an audience. Megaforce existed because one man borrowed against his house; Metal Blade existed because a young man in Woodland Hills was doing it out of a bedroom. Two companies, both improvised, both run by people with no industry experience, and between them they account for the entire year.
That is the reason the demo mattered so much and the reason the tape trading network was the real distribution system until about 1985. The bands were ready two years before the industry was, and the gap is filled with cassettes.
What 1983 handed over
Two records, a template and a proof of concept. Megaforce had demonstrated that an album by an unknown band playing music with no name could be sold, and Metal Blade had demonstrated that it could be done for even less money. Both of those facts reached everybody who was paying attention, and 1984 and 1985 are what happens when a few dozen bands act on them at once.
The year also fixed the two poles. Precision and structure at one end, impact and menace at the other, and almost everything the genre produced afterwards sits somewhere on the line between a record made in Rochester in May and a record made in Los Angeles on a hospital salary, which is the frame for this part of the history. Three years later both poles reached their maximum in the same twelve months, which is The Best Thrash Albums of 1986.
