The Best Thrash Debut Albums

Thrash is unusually kind to first albums, and there is a mechanical reason for it. A debut is made of the songs a band has been playing live for two or three years, which means it has been road tested, cut down and hardened before anybody switched a tape machine on.

Second albums are written under a deadline. First albums are written by teenagers with nothing else to do, and in this genre that difference shows more than in almost any other.

Exodus, Bonded by Blood, 1985

The best debut in the genre and one of its best records full stop. Three years of playing these songs at Ruthie's Inn before anybody recorded them, and it is audible: nothing is unfinished, nothing is padding, and Paul Baloff sounds like he means every word.

Slayer, Show No Mercy, 1983

Rougher than what came after and more melodic than the band's reputation allows, and it established the southern Californian dialect in one go: no resolution, no relief, solos that dive rather than sing. It sold about forty thousand copies with no promotion whatsoever.

Testament, The Legacy, 1987

A debut of alarming completeness by a band whose average age was around twenty two, arriving with Alex Skolnick's lead playing already fully formed. Most bands take three albums to sound this certain.

Death Angel, The Ultra-Violence, 1987

Five cousins from Daly City who had been playing together since primary school, with a drummer of fourteen at the sessions and Kirk Hammett producing the demo that got them signed. It contains a ten minute instrumental and it does not drag.

Metallica, Kill 'Em All, 1983

The most consequential debut, if not the best. Everything is present at once for the first time on any record: the downpicked rhythm, the hardcore tempo, the riff sequence arrangement, the shouted vocal. Thin, rough and completely alive.

Sepultura, Morbid Visions, 1986

Difficult listening and impossible to leave out. Four teenagers in Belo Horizonte with almost no money, singing in a language they did not speak, working from cassettes that had been copied four times. Nothing about it is competent and all of it is alive.

Annihilator, Alice in Hell, 1989

Jeff Waters playing almost everything himself and setting a standard for guitar writing the genre had not previously had to meet. A debut that arrived fully formed from a band that barely existed as a band.

Vio-lence, Eternal Nightmare, 1988

The angriest record the Bay Area's second wave produced, and the one that gave Machine Head its guitarist. Sustained shouting for forty minutes, in the best sense.

Why the second album is usually worse

It is not laziness and it is not money. It is arithmetic.

A band forms and spends three years writing. The best of that material becomes the debut. Then the label wants the follow up inside twelve months, during which the band is on tour, and the second album is written in soundchecks and hotel rooms out of whatever is left plus whatever can be assembled quickly.

Thrash suffers from this more than most genres because the songs are riff sequences, and riffs are finite. A band with forty good riffs makes a devastating debut and then has to find forty more in a year while playing five nights a week.

The bands who beat the pattern almost all did it the same way, by having an unusually strong writer who kept working on the road: Mustaine, Petrozza, Skolnick, Waters. Everybody else made a good second album by taking longer, and the ones who were not allowed to take longer are audible.

The debuts that are not here

Anthrax's Fistful of Metal has a different singer and is historically decisive rather than good. Overkill's Feel the Fire is very strong and the band got better for a decade afterwards, which disqualifies it from a list about debuts being the peak. Kreator's Endless Pain is cruder than everything that followed it.

And Possessed's Seven Churches is arguably the best debut in this whole area and is not on the list because it is not really a thrash album, which is exactly the argument that makes it interesting.

The live records that document these bands playing this material are covered in The Best Live Thrash Albums, and the wider survey is the essential albums list.

The debuts from outside America

The pattern holds internationally and in places is even stronger, because a band in Germany or Brazil in 1985 had waited longer for the chance to record.

Kreator's Endless Pain is crude and completely convinced. Destruction's Sentence of Death is the sharpest of the early German releases. Sodom's In the Sign of Evil is nineteen minutes, barely competent, and one of the most influential extreme metal releases ever made. Coroner's R.I.P. announced a band with a compositional mind. Sabbat's History of a Time to Come is the most literate debut the genre has.

What unites all of them is the same mechanism as the American records: years of material, one chance to record it, and no budget to think about it too hard.

The modern debuts

The revival produced its own first albums and two of them meet the standard set above.

Municipal Waste's Waste 'Em All is twenty minutes of a band who knew exactly what they were and were extremely good at it from the first bar. Warbringer's War Without End is pastiche played with total conviction, which is a more respectable achievement than it sounds. And Vektor's Black Future, from a band nobody had heard of, arrived with an entire private universe already built.

The pattern is identical forty years on. A band forms, plays the same eight songs for three years in front of nobody, and then records them all at once.

Sources and notes

Years refer to original pressings. Estimates of how long material was played live before recording follow the bands' published accounts and are approximate.