Every argument about the fastest thrash song ever recorded founders on the same problem, which is that nobody agrees what is being measured. Two people can time the same song and come back with numbers a hundred apart, both correctly, because they counted different things. Before any list is worth anything, the units have to be settled.
Three different numbers, all called speed
The first is the pulse: the tempo you would tap your foot to, in beats per minute. On a fast thrash song that number typically sits somewhere between 180 and 260.
The second is the snare rate, which is what a listener actually experiences as speed. In the skank beat the snare lands on the upbeat, so it hits twice per beat, which means a song at 240 beats per minute is delivering eight snare strokes a second. That is the number people are reaching for when they say a song is impossibly fast, and it is double the tempo.
The third is the picking rate, which is different again. A riff of sixteenth notes at 200 beats per minute requires thirteen picked notes a second, every one of them a downstroke, and that is the number that ends guitarists' forearms.
So a single song can honestly be described as 220, 440 or 900, depending on which of those you are counting, and most of the figures traded online do not say. Add the fact that these records were played to no click and drift by several beats per minute inside a song, and a tempo quoted to one decimal place is a fiction.
A song at 240 beats per minute is delivering eight snare strokes a second.
Hardcore got there first
One correction before any of the candidates, because it undermines the whole premise of the competition. Thrash did not invent playing fast and was not, in the early 1980s, the fastest music being made in America. Hardcore punk was already there and had been since about 1980.
Bad Brains were playing at tempos no metal band had attempted while Metallica were still learning Diamond Head covers. Discharge in England had built an entire style on it by 1982. By the middle of the decade, Cryptic Slaughter and D.R.I. were operating comfortably beyond anything on the list below, on cheaper equipment and with none of the discussion.
What thrash added was not velocity. It was velocity with the riff intact: the same tempos, but with the notes articulated, the arrangement holding, and the whole band turning on a written beat rather than simply going as hard as possible until the song stopped. That is the harder problem and it is why the numbers plateau where they do.
The credible candidates
What follows is not a ranking, because a ranking would require a precision nobody has. It is the list of records that were genuinely at the edge of what was being played in the 1980s, with approximate peak tempos.
| Band | Song | From | Roughly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Slayer | Necrophobic | Reign In Blood (1986) | Around 250 |
| Dark Angel | The Burning Of Sodom | Darkness Descends (1986) | Around 250 |
| Kreator | Pleasure To Kill | Pleasure To Kill (1986) | Around 230 |
| Sodom | Sodomy And Lust | Persecution Mania (1987) | Around 230 |
| Sepultura | Antichrist | Morbid Visions (1986) | Around 240 |
| Possessed | Fallen Angel | Seven Churches (1985) | Around 230 |
| Exodus | Strike Of The Beast | Bonded By Blood (1985) | Around 220 |
| Metallica | Dyers Eve | ...And Justice For All (1988) | Around 210 |
Two things are obvious from that table. Almost everything at the top is from 1986, and the ceiling is remarkably consistent: nobody in that era got meaningfully past 260, on either continent, whatever they were attempting.
Why 1986 and why 260
The year is easy. 1986 is the point at which the founding bands had four years of playing behind them, had heard each other's records, and were competing directly on exactly this. Speed was the scoreboard, and everybody looked at it.
The ceiling is more interesting, and it is physical. At around 250 beats per minute a drummer playing a skank beat is putting eight snare strokes a second through one hand and one stick, and a guitarist downpicking sixteenths is at the point where the forearm simply stops. Both of those are the limit of what a person can sustain for four minutes without the mechanics changing.
Which is precisely what happened next. To go faster the drummer had to switch to a blast beat, alternating hands and feet rather than driving one limb, and the guitarist had to switch to tremolo picking, alternating rather than downpicking. Both of those changes are, definitionally, the move out of thrash and into death metal and grindcore. The genre did not decline to go faster. It reached the fastest a person can play while still playing thrash, and the next increment required becoming something else.
The fastest album is easier to name
Single songs are contested. Albums are not. Reign In Blood runs ten songs in under twenty nine minutes and holds an average tempo no other full length of the era approaches, and it does it without the kind of slow section every one of its contemporaries used to let the listener recover.
That sustained average is a harder achievement than any individual peak, because a band can push one song beyond what it can hold and everybody has. Doing it for twenty nine consecutive minutes is a different kind of feat, and it is the real reason that record ended the argument in 1986 rather than merely winning it.
Live, everything is faster
Any figure taken from a studio album understates what these songs were actually played at. Bands speed up in front of an audience, always have, and thrash bands speed up more than most because the adrenaline goes into the same limb doing the counting.
Bootlegs and official live records from the period routinely run five to fifteen per cent above the studio tempo, which puts several of the songs in the table above beyond 270 on a good night and turns the studio version into the conservative reading. It also explains a common complaint from the era, that the records sounded tame to anybody who had seen the band first.
The other consequence is less flattering. Past a certain point the acceleration stops being exciting and starts costing the riff: notes get skipped, the palm mute loosens, and the arrangement blurs into noise. Every band of the period has a live recording where that line is visibly crossed, and it is the best possible argument that the studio ceiling was a musical judgement rather than a physical failure.
What the revival did with the number
The bands who rebuilt thrash in the 2000s inherited the ceiling and mostly respected it. Municipal Waste, Toxic Holocaust and their contemporaries operate in the same 200 to 250 band, with better recording and considerably better drum editing, and the honest observation is that a modern record at 240 does not feel as fast as a 1986 record at 240.
The reason is the one that runs through all of this. A modern tempo is exact, so the listener stops hearing effort in it, and effort is most of what speed communicates. A drummer who is very slightly ahead of himself going into the fast section is telling you something a grid cannot.
How to check one yourself
It takes a minute and it is worth doing before believing anybody, including this article. Play the fast section, tap along with the kick drum rather than the snare, count your taps for fifteen seconds and multiply by four. That gives the pulse. Double it for the snare rate. Do it three times across the same song and you will get three different answers, which is the point: the number is a range, not a value.
What that exercise really demonstrates is that speed was never the achievement on its own. Anybody can play fast badly. The records above are remembered because they stayed together at the edge, which is a different thing entirely and the subject of the chapter above. At the other end of the tape measure: The Longest Thrash Metal Songs.
