The usual advice is to start with the famous ones, and the usual advice is wrong, because the famous ones are famous for reasons that have very little to do with whether they are a good first listen.
What follows is a route in: five records in an order that builds, what each one is for, and the two things to get right about how you play them, because the format matters more with this music than with almost anything else.
Start here: Master of Puppets
Not because it is the best, though it is close, but because it is the most hospitable. There are acoustic passages, there is an instrumental, the songs have shapes you can follow on a first hearing, and the production is clear enough that you can hear what each instrument is doing.
It also gives you the vocabulary. Once you have heard this record, every other album on this list is legible: you know what a downpicked riff sounds like, what a half time section does to a song, and why the drumming feels different from rock drumming.
Then: Reign in Blood
Second, and second is important. Played first it is likely to be overwhelming; played after Metallica it lands as an argument rather than as noise.
It is twenty nine minutes long, which means the commitment is one bus journey. There is no filler, no ballad and no let up. If you do not like this you will probably not like the extreme end of the genre, and that is genuinely useful information to acquire in half an hour.
Then: Peace Sells... but Who's Buying?
Third, because it does something the first two do not: it is funny, it is sarcastic, and there is a narrator with a personality. Megadeth's writing has more going on in it than Metallica's and less brutal than Slayer's, and the album is where a new listener discovers that this genre has jokes in it.
It is also the best introduction to what the guitars are doing, because the two parts are separated and playing different things, which is much harder to hear on a denser record.
Then: Bonded by Blood
Fourth, and the first record on this list that most people have not heard of, which is the point. Everything above is a major label album by a band you already knew existed. This is what the underground actually sounded like: recorded in 1984, released in 1985 after the label collapsed, and more purely violent than anything the famous bands made.
If the first three worked and this one lands as well, you are no longer a beginner and the rest of the genre is open to you.
Then: Beneath the Remains
Fifth, and the one that shows you the map is bigger than America. Recorded in Rio de Janeiro in 1989 by four Brazilians in their early twenties working on overnight studio time, and it stands comparison with anything above it.
It is also the natural bridge to death metal if that is where your taste is heading, because the band were about a year away from making music that is not really thrash any more.
| Order | Album | Band | Year | What it teaches you |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Master of Puppets | Metallica | 1986 | The vocabulary, gently |
| 2 | Reign in Blood | Slayer | 1986 | What extreme actually means |
| 3 | Peace Sells... | Megadeth | 1986 | Two guitars, and a sense of humour |
| 4 | Bonded by Blood | Exodus | 1985 | What the underground sounded like |
| 5 | Beneath the Remains | Sepultura | 1989 | That the map is bigger than America |
Two things to get right
Play it loud, on speakers or proper headphones. These records were mixed with the two guitars separated hard left and right, and a great deal of what makes them work is that stereo image. On a phone speaker the parts collapse into a single grey noise and the music genuinely does not make sense. This is not audiophile fussiness; it is the difference between hearing an arrangement and hearing a texture.
And play whole sides. Almost everything here was sequenced for vinyl, in two halves of around twenty minutes with a deliberate change of pace at the start of the second. A shuffled playlist of thrash tracks will teach you that the music is fast and nothing else.
What to avoid at the start
Three traps, all of them easy to fall into.
Do not start with a compilation or a greatest hits. These albums are sequenced, and a compilation strips exactly the thing that makes them work.
Do not start with a live album. Live thrash is thrilling in a room and frequently muddy on a recording, and a first encounter with a band should be the version they meant.
And do not start with the technical wing. Coroner, Voivod, Watchtower and Atheist are wonderful and they assume you already know what a normal thrash song sounds like. Come back to them once you do, and they will be twice as rewarding.
Where to go next
If the speed was the thing, go to Dark Angel, Kreator and Demolition Hammer. If the melody was the thing, go to Testament and Heathen. If the writing was the thing, go to Coroner, Voivod and Rust in Peace. If the shortness and the fun were the thing, go to Municipal Waste and D.R.I.
And if none of it worked, that is a real answer too. This is a demanding music with a physical entry requirement for the listener as well as the player, and it is not a moral failing to bounce off it.
The wider list of thirty records, organised by what each one does, is in the essential albums list, and the best place to look once the four famous bands are exhausted is The Best Thrash Albums Not by the Big Four.
What to expect the first time
Honesty helps here, because a lot of people bounce off this music for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they would eventually love it.
The first hearing of a thrash album is usually a wall. The tempo is high enough that individual riffs do not register, the vocal is not carrying a melody you can hold on to, and there is no chorus to orient yourself by. That is normal, and it passes. What happens on the third or fourth listen is that the riffs separate out and the arrangement becomes visible, and at that point the music stops being a texture and starts being a structure.
So give each record three plays before deciding. That is roughly two hours across the five albums above, which is not much to ask of a genre that has been going for forty years.
The other thing nobody mentions
Read the lyrics. Not because they are poetry, but because the received idea of what this music is about is almost entirely wrong, and finding that out early changes how the records sound.
The sleeves suggest Satan and gore. The lyric sheets are about nuclear proliferation, heroin, the arms trade, mental hospitals, capital punishment, chemical defoliants and the treatment of Native Americans. Thrash is the most journalistic genre heavy music has produced, and a listener who knows that is hearing a different record from one who assumes it is all horror films.
Sources and notes
Years refer to original pressings. Recommendations are editorial.
