The Essential Thrash Metal Albums

Thirty records, organised by what they do rather than by where they would finish in a race. A ranked list of thrash albums is a party game; a list organised by function is something you can actually use, because it tells you which record to reach for depending on what you are missing.

Every entry below is a record that changed what was possible, or that executes the form better than anything around it. Two are usually overrated and are named as such. Two get skipped by almost everybody and should not be. And the whole thing rests on one assumption, which is that thrash metal is a craft with criteria rather than a mood, so a record can be judged on whether it does the job well.

What makes a thrash album work

Four criteria, applied consistently, and they explain every inclusion and every omission below.

The first is riff economy. A great thrash album wastes no bars. Every section earns its place, and the moment a band starts repeating a part because the song needs to be longer, the record has begun to slip. This is why so many of the best albums here are short.

The second is legibility. A music built from sequences of fast riffs has to be recorded so that the riffs can be followed, which means dry, close and separated. A wet mix smears the attack of one chord into the tail of the last and the whole architecture disappears. The German records are the exception that proves it: they abandon legibility deliberately and get mass instead.

The third is that the rhythm section has to be doing something rather than keeping time. The great thrash drummers are writing parts, not holding a pattern, and the difference between a good album here and a great one is almost always audible in the kick drum.

The fourth is that the record has to mean something. The founding albums are about the arms race, addiction, institutions and war, and the ones that have aged worst are the ones with nothing behind the noise. Sincerity is not a bonus in this genre, it is load bearing.

The ones that set the template

Metallica, Kill 'Em All, 1983, Megaforce. Not the best record here and comfortably the most consequential. Recorded on a mortgaged house after every label in America had passed, it is the first album on which the whole vocabulary is present at once: the downpicked rhythm, the hardcore tempo, the riff sequence arrangement, the shouted vocal. Rough, thin and completely alive.

Slayer, Show No Mercy, 1983, Metal Blade. The other founding document, made on a respiratory therapist's wages, and the one that established the southern Californian dialect: no resolution, no half time relief, solos that dive rather than sing.

Slayer, Haunting the Chapel, 1984, Metal Blade. Three songs, and the point at which the band stops sounding like a fast heavy metal group and starts sounding like Slayer. If you only have room for one early Slayer release, this EP is a stronger argument than the album that preceded it.

Exodus, Bonded by Blood, 1985, Torrid. Recorded in 1984 and held for a year while the label fell apart, which cost the band its place in history and cost nobody the record. Paul Baloff shouting, Gary Holt and Rick Hunolt writing riffs with no wasted bars, and the least diluted example of the form anybody has managed.

1986, the peak

Six records from one year, and any of them would be the high point of a normal decade.

Metallica, Master of Puppets, Elektra. Eight songs, fifty four minutes, an instrumental, an acoustic opening, and arrangement on a scale no heavy band had attempted at that tempo. It is the record that proved thrash could be ambitious without slowing down, and it is the last one Cliff Burton played on.

Slayer, Reign in Blood, Def Jam. Rick Rubin removed the reverb, the double tracking and anything else standing between the listener and the event, and the result is ten songs in under twenty nine minutes that ended the argument about speed for a decade. Columbia refused to distribute it.

Kreator, Pleasure to Kill, Noise. The German answer, cut at Musiclab in Berlin, and the exact opposite production philosophy: everything left in, guitars fused into one mass, drums barely holding on. Death metal came out of this record.

Megadeth, Peace Sells... but Who's Buying?, Capitol. The album on which Mustaine's writing becomes coherent: chromatic, two guitar, technically ahead of everybody, with a narrator who has an actual argument about the arms trade rather than a pose.

Destruction, Eternal Devastation, Steamhammer. The most musical of the German records, with Mike Sifringer writing riffs that nobody else in Europe could have written.

Dark Angel, Darkness Descends, Combat. Faster than Reign in Blood and less famous for it, with Gene Hoglan's first great recorded performance. If a listener wants to know what the outer limit of 1986 sounded like, this is it.

The ones that widened it

Anthrax, Among the Living, 1987, Island and Megaforce. Produced by Eddie Kramer, dedicated to Cliff Burton, and the record that proved this music could bounce, could have a real melodic singer, and could be funny without being trivial.

Testament, The Legacy, 1987, Megaforce and Atlantic. A debut of alarming completeness from a band whose average age was around twenty two, and the arrival of Alex Skolnick's lead playing, which brought a harmonic vocabulary the genre had not previously had.

Voivod, Killing Technology, 1987, Noise. Four men from a paper mill town in Quebec, a guitarist writing with chord shapes rock musicians did not use, and an entire imagined science fiction universe drawn by the drummer. There is nothing else like it.

Sodom, Persecution Mania, 1987, Steamhammer. The record on which a noise band became a functioning one, with Frank Blackfire arriving on guitar and Harris Johns keeping the menace intact.

Sabbat, History of a Time to Come, 1988, Noise. Nottingham, and Martin Walkyier writing about paganism and English history with a literacy the genre has almost never matched. The most underrated record on this list.

Sepultura, Beneath the Remains, 1989, Roadrunner. Recorded in Rio with Scott Burns 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. The moment the map stopped being American.

Testament, Practice What You Preach, 1989, Megaforce and Atlantic. The band's best balanced album, where the aggression and the songwriting arrive at the same time.

Artillery, By Inheritance, 1990, Roadrunner. Denmark, with eastern scales woven into the riffs, and one of the two or three most unjustly ignored albums the genre produced.

The technical high water marks

Coroner, No More Color, 1989, Noise. Three Swiss musicians who had been Celtic Frost's road crew, treating thrash as a compositional problem rather than as an attack. Cold, precise and genuinely intelligent.

