The four famous bands made about a dozen indispensable records between them. The rest of the genre made several hundred, and a substantial number of them are better than at least half of that dozen.
This is the list for the listener who has exhausted the obvious and wants to know where the depth actually is. Ten records, one per band, with what each one does that the famous ones do not.
Exodus, Bonded by Blood, 1985
Start here, always. Recorded in 1984 and held for a year while the label fell apart, which cost Exodus their place in history and cost the record nothing. Paul Baloff shouting over riffs with no wasted bars, and the least diluted example of what this music does.
Kreator, Pleasure to Kill, 1986
The German answer to Reign in Blood, released six weeks later, with the opposite production philosophy: guitars fused into a single mass, drums audibly at the edge of what the player can hold. It is a landslide where Slayer made a scalpel, and both are correct.
Sepultura, Beneath the Remains, 1989
Four Brazilians in their early twenties, a fortnight of overnight studio time in Rio, and a record that stands comparison with anything the Americans made that decade. The riffs are theirs, the drumming is not imitating anybody, and the lyrics are about a country that had just come out of a dictatorship.
Testament, The New Order, 1988
The Bay Area's second wave at full strength, with Alex Skolnick's lead playing bringing a harmonic vocabulary the genre had not had. The answer to anybody who assumes melody in thrash means softening.
Overkill, The Years of Decay, 1989
New Jersey, and the record where a relentless band learned what weight is. Bobby Blitz has been shouting since 1980 and has never once sounded bored, and the title track is nine minutes of a band doing something they had not tried before.
Dark Angel, Darkness Descends, 1986
Faster than Reign in Blood and considerably less famous for it. Gene Hoglan's first great recorded performance, and the record that shows what the outer limit of 1986 actually was.
Coroner, No More Color, 1989
Three Swiss musicians who had carried Celtic Frost's equipment, writing thrash as composition rather than as attack. Cold, harmonically strange, and the most intelligent record in the genre.
Voivod, Nothingface, 1989
A paper mill town in Quebec, a guitarist using chord shapes rock musicians did not use, a drummer from progressive rock, and a fully realised science fiction universe drawn by the band. Nothing else in metal sounds like it.
Sodom, Agent Orange, 1989
A working miner's band who made the most commercially successful German thrash album, about a defoliant sprayed over a war their country had not fought. Roughly a hundred thousand copies at home, and not one concession to anybody.
Artillery, By Inheritance, 1990
Denmark, with eastern scales woven into the riff writing and a level of musicianship that nobody was expecting. It sold almost nothing and it is quoted constantly by guitarists, which is a familiar pattern in this genre.
| Album | Band | Year | Scene | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bonded by Blood | Exodus | 1985 | Bay Area | The purest example |
| Pleasure to Kill | Kreator | 1986 | Essen | Mass rather than clarity |
| Darkness Descends | Dark Angel | 1986 | Los Angeles | The speed limit |
| The New Order | Testament | 1988 | Bay Area | Melody without softening |
| Beneath the Remains | Sepultura | 1989 | Belo Horizonte | The map gets bigger |
| The Years of Decay | Overkill | 1989 | New Jersey | Weight |
| No More Color | Coroner | 1989 | Zurich | Composition |
| Nothingface | Voivod | 1989 | Quebec | A new chord vocabulary |
| Agent Orange | Sodom | 1989 | Gelsenkirchen | Journalism at speed |
| By Inheritance | Artillery | 1990 | Denmark | Melody from elsewhere |
Why these bands were not the big four
Almost never for musical reasons, and the pattern is consistent enough to be depressing.
Exodus lost a guitarist to Metallica and then lost a year to a label collapse. Dark Angel were on an independent that could not promote them. Coroner sang in accented English from a country with no metal industry. Overkill were simply never fashionable. Artillery were Danish. Voivod were too strange for anybody's marketing department.
The big four is a description of commercial position, not of quality, and this list is the practical proof. Nothing on it needed a better record to become famous; it needed a better distribution deal.
Where to go after these
Ten more, briefly, for anybody who works through the above: Death Angel's The Ultra-Violence, Forbidden's Forbidden Evil, Vio-lence's Eternal Nightmare, Destruction's Eternal Devastation, Nuclear Assault's Game Over, Annihilator's Alice in Hell, Sabbat's History of a Time to Come, Demolition Hammer's Tortured Existence, Heathen's Victims of Deception and Sacred Reich's Ignorance.
That is twenty records by twenty bands, none of them in the big four, and a listener who works through all of it will have a considerably better picture of this genre than somebody who has heard the famous dozen twice.
The full thirty record survey is in the essential albums list, and the technical end of this material has a list of its own in The Best Technical Thrash Albums.
How to actually work through a list like this
Twenty records is a lot, and the usual failure is to sample three tracks from each and conclude that it all sounds the same. It does, at that resolution. So does everything.
A better method is to take them in geographical pairs and listen for the differences. Play Bonded by Blood and then Pleasure to Kill: same year within eighteen months, same nominal genre, and two entirely different ideas about what a guitar sound is for. Then The New Order against Darkness Descends: both Californian, three hundred miles apart, and opposite conclusions about whether a song should give the listener anywhere to rest.
Once those contrasts are audible, the genre stops being a single noise and becomes what it actually is, which is four or five regional traditions that happen to share a right hand technique.
The economics behind the list
One structural note, because it explains why so many of these records exist at all. Every band here was signed to an independent for the album named, and most of the independents were operating on budgets that would not cover a week in a major label studio.
That constraint produced the records. A band with four days of studio time records what it can already play, which means the album documents a group at full commitment rather than a group being assembled in post production. When the budgets rose after 1988, several of these bands made technically better and emotionally colder albums, and the pattern is consistent enough across the genre to be worth noticing.
Sources and notes
Years refer to original pressings. Selections are editorial and limited to one record per band.
