1987 is the year thrash stopped being one thing. The second wave delivered its debuts, the founding bands consolidated, and, in the same twelve months, three of the genre's own children got their founding documents: death metal in Florida, grindcore in Birmingham, and crossover naming itself on a sleeve. A year after the peak, the form was already dividing.
It is also, on the records rather than the reputation, a stronger year than 1986. Fewer masterpieces, far more excellent albums, and a depth of field the previous twelve months never had.
March: the best record of the East Coast
Anthrax released Among The Living on 22 March and it is the year's most complete album. Joey Belladonna is an actual melodic singer, which is why these records bounce where their contemporaries grind, and the writing is the most engaged in the genre: Indians is about the treatment of Native Americans, the title track comes from Stephen King's The Stand, A Skeleton In The Closet from Apt Pupil, and I Am The Law from Judge Dredd.
No other thrash band was writing like this, and very few have since. It is a record made by readers, played by a band who wore shorts and gave interviews, and it did more to make the genre likeable than anything else in the decade.
April: the Bay Area's second wave arrives
Two debuts inside three days. Testament's The Legacy came out on 21 April, cut with Alex Perialas at Pyramid Sound in Ithaca, New York, with Alex Skolnick at eighteen playing lines a jazz teacher would sign off on over a rhythm part that never eases. Death Angel's The Ultra-Violence followed on 23 April, self funded, recorded across three days in Santa Rosa the previous June by five cousins whose drummer was fourteen, and carrying a ten minute instrumental with a classical passage in the middle of it.
One is the best made debut of the second wave and the other is the most ambitious. Neither sold what it should have, because by 1987 the county had run out of oxygen and the labels had spent their money on the generation above.
The founding bands hold the line
Exodus returned with Pleasures Of The Flesh, Steve Souza now singing in place of Paul Baloff, and it is a better made record than Bonded By Blood and a less frightening one. Overkill's Taking Over put New Jersey on a major's distribution. Sodom made the leap of their career with Persecution Mania, which is where they stopped being wilfully primitive and became a band, and Kreator's Terrible Certainty did the same job more quietly.
| Date | Band | Album | Label | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22 March | Anthrax | Among The Living | Island | The most complete record of the year |
| 21 April | Testament | The Legacy | Megaforce, Atlantic | The best made debut of the second wave |
| 23 April | Death Angel | The Ultra-Violence | Enigma | The most ambitious, and the cheapest |
| 1 May | Heathen | Breaking The Silence | Combat | Produced by Ronnie Montrose, and overlooked |
| May | Death | Scream Bloody Gore | Combat | Death metal's founding album |
| July | Napalm Death | Scum | Earache | Grindcore's founding album |
| 1987 | D.R.I. | Crossover | Metal Blade | Named the traffic that had run since 1983 |
| 1987 | Sodom | Persecution Mania | Steamhammer | The leap from primitive to formidable |
| 1987 | Kreator | Terrible Certainty | Noise | Consolidation, done properly |
| 1987 | Overkill | Taking Over | Megaforce, Atlantic | New Jersey on major distribution |
| 1987 | Sacred Reich | Ignorance | Metal Blade | Arizona, and a political conscience |
| 1987 | Voivod | Killing Technology | Noise | Canada leaving the genre sideways |
| October | Exodus | Pleasures Of The Flesh | Combat | Better made, less frightening |
Fewer masterpieces than 1986, far more excellent albums, and a depth of field the previous year never had.
The three children, all born in one year
This is what makes 1987 structurally more important than 1986. In May, Death released Scream Bloody Gore, largely the work of Chuck Schuldiner, and it is the first record that is unambiguously death metal rather than very extreme thrash. In July, Napalm Death put out Scum on Earache, and grindcore existed. And D.R.I. called an album Crossover, which put a name on traffic between metal and hardcore that had been running since 1983.
Three genres acquired their founding documents inside five months, and all three were made by people who had grown up on the records in the table above. A form that produces three viable children in one year is not declining. It is reproducing, and the parent tends to look thinner afterwards because the most extreme people have left to do something else.
Europe goes technical
The continental records of 1987 are where thrash starts thinking too much, in the good sense. Voivod's Killing Technology is barely a thrash album at all: dissonant chord voicings nobody else was using, a science fiction concept, and a rhythm section playing against the guitars rather than with them. Quebec spent the decade quietly making the strangest metal in North America.
Celtic Frost went further out with Into The Pandemonium, which contains orchestration, a female operatic vocal and a cover of a new wave song, and which half their audience has never forgiven. Switzerland's contribution to this genre was to keep refusing to stay inside it.
And in the same country, Coroner began a run of records built on classical technique and time signatures that the American bands were not attempting. What all three have in common is that they treated 1986 as a ceiling to go around rather than a standard to meet.
The one nobody bought
Heathen's Breaking The Silence came out on Combat on 1 May and is one of the two or three finest records the Bay Area produced. Harmonised twin leads that actually resolve, David White singing rather than barking, arrangements that go somewhere, and a producer nobody expected: Ronnie Montrose, whose own band had headlined American arenas while these players were at primary school.
It sold in the region of a hundred thousand copies worldwide, which no second rank band is supposed to manage, and it is still left off the lists. If one record has to be rescued from 1987, it is this one.
The arithmetic the second wave walked into
It is worth being concrete about why 1987's best debuts sold so poorly, because it was not quality. A national record company could sell two or three thrash bands to an American audience, not fifteen, and by 1987 those slots were taken by bands who had arrived in 1983 and 1984.
The labels that mattered had also spent. Megaforce had put its money behind Metallica, Anthrax and Overkill; Combat had a full roster; Metal Blade was carrying the Los Angeles end. A band signing in 1987 got the terms that reflected being fourth in the queue, which meant smaller advances, less tour support and a marketing budget that would not stretch past the specialist press.
So the year produced the best crop of debuts in the genre's history into a market that had no room for them, and most of the bands in the table above spent the next four years touring on their own money. That is the actual story of the second wave, and it has almost nothing to do with the records.
What the year actually settled
Three things. That the second wave could play better than the first and would still be heard by fewer people, because the slots were taken and the labels had already spent. That the genre had reached the limit of its own extremity and the people who wanted to go further would have to start something else, which several of them did within months. And that a thrash band could write about the world without embarrassment, which is Anthrax's contribution and remains underrated.
The consequence was a broader, better and slightly less urgent genre. There are more good records in 1987 than in 1986 and no Reign In Blood, and that trade is the shape of the rest of the decade, which is the chapter above. The following year the founding bands went for scale instead, which is The Best Thrash Albums of 1988.
