1990 is the last great year and it does not look like an ending at all. Megadeth and Slayer both made the best records of their careers within three weeks of each other, the German bands were still improving, the first thrash only package tour filled halls across Europe, and the parent generation came back to prove it had been listening. Everything looks like a genre at full strength.
Read the same twelve months for what else appeared in them and the exits are all visible: a Texan band inventing what came next, a Swedish record inventing something else, and a road accident in Arizona.
September: the technical peak
Megadeth's Rust In Peace arrived on 24 September with Marty Friedman and Nick Menza newly in the band, and it is the most technically accomplished record American thrash produced. Holy Wars... The Punishment Due and Hangar 18 are built out of guitar writing that no other band in the genre could have executed, and Friedman's phrasing brings something to it that had not been in this music before.
What makes it the peak rather than merely the most difficult is that the songs survive the technique. It would have been easy to make a record that was only clever. This one is furious as well.
October: the balance
Slayer's Seasons In The Abyss followed on 9 October and does the thing the band had been circling since 1986: it combines the speed of Reign In Blood with the weight of South Of Heaven instead of choosing between them. The title track is the longest thing they had written and one of the best.
Taken together, the two records of September and October 1990 are the highest the genre reached in craft. Neither is the album most people name first, and both are better made than the albums most people name first.
The rest of a very full year
Anthrax made Persistence Of Time in August, their darkest and least playful record and, by some distance, their most serious. Kreator's Coma Of Souls closed out Germany's great run. Death Angel made Act III with a proper budget and finally sounded like the band their debut had promised. Forbidden and Vio-lence both delivered second albums, and Sacred Reich put out The American Way, the most directly political record the genre made.
| Date | Band | Album | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| 21 August | Anthrax | Persistence Of Time | Their darkest and most serious |
| 24 September | Megadeth | Rust In Peace | The technical peak of American thrash |
| 9 October | Slayer | Seasons In The Abyss | Speed and weight, finally together |
| 1990 | Death Angel | Act III | The record their debut had promised |
| 1990 | Kreator | Coma Of Souls | The end of Germany's great run |
| 1990 | Forbidden | Twisted Into Form | The second wave's best second album |
| 1990 | Vio-lence | Oppressing The Masses | Still the most physical band in the county |
| 1990 | Sacred Reich | The American Way | The most directly political record in the genre |
| 1990 | Testament | Souls Of Black | Written fast, for a tour, and it shows |
| 1990 | Annihilator | Never, Neverland | Canada consolidating |
| 1990 | Pantera | Cowboys From Hell | Not thrash. The thing that replaces it |
| 1990 | Judas Priest | Painkiller | Not thrash. The parents answering |
| 1990 | Entombed | Left Hand Path | Not thrash. Stockholm, and a buzzsaw |
Everything looks like a genre at full strength, and every exit is already visible in the same twelve months.
The three records that are not thrash
The most consequential albums of 1990 for thrash's future were made by other people. Pantera's Cowboys From Hell keeps the half time drop, throws the speed away and builds a whole style out of what is left; within four years that style had taken the audience. Judas Priest's Painkiller is the parent generation demonstrating it had listened, double kick throughout and a drummer hired specifically to play it, and it is better than most thrash records of the same year.
Entombed's Left Hand Path, made at Sunlight in Stockholm on a guitar tone built from a distortion pedal with everything turned fully up, is the furthest possible answer to thrash's demand for clarity, and it recruited a generation.
Three doors, all opened in one year, all leading out of the room.
The records that were written for a tour
Not everything in 1990 was a peak, and the failures are instructive because they all have the same cause. Testament's Souls Of Black was written and recorded quickly so the band would have product to tour behind on a bill they had already been booked onto, and it is the weakest album of their good run. Exodus's Impact Is Imminent has the same problem.
That is a new kind of bad record for this genre and it arrives exactly when the money does. Nothing made between 1983 and 1987 sounds like it was scheduled, because nothing was; by 1990 a band on major distribution had a release cycle, a tour cycle and an obligation to keep the two aligned, and albums began appearing because the calendar said so rather than because the songs were ready.
Clash of the Titans
The genre also got its own package tour in 1990: Slayer, Megadeth, Testament and Suicidal Tendencies across Europe, the first bill assembled entirely from thrash bands and capable of filling halls without anybody else on it. The American leg followed the next year with Anthrax in place of Suicidal Tendencies and a young Alice in Chains opening.
That detail is the whole decade in one line-up. The genre proved it could headline on its own terms, and the band it put on first to fill the early slot came from the city that was about to take the market.
Arizona
The year has a cost attached to it. Death Angel were touring Act III, the record on which they had finally arrived, when their tour bus crashed in Arizona on the way to a show in Las Vegas. Andy Galeon was critically injured and needed more than a year to recover. The band lost their support slot on the American Clash of the Titans to Alice in Chains and had come apart before he was well.
They were the youngest band in this story and the one with the most left to do, and they did not get to do it. Eleven years later they reformed for a benefit concert and have released more albums since than they ever managed the first time.
What 1990 was
A peak that nobody at the time could tell was a peak. The records are as good as the genre ever made, the touring was the biggest it had ever been, and the audience was still there. Nothing in the year's numbers predicted what happened next.
What the year does contain, for anybody reading it backwards, is every mechanism of the collapse: a successor style with a better commercial proposition, an extreme wing that had left for other genres, the industry's attention span already wandering, and the physical attrition that takes bands out one at a time regardless of the market. The following August a different record sold sixteen million copies and the argument was over.
Where that leaves the decade's albums when they are ranked against each other rather than by year is this part of the history, and the question of which of them actually hit hardest is The Heaviest Thrash Metal Albums Ever Made.
