Three of the Big Four released nothing in 1989. Metallica were touring an hour long album, Slayer and Megadeth were writing the records that would arrive the following year, and into that gap walked everybody who had spent five years being described as the second rank. It is the best year the genre's underdogs ever had, and several of them made the album of their lives in it.
April: the record that came out of Rio
Sepultura's Beneath The Remains arrived on Roadrunner on 7 April and it is the finest thrash album made outside the United States and West Germany. It was recorded at Nas Nuvens in Rio de Janeiro with Scott Burns, on a budget that would have covered catering on ...And Justice For All, by a band who had grown up in a country with no metal industry.
What it has is urgency of a kind the American records of 1988 had traded away for scale. Nothing on it is comfortable, the production is dry and violent, and the writing is the sharpest of their career. It is also the moment Brazil stopped being a curiosity in this story and became a place records came from.
The Germans peak
1989 is the best year Teutonic thrash ever had. Kreator's Extreme Aggression is the most complete record they made in the decade, better produced than Pleasure To Kill without losing the wall. Sodom's Agent Orange is their commercial peak at home and their most serious album: a record about the defoliant sprayed over Vietnam and the illnesses it left, made by a band from the Ruhr with no obligation to care.
Both were made without a major label anywhere near them, which is the point. While the American bands were negotiating with A and R departments, the Germans were competing with each other, and the records show it.
The Americans who were not quiet
Testament made their commercial peak in August with Practice What You Preach, cut at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley: cleaner, more melodic, the songs shorter and the hooks nearer the front, and it is either their best record or the one where they blinked, depending which side of that argument you take.
Exodus opened the year with Fabulous Disaster, which contains their most famous song and a cover of a punk standard, and Overkill made The Years Of Decay with Terry Date producing, which is the best album New Jersey ever produced and remains the most consistently underrated record in American thrash.
| Band | Album | Label | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sepultura | Beneath The Remains | Roadrunner | The best record made outside the two big scenes |
| Overkill | The Years Of Decay | Megaforce, Atlantic | New Jersey's masterpiece, still underrated |
| Kreator | Extreme Aggression | Noise | The most complete German record of the decade |
| Sodom | Agent Orange | Steamhammer | Their peak, and their most serious subject |
| Testament | Practice What You Preach | Megaforce, Atlantic | The commercial peak, and an argument |
| Exodus | Fabulous Disaster | Combat | Their most quoted songs |
| Coroner | No More Color | Noise | Switzerland, thinking harder than anybody |
| Voivod | Nothingface | MCA | Quebec's most successful record, and its strangest |
| Annihilator | Alice In Hell | Roadrunner | Canada, and a debut with real writing on it |
| Nuclear Assault | Handle With Care | In-Effect | The bomb, one more time |
| Watchtower | Control And Resistance | Noise | Texas, and the outer limit of technical thrash |
| Metal Church | Blessing In Disguise | Elektra | Seattle, before Seattle meant something else |
Three of the Big Four released nothing, and everybody who had spent five years being called the second rank walked into the gap.
Canada finally gets paid
Canada had been making this music since Exciter in 1983 and being ignored for six years. 1989 is when that stopped. Annihilator's Alice In Hell is a debut with genuine writing on it, Jeff Waters playing most of the instruments himself, and it did well enough in Europe to build a career that is still running.
Voivod signed to a major and made the strangest record any major put out that year. Between them, and with Sacrifice and Razor working underneath, the country produced a body of work in the second half of the decade that no history written from California has ever properly accounted for.
The technicians
1989 is also where thrash's cleverest wing peaked. Coroner's No More Color and Watchtower's Control And Resistance are records built on classical technique, shifting time signatures and playing that would embarrass most of the bands in the previous year's table, and neither sold anything worth mentioning.
Voivod's Nothingface went the other way and worked: dissonant, science fictional, with a Pink Floyd cover on it, and it became the most successful record Quebec produced. Between the three of them they demonstrate that the ceiling on technical ambition in this genre was commercial rather than musical.
Next door, death metal arrives properly
The same twelve months carried Morbid Angel's Altars Of Madness, Obituary's Slowly We Rot and Bolt Thrower's Realm Of Chaos. Florida had a scene, a studio and a producer, and Britain had a label, and the genre that had been born on a Possessed demo in 1984 was now a going concern with its own roster.
That matters to a thrash article because of where the talent went. A nineteen year old in 1989 who wanted to play the most extreme music available no longer had any reason to start a thrash band, and the supply of new blood into the parent genre effectively stopped that year.
The one argument the year started
Practice What You Preach is where a question first gets asked out loud that the whole genre would be answering within three years: what does a thrash band do when it is good enough to be bigger than thrash allows?
Testament's answer in 1989 was to shorten the songs, raise the melody, put the hooks nearer the front and keep everything else. It worked commercially and it cost them something with the audience that had bought The Legacy, and both of those facts were noticed by every band on a major label roster.
Two years later a different band gave a far more drastic version of the same answer and sold sixteen million copies, and the argument that started quietly in Berkeley in August 1989 became the argument about the entire genre.
What the year proves
That the genre's depth was real. Take the four biggest bands out of any twelve months and most styles collapse; take them out of 1989 and you are left with a dozen albums, four of them career best, from four countries. No other year in thrash could survive that subtraction.
It also shows where the centre had moved. The best records of 1989 were made in Rio, Essen, Bochum, Montreal and New Jersey, on independent labels, by bands nobody was managing carefully. The American majors had four thrash acts and were about to discover they had bought the top of a market rather than the whole of it.
The following year the four came back, and one of them made the record that ended the era, which is the wider story and the subject of The Best Thrash Albums of 1990.
