The received idea about thrash is that it is fast and short. Half of that is right. The genre produced some of the longest songs in heavy music, routinely ran past seven minutes on its most celebrated albums, and spent the second half of the 1980s in an argument with itself about whether that was ambition or self indulgence.
The argument was never settled and both sides made great records out of it, which is the most interesting thing about the whole question.
Why a fast genre wrote long songs
It follows from the structure. A thrash song is not built around a chorus; it is a sequence of distinct riffs arranged like paragraphs, each earning its place and handing over to the next. Once a band has written six good riffs and refuses to repeat any of them more than it must, the song is seven minutes long whether anybody planned it or not.
The tempo makes it worse, or better, depending on your view. At two hundred beats per minute a great deal of material goes past in a short time, so a band that wants a song to feel substantial has to write more of it. A five minute thrash song contains roughly as much music as a nine minute song at a rock tempo, and the bands knew it.
The instrumental tradition
The longest pieces are frequently the ones with nobody singing, and that is not a coincidence. An instrumental has no verse structure to obey and no singer to accommodate, so it becomes the place where a thrash band put everything it could not fit into a song.
Metallica built the tradition. The Call Of Ktulu closes Ride The Lightning in 1984 at nearly nine minutes, Orion sits at the heart of Master Of Puppets in 1986, and To Live Is To Die runs to nine minutes and forty eight seconds on ...And Justice For All in 1988. All three are largely Cliff Burton's musical thinking, the last one assembled from material he had left behind, and together they are the strongest argument the genre ever made for its own seriousness.
Death Angel went further and did it earlier, with less. The title track of The Ultra-Violence, recorded in Santa Rosa across three days in June 1986 by five cousins whose drummer was fourteen, is a ten and a half minute instrumental with a classical section running through its middle. It is the most ambitious thing anybody in the Bay Area attempted, and it was made for almost no money by teenagers.
| Band | Song | Year | Length | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Death Angel | The Ultra-Violence | 1987 | Over 10 minutes | Instrumental, with a classical passage |
| Metallica | To Live Is To Die | 1988 | Around 9:48 | Instrumental, built from Cliff Burton's material |
| Metallica | ...And Justice For All | 1988 | Around 9:44 | The title track, and the genre's high water mark for structure |
| Metallica | The Call Of Ktulu | 1984 | Around 8:52 | Instrumental, the tradition's starting point |
| Metallica | Master Of Puppets | 1986 | Around 8:35 | Everything the genre could do, in one song |
| Metallica | Orion | 1986 | Around 8:27 | Instrumental, with a written bass passage |
| Metallica | One | 1988 | Around 7:24 | Trumbo, and the genre's only real hit at that length |
| Slayer | Seasons In The Abyss | 1990 | Around 6:38 | Long, for them, and deliberately so |
At two hundred beats per minute a great deal of music goes past in very little time, so a band that wants a song to feel substantial has to write more of it.
The album that took it too far, or did not
...And Justice For All is where the argument comes to a head. Nine songs, over an hour, an average track length that no thrash record before it had approached, and arrangements of a complexity that the genre had not previously attempted. The title track alone changes shape more times than most bands manage on a side.
Two readings have coexisted for nearly forty years and both are defensible. The first is that this is the genre reaching its intellectual peak: written, structural music that happens to be played at speed, and the moment thrash proved it could carry weight. The second is that it is a band losing its editor, replacing riffs with more riffs, and mistaking length for depth.
What is not in question is the effect on everybody else. After 1988 a great many thrash bands wrote longer, more complicated songs, and most of them could not do it. The ability to sustain nine minutes without a listener checking the time is rarer than the ability to write a good riff, and the imitation phase produced a large number of records that are exhausting for reasons their makers did not intend.
What a long thrash song is actually made of
It is worth taking one apart, because the length is not padding and the mechanism is specific. A nine minute thrash song is almost never one idea extended. It is six or seven separate ideas placed in an order, with the transitions written rather than improvised, and the whole band turning on a single beat between them.
The standard shape runs: a clean or mid tempo opening, an acceleration into the main riff, a verse and a return, a middle section that abandons the material entirely for something slower and heavier, a solo built over a third riff nobody has heard yet, and a final section that either climbs back to the opening or refuses to. Take out any one of those and the song is five minutes long and worse.
That is also why so few bands managed it. Writing six good riffs is a matter of time. Ordering them so that each arrival feels earned, and getting five people to change gear together at speed without a click, is arrangement, and arrangement was the one skill the genre's second rank consistently lacked.
The counter argument, in twenty nine minutes
The best rebuttal was made two years before the question was asked. Slayer wrote short. Reign In Blood is ten songs in under twenty nine minutes and the longest thing on it is under five, and every one of those songs stops at the exact point it has finished saying something.
That is a discipline, not a limitation, and it is considerably harder than it looks. A band that keeps going has somewhere to hide; a band that stops at three minutes has to have made the case by then. Slayer did eventually write longer, and Seasons In The Abyss in 1990 is their concession to the argument, but the position they held through the 1980s is the one that has aged best.
The side of vinyl was watching
There is a physical constraint under all of this that nobody discusses. A side of an LP holds roughly twenty two minutes at a healthy cutting level, and the further in towards the label a groove runs the worse it sounds. Put a nine minute song on a record and you have spent nearly half a side on it.
That is why the long pieces sit where they do in the running orders. Orion and To Live Is To Die both close a side, because a long track is easiest to accommodate at the end, and because a listener who has to get up and turn the record over is a listener the band has already finished with. A band writing a nine minute song in 1988 was implicitly deciding to cut two shorter ones, and the arrival of the compact disc, which removed the limit entirely, is a large part of why records got longer and worse in the years immediately afterwards.
Where the length went afterwards
The taste for long songs left thrash and moved next door. Technical thrash carried it furthest, and the bands who wanted to keep writing at that scale largely stopped being thrash bands to do it: the progressive end of the genre in the 1990s, and later the whole of progressive metal, is built on exactly the ambitions ...And Justice For All licensed.
Meanwhile the surviving thrash bands got shorter again, and the 2000s revival is built almost entirely on songs of three or four minutes. That is not a failure of ambition. It is a recognition that this music was designed to make a room move, and a room stops moving at about the six minute mark no matter how good the riff is.
Which returns the whole question to what the songs were for in the first place, and that runs through the chapter this belongs to. The other measurement everybody argues about, and the one that cannot actually be measured at all, is The Heaviest Thrash Metal Songs Ever Recorded.
