No genre gets a year like this. Between March and November 1986 thrash metal released the best record of its American wing, the best record of its German wing, the most extreme record anybody had yet made, the most politically sharp record it would ever produce, and half a dozen albums that would have been the highlight of any other twelve months. Then, in September, it lost the musician who had done most to make it serious.
Everything the genre is remembered for is in this year, which is both the reason 1986 is celebrated and the reason what came afterwards was always going to be measured against something unrepeatable.
March: the album that made it respectable
Metallica released Master Of Puppets on 3 March, recorded at Sweet Silence in Copenhagen with Flemming Rasmussen, and it is the record that settled whether this music could carry weight. Eight songs, over fifty minutes, a title track past eight minutes that changes shape four times without losing anybody, an instrumental in the middle, and a song about addiction written from the drug's point of view.
It reached 29 on the American album chart with no radio play and no video, which in 1986 was an argument in itself. If a single record has to be handed to somebody asking what thrash metal is, this is still the one, and forty years of trying has not produced a better answer.
October: the album that ended the speed argument
Slayer's Reign In Blood arrived on 7 October: ten songs, under twenty nine minutes, produced by Rick Rubin, who stripped the reverb out and pushed everything forward and dry. Columbia refused to distribute it over Angel Of Death and Geffen put it out without their own logo on the sleeve.
What it settled is the ceiling. Nobody has convincingly gone faster while still playing thrash, because the next increment requires the blast beat and tremolo picking, and those are the door into death metal. It is also the shortest significant album in the genre, which turned out to be a discipline rather than a limitation.
September: the album with a political tongue
Megadeth put out Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? on 19 September, and it is the record where thrash acquired a sense of humour about power. Dave Mustaine wrote leads that are technical rather than melodic or atonal, all serrated edges and unexpected intervals, and the title track treats the arms trade as a shop staffed by people who will not be doing the dying.
It is also the moment Megadeth stopped being explicable as revenge on a former band and became a proposition of its own.
The German answer, and Brazil arriving
Kreator's Pleasure To Kill, made at Musiclab in Berlin with Harris Johns for Noise, is the Teutonic dialect fully formed: room, weight and mass where the Americans wanted separation, a lower and dirtier rasp, and a wall rather than a diagram. Sodom and Destruction both delivered in the same year, so the German big three arrived effectively at once.
And in Belo Horizonte, Sepultura made Morbid Visions for Cogumelo, in a country with no metal industry, on equipment that would have embarrassed a garage. It is closer to death metal than to thrash and it is the beginning of the most successful career the genre produced outside the United States.
| Date | Band | Album | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 March | Metallica | Master Of Puppets | Elektra |
| 1986 | Kreator | Pleasure To Kill | Noise |
| 1986 | Sodom | Obsessed By Cruelty | Steamhammer |
| 1986 | Destruction | Eternal Devastation | Steamhammer |
| July | Flotsam and Jetsam | Doomsday For The Deceiver | Metal Blade |
| 19 September | Megadeth | Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? | Capitol |
| 7 October | Slayer | Reign In Blood | Def Jam, via Geffen |
| November | Dark Angel | Darkness Descends | Combat |
| 1986 | Nuclear Assault | Game Over | Combat |
| 1986 | Sepultura | Morbid Visions | Cogumelo |
| 1986 | Possessed | Beyond The Gates | Combat |
| 1986 | Metal Church | The Dark | Elektra |
Everything the genre is remembered for is in one year, which is why everything after it was always going to be measured against something unrepeatable.
The records underneath the famous four
Dark Angel's Darkness Descends, out on Combat in November with Gene Hoglan behind the kit, packs more riffs into a single song than most bands spend on a side and does not stop to let any of them land. It is the most extreme American record of the year that is not called Reign In Blood, and it is routinely left off lists it should lead.
Nuclear Assault's Game Over is the year's angriest record about the actual world, from a band who put their subject in their name. Flotsam and Jetsam released Doomsday For The Deceiver in July with Jason Newsted on bass, three months before he was recruited by the band he would spend the next decade being inaudible in.
Three producers, three answers, one year
The most instructive thing about 1986 is that its four defining records were made by four people who disagreed completely about what a metal album should sound like, and all four were right.
Flemming Rasmussen at Sweet Silence gave Master Of Puppets depth and space: a big room, audible air around the drums, every layer separated so a listener can follow six riffs without losing any. Rick Rubin did the opposite for Reign In Blood, stripping the reverb out entirely and pushing everything flat and forward, which is a hip hop producer's instinct applied to guitars and is why that record still sounds like it was made last week.
Harris Johns at Musiclab took the third road for Kreator, keeping the room and losing the separation, so Pleasure To Kill arrives as mass rather than as detail. And Randy Burns, working across the American underground, gave Dark Angel and their peers a controlled filth in which everything is audible without anything sounding tidy.
Four philosophies, twelve months, no consensus. Every argument about metal production since has been a rerun of one of those four positions.
27 September
The year has a second half that nothing on the shelf accounts for. On 27 September, on the road in Sweden, Metallica's tour bus went off the road and Cliff Burton was killed. He was twenty four.
He had done more than anybody to make the bass a written instrument in this music and more than anybody in his own band to push it towards structure and ambition. The material he left behind was assembled into an instrumental two years later. What the genre lost is not measurable and it is not a subject for the register this article is otherwise written in.
What it did to everybody else
The immediate effect on the rest of the genre was not inspiration, it was pressure. A band writing its debut in 1987 was writing it against five records that had arrived in the previous eighteen months, each of which had moved the standard in a different direction: faster, longer, better produced, more technical, more political.
Some rose to it, and 1987 and 1988 produced genuinely excellent albums as a result. A great many did not, and the second half of the decade is full of records that are audibly trying to be one of the four above and falling short in the specific way that copying does. The imitation phase is the direct consequence of the peak, and it is why so much late 1980s thrash sounds competent and unnecessary at the same time.
Why it never happened again
Because 1986 is a convergence rather than an achievement. Every founding band was three or four years into its life, which is exactly when a group has enough craft to execute what it wants and has not yet run out of things to say. They had all heard each other's records and were competing directly. The independent labels were still willing to sign and the majors had begun paying without yet interfering.
All of those conditions expired within four years. The bands got bigger and slower, the labels got cautious, and the competition turned into an industry. The genre kept making good records for another five years and never again put five of them in one twelve month period.
That concentration is what makes the year the reference point for where this sits in the story. What a scene does after its own peak year is the question that runs through The Best Thrash Albums of 1987.