Megadeth, Rust in Peace, 1990, Capitol. With Marty Friedman and Nick Menza in place, the band finally had players equal to the writing, and the result is the hardest record in the genre to play and the benchmark the technical wing is still measured against.

Slayer, Seasons in the Abyss, 1990, Def American. The band's most complete album, balancing the speed of Reign in Blood against the weight of South of Heaven, and the last great record of the golden years.

Death, Human, 1991, Relativity. Filed here rather than under death metal deliberately, because it is what happens when thrash's technical ambition is taken to its logical end by a writer who had outgrown the scene he started.

Overkill, Horrorscope, 1991, Megaforce and Atlantic. Released into the worst possible year and one of the finest things New Jersey ever produced.

The crossover records

S.O.D., Speak English or Die, 1985, Megaforce. Recorded in three days by four men who were not a band, and the blueprint for everything with a breakdown in it. The lyrics have been argued about for forty years and the argument has not been settled here or anywhere.

D.R.I., Crossover, 1987, Metal Blade. The record that named the style, and a demonstration of both what the trade gains and what it costs.

Suicidal Tendencies, Join the Army, 1987, Caroline. The transitional record, hardcore turning into thrash in real time, and more interesting than either the debut or the later albums.

The modern ones that earn a place

Municipal Waste, Hazardous Mutation, 2005, Earache. Twenty six minutes, no ambition beyond being extremely good at being extremely fast, and the record that made the revival fun rather than reverent.

Vektor, Terminal Redux, 2016, Earache. A seventy three minute science fiction concept album with a choir on it, made by a band who took Voivod as a starting point rather than as a destination. It has no business working and it works completely.

Kreator, Gods of Violence, 2017, Nuclear Blast. Proof that a band can be thirty five years into a career and make a record that stands next to its best, which nobody else on this list has quite managed.

Power Trip, Nightmare Logic, 2017, Southern Lord. Thirty two minutes from Dallas that got reviewed by publications which do not acknowledge metal exists, because the band were using the form to say something current rather than to salute 1986.

Two that are overrated

Both of these are good records and both are habitually placed higher than they deserve, which is a different complaint from saying they are bad.

...And Justice for All, Metallica, 1988. The writing is extraordinary and the record is very hard to actually listen to. The bass is inaudible, the drums are dry to the point of brittleness, and the songs run past the point where the ideas do. It is admired more than it is played, and the people who tell you it is Metallica's best are usually describing the ambition rather than the experience.

Roots, Sepultura, 1996. Historically important, genuinely brave, and half of it is a very good record. The other half is a band being pushed towards a market that was about to disappear, and the album has been protected by its own reputation for so long that the unevenness rarely gets mentioned.

Two that get skipped

Forbidden Evil, Forbidden, 1988. Two guitarists who could genuinely play, a singer with range, and songwriting sharper than most of what the East Bay's second wave managed. It arrived a year late into a crowded field and disappeared, and it is better than several albums that did not.

Terrible Certainty, Kreator, 1987. Sits between two more famous German records and is arguably stronger than either, with the band's first genuinely controlled performances and Mille Petrozza's writing beginning to acquire a subject rather than a mood.

How to actually listen to these

One piece of practical advice, because the format matters more with this music than with almost any other.

These records were mixed to be heard loud, on speakers, with the guitars separated left and right, and a great deal of what makes them work is the stereo image: two guitars playing different parts in different ears, which collapses into mud on a phone speaker and disappears entirely in a compressed stream played quietly. A thrash album at low volume is a rumour of itself.

Second, listen to sides. Almost everything here was sequenced for vinyl, in two halves of around twenty minutes each, with a deliberate change of pace at the start of the second. Playing a shuffled selection of tracks from six of these albums will teach you nothing except that they are fast.

And if the mechanics of why any of it works are what interest you, the technical account is here: What Thrash Metal Actually Is.

What is deliberately not here

Three categories are missing on purpose and it is worth saying why, because their absence is usually the first complaint.

No live albums. Thrash is a studio form in the sense that the arrangements are precise and the tempos are unforgiving, and almost every live record in the genre is a slightly worse version of something you can already own. There are honourable exceptions and none of them would displace a studio album on this list.

No demos. The tape trading era produced recordings that matter enormously to the history and that nobody should be sent to as a first listen. A fourth generation cassette of a 1982 rehearsal is a document, not an album.

And nothing from the restyling years between 1993 and 1999, with the exception of nothing at all. That is not spite. It is simply that the records made in that period by these bands were made under commercial pressure to sound like something else, and a list of essential thrash albums cannot in good conscience include albums whose own makers describe them as departures.

What that leaves is a list weighted heavily towards eight years in the 1980s, which is an accurate description of the genre rather than a failure of curiosity. The modern entries are here because they earn it on the same criteria, not to balance the decades.

What the list is really measuring

A closing admission. Thirty records chosen on four criteria still encodes a set of assumptions, and it is worth naming them.

It assumes that a record is judged as a whole rather than by its best track, which favours short albums and penalises long ones with a masterpiece on side two. It assumes that execution matters as much as invention, which favours 1986 over 1983. And it assumes that a record should have something behind it, which is a criterion no purely formal analysis would include.

Change any of those and the list moves. State them, and at least the argument is about something. That is the whole case for writing the criteria down before the entries rather than after them.

Sources and notes

Labels and years refer to original pressings; several of these records have been reissued repeatedly on other labels. The Bonded by Blood recording date is 1984 and the release date 1985. Judgements about which records are overrated or skipped are editorial and are meant to be argued with.