Modern Thrash Metal Bands: Who to Hear Now

The genre is in better health than at any point since 1990, and the reason is that it now has two working generations at once: founders still making records that stand comparison with their best, and bands formed after 2000 who have stopped imitating.

The founders, still working

Kreator have not made a weak album since 2001 and are arguably the best band in the genre worldwide. Testament have a late catalogue as strong as the early one and a singer who has improved with age. Exodus, Overkill, Death Angel, Sodom and Destruction are all active and all releasing.

That is unusual. Most genres from the 1980s have founders who tour and do not record, or who record and should not. This one has half a dozen bands whose new albums a serious listener would actually choose over the classics on a given evening.

The second generation

Municipal Waste, twenty years in and still making short, fast, funny records. Havok, who started as a tribute and became a band with its own politics. Warbringer, who grew out of pastiche into something darker. Toxic Holocaust and Evile.

The third

Vektor, whose Terminal Redux in 2016 is the most ambitious record the modern era has produced and who have not followed it up. Enforced from Richmond, who play it completely straight. Angelus Apatrida from Spain, who are now one of the best in Europe. Power Trip, until 2020.

And a hardcore scene full of bands playing downpicked thrash riffs with no interest in the genre label at all, which is where the most interesting new material is currently coming from.

Where to start if you only know the classics

With Kreator, because the case is easiest to make and the records are unambiguously good. Anything from Violent Revolution onwards will do the job.

Then Nightmare Logic, which is the record that proved this music can be about the present. Then Terminal Redux, which is the most ambitious thing anybody has attempted in the form since 1990 and which requires seventy three minutes of your attention.

What is different now

The audience is international in a way it never was. A band from Spain, Brazil or Japan reaches everybody the day it releases, which has quietly changed where the interesting records come from.

The economics are different too. There is no mass market, and there does not need to be: a band with four thousand committed listeners in twenty countries can tour, sell records and continue, which was impossible when distribution meant physical shops.

What has not changed is the form. A thrash song in 2026 is built the same way as a thrash song in 1986, and the bands doing it best are the ones using it to say something rather than to reproduce something.

The record that made that distinction visible is covered in Power Trip, and the wider account is in The Fall and the Revival.

What the founders are actually doing right

It is worth being specific, because a band making good records at forty is genuinely unusual and the reasons are instructive.

They stopped chasing. Kreator's recovery began the moment they abandoned the idea that a record had to sound current, and the same is true of Testament and Exodus. A band with no commercial expectation attached is free to make the record it wants, which is the condition the founding albums were made under.

They also kept the writers. Every one of the bands still worth hearing has its principal songwriter in it: Petrozza, Peterson, Holt, Ellsworth. The reformations that produced nothing are almost all the ones where the writing had left.

And they are better players than they were. Thirty years of doing this produces execution that a twenty two year old cannot manage, and the modern records are audibly tighter than the originals without being colder.

What to be sceptical about

Two things. A founding band's new album being described as their best since 1990 is a claim made about almost every one of them, and it is usually generous by a wide margin.

And a reunion with a rotating cast playing an album from 1987 is a different product from a working band, however good the night is. Both are worth your money and it is worth knowing which one you are buying.

Where the young listeners are

Not, mostly, at heritage thrash shows. The audience for a founding band on a European festival stage is largely the audience that bought the records, plus their children.

The young listeners are at hardcore shows, where a substantial number of current bands are playing downpicked riffs at thrash tempos without ever using the word. That scene has a functioning circuit, cheap tickets, small rooms and an audience in its twenties, and it is where this music is currently being handed on.

Anybody who wants to know what thrash sounds like to somebody who is nineteen should go to one of those, not to a festival.

The one thing to take away

That a genre with two working generations and a third arriving through a side door is not in decline, whatever the absence of a commercial moment suggests. The founding bands are making records worth hearing, the younger ones are making records about the present, and the form is being used rather than preserved.

One practical note for anybody making a start on the current end of this genre. Go to the shows rather than working through the discographies. These bands are built for rooms, the tickets are cheap, and forty minutes in front of a band playing this music properly settles the question of whether you like it considerably faster than any list can.

Sources and notes

Years and labels refer to original releases. Selections are editorial and reflect the position at the time of writing.