Some of the best writing in this genre is on records that last twelve minutes, and a fair amount of it never came out on anything you could buy at all.
The short format suited thrash for a specific reason: a band with four songs and no filler makes a stronger statement than the same band with nine songs and a deadline. What follows is the EPs worth owning and the demos worth finding.
Slayer, Haunting the Chapel, 1984
Three songs, and the most important short release in the genre. This is where Slayer stop sounding like a fast heavy metal band with a debut album and start sounding like Slayer: darker, uglier, faster, with the whammy bar solos and the flat delivery already in place. If you only have room for one early Slayer release, take this over Show No Mercy.
Metallica, The $5.98 E.P. Garage Days Re-Revisited, 1987
Five covers of the records that made them, recorded quickly and deliberately rough, with Jason Newsted's first appearance and the retail price printed on the cover so shops could not mark it up. It is the most likeable thing the band ever released and it doubles as a reading list: Diamond Head, Holocaust, Killing Joke, Budgie and the Misfits.
Anthrax, Armed and Dangerous, 1985
A transitional release with Joey Belladonna's arrival, a live track and a Sex Pistols cover, and it captures a band in the exact month they worked out what they were going to be.
Nuclear Assault, Brain Death, 1986
The short format doing what it does best: four songs, no ballast, and the crossover and thrash halves of this band balanced better than on either album around it.
The demos that matter
A demo tape is not a record and several of them were more consequential than most records, so they belong here with the caveat that finding them legitimately is not always simple.
No Life til Leather, Metallica, July 1982. Seven songs, recorded in southern California, and the tape that crossed a continent by post and produced a record label. Most of the material was rerecorded a year later and the demo versions are rougher, faster and in places better.
Death Metal, Possessed, 1984. The demo whose title gave a genre its name, made by teenagers who were about to record their debut at a converted chicken farm.
Kill Again and the early Slayer rehearsal tapes; Exodus's 1982 demos with Kirk Hammett still in the band; Sepultura's Bestial Devastation material; the early Kreator and Sodom tapes that reached South America and came back changed.
| Release | Band | Year | Format | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No Life til Leather | Metallica | 1982 | Demo | The tape that built the genre's distribution |
| Haunting the Chapel | Slayer | 1984 | EP | The band becomes itself |
| Death Metal | Possessed | 1984 | Demo | Names a genre |
| Armed and Dangerous | Anthrax | 1985 | EP | A band changing shape in real time |
| Brain Death | Nuclear Assault | 1986 | EP | The balance the albums missed |
| The $5.98 E.P. | Metallica | 1987 | EP | A reading list, played loud |
Why the short format suited this music
Three reasons, and they are worth stating because the same logic explains why so many thrash albums are under forty minutes.
First, the physical cost. Downpicking for four minutes is manual labour, and a band recording four songs can play all of them at full commitment in a way that a band recording nine cannot.
Second, the writing. Thrash songs are riff sequences, and riffs run out. A band with twelve good riffs makes a devastating EP or a patchy album, and the honest ones chose the EP.
Third, the economics. An EP cost a fraction of an album to record and press, which for an independent label in 1985 was frequently the difference between releasing something and not.
How to find the demos now
Most of this material has been digitised by collectors and circulates online in variable condition, and a good deal of it has been officially reissued as bonus material on deluxe editions of the albums that followed.
The condition is part of the experience and should not be treated as a problem to be fixed. A fourth generation cassette rip with the top end gone is what everybody outside the band actually heard at the time, and there is a real argument that a cleaned up version of No Life til Leather is less historically truthful than the hissing one.
The full survey of the genre's records is in the essential albums list, and the year in which most of these tapes turned into albums is covered in Thrash Metal Albums of 1984.
The other short releases worth knowing
Beyond the six above, a handful of short records reward the effort of finding them.
Sodom's In the Sign of Evil is nineteen minutes long, barely competent, and one of the three or four most influential extreme metal releases ever made. Sepultura's side of the Bestial Devastation split is four songs by teenagers with nothing. Testament released a set of demos as Legacy that circulated widely before the debut. Exodus's 1982 tapes with Kirk Hammett still in the band are the closest thing there is to a recording of the East Bay before any of it happened.
Each of those is under twenty five minutes and each tells you something about the period that the albums cannot, because the albums were made after somebody had decided what the band was supposed to sound like.
Why the EP nearly died and came back
The format collapsed in the 1990s for a purely commercial reason: compact discs had a fixed manufacturing cost regardless of length, so a label made more money selling seventy minutes than twenty, and the short release stopped making sense on a balance sheet.
What brought it back was streaming and vinyl at the same time, from opposite directions. A streaming release has no manufacturing cost at all, and a small vinyl pressing of four songs is exactly the sort of thing a modern independent can afford. The modern thrash bands use the format the way the 1980s bands did, and for the same reason: four songs at full commitment beats nine with three of them written to fill a side.
Sources and notes
Dates refer to original releases and to the recording dates of the demos where these are documented. Demo dating in this period is frequently approximate.
