Ten records, and the ranking is deliberately provocative in one place, which is the point of writing it down rather than nodding along to the consensus.
The criteria are stated first, because a list without criteria is just a set of preferences with numbers attached. A record qualifies here if it does the job the genre exists to do, and does it better than anything around it: riff economy, legibility at speed, a rhythm section that writes rather than keeps time, and something behind the noise worth saying.
1. Slayer, Reign in Blood, 1986
Ten songs, under twenty nine minutes, and a producer who removed everything a metal record was assumed to need. Rick Rubin took away the reverb, the delay and the blanket of double tracking, and what is left is a band playing at two hundred and twenty beats per minute with total clarity. Nothing has ever been more efficient. It ended the argument about speed for a decade and the record still sounds like it was made last week.
2. Metallica, Master of Puppets, 1986
Eight songs, fifty four minutes, an instrumental, an acoustic introduction, and arrangement on a scale no heavy band had previously attempted at that tempo. It is the record that proved thrash could be ambitious without slowing down. It is also the last one Cliff Burton played on, which is a fact the album has to carry whether it wants to or not.
3. Megadeth, Rust in Peace, 1990
The hardest record in the genre to play, and the one on which Mustaine finally had musicians equal to what he was writing. Marty Friedman's lead playing is unlike anybody else's in metal, Nick Menza is a jazz drummer operating at thrash speed, and the writing is chromatic, restless and completely without padding.
4. Exodus, Bonded by Blood, 1985
Here is the provocation. This belongs above at least two records that outsold it a hundred to one, because it is the least diluted example of what this music does. Recorded in 1984 and held for a year while the label collapsed, it is Paul Baloff shouting over riffs with no wasted bars, and it is the purest thing the Bay Area produced.
5. Kreator, Pleasure to Kill, 1986
The German answer to Reign in Blood, released six weeks later, and the exact opposite production philosophy: everything left in, guitars fused into a single mass, drums audibly at the edge of control. Death metal came out of this record, and a dozen musicians have said so in print.
6. Sepultura, Beneath the Remains, 1989
Recorded in Rio de Janeiro on overnight studio time by a band who had rehearsed until second takes were unnecessary, and better than most of what it was competing with in America. The first great thrash album from outside the United States and Germany, and the moment the map changed.
7. Testament, The New Order, 1988
The most complete record of the Bay Area's second wave, with Alex Skolnick playing lead guitar with a harmonic vocabulary the genre did not previously have and Chuck Billy singing rather than merely shouting. It is the answer to anybody who thinks thrash cannot be melodic without going soft.
8. Voivod, Nothingface, 1989
A band from a paper mill town in Quebec with a guitarist who wrote using chord shapes rock musicians did not use, a drummer closer to progressive rock than to hardcore, and an entire imagined science fiction universe drawn by the band themselves. There is nothing else like it in heavy music.
9. Dark Angel, Darkness Descends, 1986
Faster than Reign in Blood and far less famous for it, with Gene Hoglan's first great recorded performance behind the kit. If somebody wants to know what the outer limit of 1986 actually sounded like, this is the record, and it makes most of its contemporaries sound polite.
10. Coroner, No More Color, 1989
Three Swiss musicians who had been Celtic Frost's road crew, treating thrash as a compositional problem rather than as an assault. Cold, precise, harmonically strange and completely unlike the American records. The most intelligent album the genre has.
| # | Album | Band | Year | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Reign in Blood | Slayer | 1986 | Perfect efficiency |
| 2 | Master of Puppets | Metallica | 1986 | Ambition without slowing down |
| 3 | Rust in Peace | Megadeth | 1990 | The technical benchmark |
| 4 | Bonded by Blood | Exodus | 1985 | The least diluted example |
| 5 | Pleasure to Kill | Kreator | 1986 | The other pole of 1986 |
| 6 | Beneath the Remains | Sepultura | 1989 | The map changes |
| 7 | The New Order | Testament | 1988 | Melody without softening |
| 8 | Nothingface | Voivod | 1989 | A vocabulary of its own |
| 9 | Darkness Descends | Dark Angel | 1986 | The outer limit of speed |
| 10 | No More Color | Coroner | 1989 | Thrash as composition |
What is not here, and why
...And Justice for All is absent and its absence is deliberate. The writing is extraordinary and the record is genuinely difficult to listen to: no audible bass, drums dry to the point of brittleness, and songs that run past the point where the ideas stop. It is admired more than it is played.
Ride the Lightning is the record most likely to displace something above, and on another day it would. Seasons in the Abyss, Among the Living, Horrorscope, Persecution Mania and By Inheritance are all within touching distance and none of them would embarrass the list.
And no album made after 1991 appears, which is a statement about the genre rather than about the modern bands. Terminal Redux and Nightmare Logic are both good enough to be argued for. Neither has yet had thirty years of people failing to displace it, which is the only test a list like this can honestly apply.
How to disagree with this properly
Two rules, offered in good faith. First, name the criterion you are using. If your list is ordered by influence, Kill 'Em All goes to the top and stays there. If it is ordered by sales, the ordering is different again and considerably less interesting. If it is ordered by how well the record does the thing the genre exists to do, you get something close to what is above.
Second, listen to the whole record rather than to the three tracks everybody knows. Half the arguments about thrash albums are actually arguments about singles, and this is a genre in which the deep cuts are frequently where the writing is best. Reign in Blood is not "Angel of Death" and a filler; it is twenty nine minutes with no filler in it at all, which is exactly why it is first.
The full set of thirty records, organised by function rather than rank, is in the essential albums list, and if you are starting from nothing the gentler route in is Thrash Metal Albums for Beginners.
What a list like this is actually for
Not settling anything, obviously. The value of writing the criteria down is that it turns a taste argument into a comparable one: if two people order these records differently and both have stated what they are measuring, the disagreement becomes informative rather than circular.
It also protects against the single most common failure in metal criticism, which is ranking by significance and calling it quality. Kill 'Em All is more historically important than eight of the records above and it is not a better album than any of them. Both statements are true and a list that cannot hold both is not much use.
The last thing it does is put the underground records next to the famous ones on the same terms. Bonded by Blood and Darkness Descends sold a fraction of what the major label albums sold, and on the criteria that matter to this music they are not a fraction as good; in places they are better. A ranking that never lets that happen is describing the record industry rather than the genre.
Sources and notes
Years refer to original pressings. The ordering is editorial and is meant to be argued with. Records released after 1991 are excluded from the ranking for the reason given above rather than on quality grounds.
