The Best Thrash Metal Drummers

The drummer is the reason this genre exists. Take the hardcore derived beat away and thrash is fast heavy metal; put it back and everything else follows, including the guitar technique, the song lengths and the arrangements.

Which makes the drum chair the most demanding job in the music, and produced a generation of players who were doing things nobody had asked for and nobody could copy.

What the job actually is

Three simultaneous demands. Hold the offbeat snare pattern at a tempo that makes it manual labour. Run the kick drum as a continuous floor underneath it. And write parts rather than keep time, because in a music made of riff sequences the drums have to signal the changes.

Any two of those is difficult. All three, for forty five minutes, is why this list is short and why so many of these players have had surgery.

Dave Lombardo

The best, and the one everybody else was measured against. Lombardo's playing on the Slayer records is not simply fast; it swings in a way no other drummer in the genre managed, because he came out of a Latin and jazz listening background rather than a rock one. He also plays with a looseness that should not work at those tempos and does.

The double kick on "Angel of Death" is the most imitated performance in thrash and remains, forty years on, a demonstration rather than a benchmark.

Gene Hoglan

The most inventive. Hoglan arrived on Darkness Descends at twenty playing patterns that nobody had heard, with a level of independence between limbs that belonged in fusion rather than in thrash, and he went on to define the drumming of technical death metal as well. He is also, unusually, an excellent arranger; several of the bands he has played with credit him with structural writing rather than just parts.

Charlie Benante

The most musical. Benante brought hardcore's bounce into a metal context and made the offbeat sit differently, and Anthrax's whole feel is his. He also wrote a substantial amount of the guitar material, which is not a common line on a drummer's CV.

Andy Galeon

The most improbable. Galeon was fourteen years old when Death Angel recorded The Ultra-Violence, including a ten minute instrumental, and the performance would be impressive from somebody twice his age. He is the single best argument that this music was made by children.

Ventor and the German school

Jurgen Reil of Kreator plays as though the kit is about to come apart, and that is the entire effect: Pleasure to Kill works because the drumming is audibly at the limit of what a person can hold. It is the opposite philosophy to Lombardo's control and it is equally valid.

Nick Menza and the technical end

Menza was a jazz drummer operating at thrash speed, and Rust in Peace is unplayable without that background. At the far technical end sit Watchtower's and Atheist's drummers, who were doing things in 1989 that most of the genre has still not caught up with.

The Lars Ulrich question

He is on the list and he is not on it for chops, which he would be the first to say. Ulrich's contribution is arrangement: the decision about where a song changes, how long a section runs, when the tempo drops, and what the band is actually doing structurally.

That is a real skill and it is the reason Metallica's records are shaped the way they are. Judged as a technician he is comfortably behind everybody else in the table, and judged by what he contributed to the records the genre would be poorer without him. Both things are true and the argument usually refuses to hold both.

What it does to the body

Worth stating plainly, because it is the least romantic and most relevant fact about the job. Holding a D beat at these tempos for ninety minutes a night, four nights a week, causes tendon damage, back injuries and hearing loss, and the founding generation of thrash drummers has a surgical history to match.

Several have had to change technique entirely in middle age. Some have stopped. The ones still doing it at sixty are performing an athletic feat that no other branch of popular music demands, and the fact that it is done in the dark at the back of the stage is one of the reasons this list needed writing.

The songs those drummers were holding together are in The 50 Essential Thrash Metal Songs, and the full map is in the bands you need to know.

The kit, and what it says

Thrash drum kits of the 1980s got progressively larger and then progressively smaller again, and the arc tells you something about the music.

The founding records were played on ordinary rock kits with two mounted toms and a double pedal or two kick drums. By 1988 the technical wing had arrived at enormous configurations with multiple rack toms, several crashes and a china cymbal, because the arrangements had grown complicated enough to need the colours.

Then the modern revival went back to four pieces. Power Trip, Municipal Waste and most of their contemporaries play small kits hard, which is a deliberate statement about what the music is for: the point is not what you can reach, it is what you can hit.

What the recordings hide

One technical note that changes how these performances should be heard. Almost everything above was played in full takes onto tape, with no grid to snap a hit to and no sampler waiting to replace a weak snare. If the third verse fell apart, the drummer played the song again from the top.

What that means is that the small inconsistencies audible on these records are the performance rather than a failure of it, and the sense of a person just barely holding a tempo is not an illusion. Modern recordings of the same material sound tighter and considerably less alive, and every one of the drummers above has said some version of that in an interview.

Sources and notes

Judgements are editorial. Andy Galeon's age refers to the period of the The Ultra-Violence sessions. Nick Menza died on 21 May 2016.