Tier lists are a slightly ridiculous format and they have one genuine virtue: they force you to say where the cliffs are. A ranked list implies a smooth gradient from best to worst, and that is not how this catalogue is shaped. There are four or five records at the top that nothing else touches, then a large plateau, then a drop.
What follows is that shape, with the criteria stated, and an argument about why the tiers fall where they do.
The criteria
Riff economy: no wasted bars. Legibility: an arrangement you can follow at speed. A rhythm section writing rather than keeping time. And something behind the noise worth saying. Speed is not a criterion and neither is sales.
S tier: the untouchable four
Reign in Blood, Master of Puppets, Rust in Peace, Bonded by Blood. Each does the whole job without a weak passage, and each has survived forty years of people trying to displace it. Three of them are famous and the fourth outsold none of them, which is the point.
A tier: the ones that would top any other genre
Pleasure to Kill, Beneath the Remains, Ride the Lightning, Seasons in the Abyss, Darkness Descends, The New Order, Among the Living, Peace Sells... but Who's Buying?, No More Color, Nothingface, Agent Orange, The Years of Decay.
Twelve records, any of which could be argued into the tier above on a given afternoon. What separates them from S tier is usually one passage, one production decision or one song that does not earn its place.
B tier: the ones worth owning
Kill 'Em All, Show No Mercy, The Legacy, The Ultra-Violence, Eternal Nightmare, Forbidden Evil, By Inheritance, Alice in Hell, Horrorscope, Game Over, Persecution Mania, Eternal Devastation, Terminal Redux, Nightmare Logic, History of a Time to Come.
A large and honourable plateau. Every one of these is a record somebody's favourite band never bettered.
C tier: the interesting failures
...And Justice for All belongs here and the placement is the most contentious thing in this article. The writing is extraordinary and the record is punishing to listen to: no audible bass, brittle drums, and songs that outlast their ideas. It is admired far more than it is played.
Alongside it: The Ritual, Low, Practice What You Preach for some listeners, and half a dozen late eighties records where the budget rose and the temperature dropped.
D tier: the restyling
Risk, Diabolus in Musica, Outcast, Demonic. Records made between 1993 and 1999 under commercial pressure to sound like something else, most of which the bands themselves now decline to defend. Naming them is not cruelty; the musicians got there first.
| Tier | What is in it | How many |
|---|---|---|
| S | No weak passage, undisplaced in forty years | 4 |
| A | Would top most genres, one flaw each | 12 |
| B | Somebody's favourite band's best record | 15 plus |
| C | Ambitious and hard to love | A handful |
| D | The restyling years | Four, named |
Why the tiers are not smooth
Because the genre's history is not smooth. Everything in S and most of A comes from a fifty five month window between March 1986 and October 1990, when four conditions held simultaneously: bands three or four years into their lives, real competition, budgets that were adequate without being interfering, and a set of technical questions nobody had answered yet.
When those conditions expired the ceiling dropped, and it dropped sharply rather than gradually. That is why a tier list of this catalogue has a cliff in it where a list of, say, soul records would have a slope.
How to argue with the placements
State your criteria first. If you rank by influence, Kill 'Em All goes to S and stays there. If you rank by technical achievement, ...And Justice for All climbs two tiers and Bonded by Blood drops one. If you rank by how much you actually reach for the record, the list above is roughly what you get.
The other honest move is to admit that tier four and five in any list like this are mostly about disappointment rather than quality, and disappointment is a function of expectation. Nobody would care that Risk is a mediocre rock album if it had been made by a band nobody had heard of.
The albums that produced most of that disappointment have a piece to themselves, and the production question that decides several of these placements is in Thrash Production: The Best and Worst Sounding Albums. The wider survey is the essential albums list.
The records that move between tiers
Half a dozen albums refuse to sit still, and the reasons they move are more interesting than their final placement.
Kill 'Em All moves on criteria. Judged by influence it is untouchable; judged by whether you reach for it, it sits behind four or five records the same band made later. Hell Awaits moves on production taste: if you like the murk it is A tier, and if you do not it is B. Seven Churches moves on genre definition, because half the people who love it do not think it is thrash.
Roots moves on everything. Historically important, genuinely brave, and half of it is a very good record while the other half is a band being pushed towards a market that was about to disappear. It has been protected by its own reputation for so long that the unevenness rarely gets mentioned.
What the modern records do to the shape
The one thing a tier list of this catalogue cannot yet settle is where the revival belongs, and honesty requires saying so.
Terminal Redux and Nightmare Logic are both placed in B above, and both have arguments for A. What they have not had is thirty years of people failing to displace them, which is the only test that separates a very good record from a permanent one. Ask again in 2040.
What is already clear is that they are not novelties. Both were made by people using the form to say something current rather than to salute 1986, and on the four criteria at the top of this article they score as well as most of the A tier.
Sources and notes
Placements are editorial. Records are judged on original pressings; several have been remixed or remastered since in ways that would change the C tier discussion.
