1988 is the year thrash got big, and the year it started paying for it. Four of the founding bands released albums on major label money with arena tours behind them, the records got longer and more complicated, and every one of those decisions is defensible on its own and slightly ominous taken together. Meanwhile, four hundred miles north of the offices, the Bay Area's second wave was finishing its run in front of nobody.
August: the most ambitious record the genre made
Metallica released ...And Justice For All on 25 August: nine songs, over an hour, an average track length nothing in the genre had approached, and arrangements of a complexity nobody had attempted at that tempo. The title track alone changes shape more times than most bands manage on a side, and To Live Is To Die is an instrumental assembled from material Cliff Burton had left behind.
Two readings of it have coexisted for forty years. Either this is the genre reaching its intellectual peak, written structural music that happens to be played at speed, or it is a band losing its editor and mistaking length for depth. Both are defensible. What is not in dispute is the mix, in which Jason Newsted's bass is effectively absent, and which has been argued about ever since.
July: the album that slowed down on purpose
Slayer had a problem after Reign In Blood, which is that they had ended the speed argument and could not win it twice. South Of Heaven, released on 5 July, is their answer: slower, heavier, more deliberate, with the title track crawling where its predecessor sprinted.
It disappointed a great many people in 1988 and it is one of the smartest decisions any band in this genre made. Going faster was not available; going bigger was the trap everybody else fell into; so they went down instead, and the record has aged better than the reaction to it.
The rest of the Big Four, and the arithmetic of scale
Megadeth opened the year on 19 January with So Far, So Good... So What!, made in the middle of a line-up collapse and audibly so, and it is the weakest record of their classic run. Anthrax closed it on 19 September with State Of Euphoria, which sold well and is the least essential of their three good ones, made by a band who had been on the road for two years and were writing on a deadline.
That is what scale does. Both records were better funded, better distributed and better promoted than anything either band had made before, and both are less good than the album in front of them.
| Date | Band | Album | Label | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 19 January | Megadeth | So Far, So Good... So What! | Capitol | A line-up collapse, on tape |
| 10 May | Testament | The New Order | Megaforce, Atlantic | Better songs than the debut, and 136 on the chart |
| 27 June | Vio-lence | Eternal Nightmare | Mechanic, MCA | The most physical record of the second wave |
| 5 July | Slayer | South Of Heaven | Def Jam | The deliberate slowdown |
| 5 July | Death Angel | Frolic Through The Park | Enigma | Cleaner, and a great deal stranger |
| 25 August | Metallica | ...And Justice For All | Elektra | The most ambitious, and the most argued about |
| 19 September | Anthrax | State Of Euphoria | Island | Written on a deadline, sold anyway |
| 30 September | Forbidden | Forbidden Evil | Combat | The best record of the second wave |
| 1988 | Overkill | Under The Influence | Megaforce, Atlantic | New Jersey, undiminished |
| 1988 | Nuclear Assault | Survive | In-Effect | Still writing about the bomb |
| 1988 | Destruction | Release From Agony | Steamhammer | Germany going technical |
| 1988 | Blind Illusion | The Sane Asylum | Combat | One album, and two thirds of Primus |
| 1988 | Voivod | Dimension Hatross | Noise | Quebec, leaving the genre entirely |
| 1988 | Death | Leprosy | Combat | Death metal consolidating next door |
Both records were better funded, better distributed and better promoted than anything the bands had made before, and both are less good than the album in front of them.
The best record of the year came out on Combat
Forbidden's Forbidden Evil, released on 30 September, is the finest thrash album of 1988 and almost nobody bought it. Russ Anderson could actually sing, which in that year was closer to a handicap than an asset. Craig Locicero wrote riffs that hold a melody without easing off the throttle to do it, and Paul Bostaph, later of Slayer, was already the most technically frightening drummer in the county.
It was made across three studios in San Francisco and Cotati with John Cuniberti and Doug Caldwell producing, and it does the one thing the whole second wave was trying to do and could not: it is tuneful and brutal in the same bar. Set it beside ...And Justice For All and the smaller record wins on every measure except ambition.
Germany did not follow
The Teutonic bands had no majors to be tempted by, and 1988 shows what that protects. Destruction's Release From Agony is the year's most technically demanding thrash record from anywhere: time signatures the Americans were not attempting, a third guitarist added to execute the arrangements, and no interest whatsoever in a chorus a hall could sing.
The comparison is instructive rather than flattering to one side. American thrash in 1988 was getting longer because it had the budget to be indulgent; German thrash was getting harder because it had nothing else to compete on. Neither is virtue. But the German records of this year sound like bands solving musical problems, and several of the American ones sound like bands meeting a delivery date.
The second wave finishes
Vio-lence's Eternal Nightmare arrived on 27 June, recorded with Cuniberti and put out by Mechanic, and it is the most physically punishing record the Bay Area made. Sean Killian's voice settles the question of whether you can listen to it before the songs get a hearing, and underneath that voice the Demmel and Flynn writing is sharper than the band was ever credited for.
Death Angel's Frolic Through The Park, out the same day as South Of Heaven, is cleaner than their debut and considerably odder. Blind Illusion made their only album, thrash with progressive rock's structural ambitions bolted on, with Les Claypool and Larry LaLonde in the band. Between them these three records are the county's last full statement, and all three were commercially invisible.
The room next door was filling up
While thrash was being promoted, its children were being made. Death's Leprosy arrived on Combat, tighter and more purposeful than the debut, and the Florida scene around Morrisound was assembling the roster that would define the next five years. In Britain, Earache was doing the same for grindcore.
The traffic ran one way. Musicians who wanted to go further than Reign In Blood had gone were leaving thrash for those rooms, and the bands they left behind were being asked by their labels to go the other way, towards something an American radio programmer might play. A genre losing its most extreme players at the same moment its biggest bands are being pushed towards the middle has a problem it will not feel for another three years.
What 1988 cost
The trade was visible at the time and is clearer now. Major label distribution put these records in shops across America and paid for tours that filled halls, and it also introduced deadlines, A and R opinions and the expectation of a follow up within eighteen months. Three of the four Big Four albums of 1988 are the weakest of their respective runs, and that is not a coincidence.
It also widened the gap inside the genre to the point where it stopped being one scene. A band on Elektra and a band on Combat were now in different industries, playing to different sized rooms, with different problems, and the sense of a shared project that had carried everything from 1983 to 1986 did not survive it.
The following year the founders would make some of their best records anyway, which is the argument of the chapter this belongs to and the subject of The Best Thrash Albums of 1989.
