The year the genre made some of its best records and lost anyway. Nineteen ninety one is the strangest twelve months in this history: the release schedule is full of albums that stand up four decades later, and by December the audience had gone somewhere else entirely.
Understanding what happened requires holding both facts at once, because the usual account, in which thrash declined because the records got worse, is straightforwardly false for this year.
Sepultura, Arise
The best album released that year and the last one Sepultura made before the restyling. Recorded in Florida with Scott Burns, heavier and more controlled than Beneath the Remains, and the point at which a band from Belo Horizonte was unarguably operating at the top of the genre worldwide.
Overkill, Horrorscope
A band with a new guitar line up making the heaviest record of their career, released into a market that had stopped listening. It contains a cover of an Edgar Winter song and a title track that is as good as anything the genre produced, and it sold a fraction of what the previous album had.
Death, Human
Filed here rather than under death metal deliberately, because it is what happens when thrash's technical ambition is taken to its conclusion by a writer who had outgrown the scene he started. Chuck Schuldiner with a jazz rhythm section, and one of the most influential records of the decade in any genre.
Coroner, Mental Vortex
The Swiss trio at their strangest and most complete, with harmonic writing that has no real precedent in metal and a cover of a Beatles song that ought not to work. Almost nobody bought it.
Metallica, Metallica
The album with the black sleeve, which is a very good record and the most damaging thing that happened to this genre. Bob Rock stripped the arrangements to one central riff per song, put the tempo where a room full of ordinary people can move to it, and sold in excess of thirty million copies.
Every label with a thrash band on its books now had proof of what slowing down was worth, and from 1992 onwards those bands were invited, politely, to consider their direction. It is not the record's fault. It is what the record demonstrated.
The rest of the year
Testament's The Ritual, which is the band's first flinch. Anthrax's Attack of the Killer B's, a stopgap containing the collaboration with Public Enemy. Heathen's Victims of Deception, an ambitious record that arrived into silence. Annihilator's Set the World on Fire. Nuclear Assault's Out of Order. Atheist's Unquestionable Presence.
| Album | Band | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Arise | Sepultura | The year's best, and their last thrash record |
| Horrorscope | Overkill | Their heaviest, into an empty room |
| Human | Death | Technical ambition taken to its end |
| Mental Vortex | Coroner | The strangest record of the year |
| Unquestionable Presence | Atheist | Fusion arrangements at extreme speed |
| Victims of Deception | Heathen | Ambition, arriving too late |
| Metallica | Metallica | Excellent, and a ruinous precedent |
| The Ritual | Testament | The first flinch |
What actually took the audience
Four things at once, and it is worth listing them in order of damage rather than in order of fame.
Death metal took the extreme listeners. By 1991 Florida, Stockholm and Birmingham were producing music that went further than thrash, made by people the same age as the audience, and the teenagers who would have formed a thrash band formed a death metal band instead.
The black album showed the industry a better business. Grunge arrived in the autumn and made everything with a guitar solo in it look ridiculous to a mainstream audience. And the club circuit that carried the underground quietly stopped booking these bills, which took fifteen years to rebuild.
None of that is a judgement on the records. Arise, Horrorscope and Human would have been career albums in 1988. They arrived in the wrong year, which is the only thing wrong with them.
What to take from the year
Start with Arise, which is the complete record. Then Horrorscope, which is the most underrated. Then Human, which is where the genre's most ambitious writer went once thrash was no longer big enough for him.
And listen to the black album with the history in mind rather than against it. It is genuinely excellent, and the argument about it has never really been about the music.
The debuts that started all of this are collected in The Best Thrash Debut Albums, and the wider survey is the essential albums list.
What the bands did next
The year is best understood by what followed it, because almost every band on that list made a decision within eighteen months that defined the rest of their career.
Sepultura slowed down and brought in Brazilian percussion, which is the one restyling of the decade that made a better band. Testament went downtuned and lost their lead guitarist. Anthrax changed singer. Kreator went industrial and gothic and spent five years in the wilderness. Overkill simply carried on, released an album every eighteen months to steadily smaller crowds, and changed nothing at all.
Looking back, the bands who came out of the decade best are almost exactly the bands who had least to lose in 1991. The ones with major label contracts and expectations attached took the terms they were offered. The ones playing to four hundred people had nothing to renegotiate and kept making the same music, and thirty years later they are the ones with their reputations intact.
The records nobody bought
Two more from the year deserve rescuing, because both are excellent and both vanished without trace.
Demolition Hammer's Necrology is the heaviest American thrash record of the period and effectively the bridge into death metal. And Morbid Saint's Spectrum of Death, recorded in 1988 and finally released around this time, circulated for years as a tape and is now cited constantly by musicians who spent a decade trying to find a copy.
Sources and notes
Release dates refer to original pressings. Sales figures for the 1991 Metallica album are widely reported worldwide totals and should be read as an order of magnitude.
