Thrash Metal Albums of 1984

The year the floodgate opened. In 1983 there were two thrash albums in the world. By the end of 1984 there were a dozen, on two continents, and the genre had stopped being a rumour about a few bands in California.

It is also the year the parts finally separated: the American bands went one way, the German bands went another, and a Swede recording alone in a garage went somewhere neither of them had thought of.

Metallica, Ride the Lightning

Recorded at Sweet Silence in Copenhagen with Flemming Rasmussen, and the album on which the band's ambition arrives. There is an acoustic introduction, an instrumental, a song about capital punishment and one about nuclear annihilation, and the whole thing is still fast. Elektra bought the band on the strength of it before the year was out.

Slayer, Haunting the Chapel

Three songs, and the most important short release the genre produced. This is where Slayer stopped being a fast heavy metal band and became the thing everybody afterwards had to answer.

Anthrax, Fistful of Metal

The New York debut, with a different singer from the one everybody remembers, a cover of a Alice Cooper song and a track called "Metal Thrashing Mad" that put a word into circulation. Rough, and historically decisive out of all proportion to its quality.

Bathory, Bathory

Filed here because it came out in 1984 and because everything it did came out of the same records the thrash bands were using. Quorthon working almost alone in Stockholm, with a production so thin and cold that it became a genre in itself. Norway took more from this than from anything American.

Hellhammer, Apocalyptic Raids

Switzerland, and the record that skipped thrash entirely. Slower, uglier and more primitive than anything else being made, it was derided at the time and is now understood as a founding document of both death and black metal. Tom Warrior wound the band up within months and started Celtic Frost.

Exciter, Violence and Force

Canada, and a band who had been making this music since before most of the Americans. Faster and more assured than their debut, and still difficult to file between speed metal and thrash, which is where they have always sat.

Overkill, Feel the Fire

New Jersey's arrival, released at the end of the year, and the beginning of a career that has now run for four decades without a bad record in it. Bobby Blitz's voice is already fully formed.

What 1984 settled

Three things, and each of them shaped the rest of the decade.

The first is that the American and German traditions were now visibly separate. Destruction's Sentence of Death arrived in November, working from Venom and Motorhead rather than from Diamond Head, and the difference in the riff vocabulary is audible in the opening bar.

The second is that the majors were now watching. Elektra took Metallica in the autumn, which set a template for the next four years: an independent does the expensive work, and a major arrives with a cheque once the risk has been taken.

The third, and least noticed at the time, is that the extreme end had already branched. Hellhammer and Bathory in the same twelve months are not making thrash and are not trying to, and everything that would take the audience away from thrash in 1991 is audibly present in 1984.

What to play from it

If you want one record from the year, take Ride the Lightning, which is the best album released and also the most representative of where the genre was heading. If you want the year's most influential twelve minutes, take Haunting the Chapel. And if you want to hear the future arriving early, take Bathory and Apocalyptic Raids back to back and note that both were dismissed at the time.

The following year is covered in Thrash Metal Albums of 1985, and the wider survey of the genre's records is in the essential albums list.

What else was happening that year

The albums are only part of it, and the surrounding events explain why 1984 felt like a turning point to anybody who was there.

Megaforce, run out of a New Jersey flea market stall, was now a functioning label with a catalogue. Metal Blade had released three volumes of its compilation series and signed Slayer. Noise Records in West Berlin was signing the German bands. The infrastructure that had been improvised in 1982 was, by the end of 1984, an actual industry, albeit a very small and badly capitalised one.

The tape network was at its peak. Demos were moving between California, New Jersey, the Ruhr, Ontario, Stockholm and Sao Paulo, and the lag between a band recording something and a stranger on another continent hearing it had dropped to a few weeks.

And the American parents' groups were starting to pay attention, which within a year would produce a Senate hearing and a sticker on record sleeves that turned out to be the best advertising the genre ever got.

The bands who formed in 1984

The other way to read the year is by what started rather than by what came out, and the list is remarkable.

Kreator's first album was recorded in 1985 but the band was assembling through 1984. Death Angel were rehearsing in Daly City with a drummer who was not yet fifteen. Testament existed as Legacy. Sepultura formed in Belo Horizonte. Sarcofago formed in the same city. Nuclear Assault started after Dan Lilker left Anthrax.

Every one of those bands would release something significant within three years, which is the clearest possible measure of what 1984 did: it turned a handful of records into a signal that reached teenagers on four continents, and a great many of them picked up a guitar in response.

Sources and notes

Release dates refer to original pressings and are approximate for several of the European independents, whose distribution dates varied by country.