The 50 Thrash Metal Bands You Need to Know

This is not a countdown. A ranked list of fifty thrash bands is an invitation to argue about positions thirty one and thirty two, and nobody has ever learned anything from that. What follows is a map: nine regions, one record each, one honest sentence each, and no attempt to pretend that a band from Zurich and a band from Houston are competing in the same event.

The rule for inclusion is simple. Either the band made at least one record that still works, or it did something the genre could not have done without. A few names here sold millions and a few sold four hundred copies, and the list does not distinguish between them, because the thrash metal story is not a sales chart.

What counts as a thrash band

Before the list, the boundary, because half the arguments about it are really arguments about definition.

A thrash band, for the purposes of this map, is one that built its songs out of palm muted downpicked riffs at speed, took its drumming from hardcore rather than from rock, and arranged in riff sequences rather than around choruses. That excludes a great many fast heavy bands and includes a few slow ones, and it is the only definition that does not collapse the moment you apply it to a real record.

So Motorhead are not here, because they were a rock and roll band who happened to be quick. Judas Priest are not here despite "Painkiller". Pantera are not here, because groove is a different animal even when it is played by people who could do this if they wanted. And several names below are borderline and are included anyway, because a map that admits its edges are fuzzy is more use than one that pretends otherwise.

The four that got the label

Metallica. The one that got out. Four albums between 1983 and 1988 that constitute the single strongest run in the genre, and then a career so large it stopped being possible to hear the early records clearly. Start with Ride the Lightning, which is where the ambition and the speed are both still fully present.

Slayer. The most frightening band America produced, and the most consistent. Five albums in a row without a weak one, an eighteen year drummer problem they eventually solved by getting the original back, and a final tour that filled arenas thirty five years after a debut recorded on a father's loan.

Megadeth. Founded out of spite on a four day bus ride and sustained by it for four decades. The most technically demanding writing in the genre, the most unstable line up in it, and a discography that runs from indispensable to indefensible and back again.

Anthrax. The one that thought it was allowed to be fun, and got punished for it by critics who have since come round. New York bounce, a genuine melodic singer, and Among the Living, which is the most purely enjoyable record any of the four made.

The rest of the Bay Area

Exodus. Older than Metallica in the East Bay, and the band that taught the scene how to play. Bonded by Blood was recorded in 1984, released in 1985 after a label collapse, and is the most purely violent thrash debut of the decade.

Testament. The second generation's best, with Alex Skolnick playing lead guitar as if he had studied something. Forty years, no scandal, no disgrace, and a run of late career albums as strong as anything they made young.

Possessed. Six teenagers' worth of energy, one week at a converted chicken farm, and a song called "Death Metal" in 1985. Whether they invented the genre they named is arguable; that they got there first is not.

Death Angel. Five cousins from Daly City who had been playing together since primary school, with a drummer of fourteen on the first demo. The Ultra-Violence is one of the great debuts and they are, remarkably, better now than they were then.

Vio-lence. The angriest band in the second wave, and the one that gave Machine Head its guitarist. Eternal Nightmare is a sustained shout.

Forbidden. Technically the best of the East Bay second rank, with two guitarists who could genuinely play and a singer with range. Forbidden Evil deserved a great deal more than it got.

Heathen. Melodic, ambitious, chronically unlucky. Victims of Deception arrived in 1991 into an audience that had stopped listening.

Defiance, Mordred, Laaz Rockit, Blind Illusion. The deep East Bay, worth digging into if the top layer has been exhausted. Blind Illusion in particular contained two future members of Primus, which is a sentence that should stop anybody in their tracks.

The East Coast

Overkill. New Jersey, twenty studio albums, not one of them bad, and a singer who has been shouting since 1980 and shows no sign of stopping. If longevity were the criterion this list would be one name long.

Nuclear Assault. Dan Lilker's band after Anthrax, and the most balanced crossover and thrash hybrid anybody made. Game Over is furious and funny in the same three minutes.

Whiplash. Three men from New Jersey playing faster than was reasonable in 1985. Power and Pain is a rough, honest, deeply underrated record.

Toxik. Technical thrash with a singer who could actually hit the notes. Think This is the record that should have made them.

Demolition Hammer. The heaviest band on the American East Coast and effectively the bridge into death metal. Tortured Existence is unpleasant in the best sense.

Carnivore. Peter Steele before Type O Negative, writing post apocalyptic material in a register nobody else was attempting.

Los Angeles and the south west

Dark Angel. The fastest American band of 1986, with Gene Hoglan behind the kit playing something nobody had heard before. Darkness Descends makes most of its contemporaries sound polite.

Sacred Reich. Phoenix, Arizona, seventeen year olds writing about American foreign policy. Ignorance in 1987 is a young band's record in the best way.

Flotsam and Jetsam. Made a very good album in 1986 and then lost their bass player to Metallica, which is a hard thing for a band to recover from.

Abattoir, Evildead, Wargasm, Hirax. The southern Californian underground that fed Metal Blade its catalogue and never left it.

The Germans and the Swiss

Kreator. The best European thrash band and, since 2001, arguably the best in the world. Pleasure to Kill is the 1986 pole opposite Reign in Blood, and everything after Violent Revolution is worth your time.

Sodom. A working miner's band that started barely able to play and ended up making the most commercially successful German thrash album with Agent Orange. Never once slowed down for anybody.

Destruction. The most technically able of the German three from the start, with a guitarist in Mike Sifringer who wrote riffs nobody else could have. Eternal Devastation and Release from Agony either side of their peak.

Tankard. Forty years of songs about beer, played properly, never once breaking character, never split up, still on the same label. The most stable career in this document.

Deathrow. Dusseldorf, and the most dramatic improvement curve in the genre: crude in 1985, genuinely progressive by 1988.

Coroner. Three Swiss musicians who had been Celtic Frost's road crew and who treated thrash as a compositional problem. No More Color is the most intelligent record in the genre.

Celtic Frost. Not really a thrash band and more influential than most of them. Changed shape on every album, got one catastrophically wrong, and came back in 2006 with a record nobody saw coming.

The technical and progressive wing

Voivod. A paper mill town in Quebec, a guitarist who did not know which chords were forbidden, and a drummer who drew the artwork. Nothingface is unlike anything else in heavy music.

Watchtower. Austin, Texas, and the origin point of everything later called progressive metal. Time signatures that require concentration to count, let alone play.

Atheist. Florida, jazz fusion bass, and a catalogue that has grown steadily more admired for thirty years.

Sadus. Steve DiGiorgio's fretless bass at thrash tempo, from a small town in the Central Valley.

Realm. Milwaukee, absurd technical ability, and a cover of a Beatles song that has to be heard.

Annihilator. Jeff Waters playing almost everything himself on Alice in Hell and setting a standard for guitar writing the genre had not previously had to meet.

The rest of the world

Sepultura. Belo Horizonte, four teenagers, a record shop that became a label, and Beneath the Remains, which is one of the four or five best albums the genre has. Then Chaos A.D., then a split that has never healed.

Sarcofago. Corpse paint in 1987, blast beats before they had a name, and a direct line to Norway. Went further than Sepultura and got nothing for it.

Vulcano. Santos, Brazil, primitive and completely convinced.

Vader. Poland, formed 1983, spent the decade on demo tapes because there was no other option, and emerged after 1989 as one of Europe's best.

Kat. Made a thrash album on a Polish state label in 1986 with lyrics that should never have got past the censors.

Artillery. Denmark, three superb albums almost nobody bought at the time, quoted constantly by guitarists now.

Onslaught. Bristol, out of anarcho punk, and the first British thrash album that needs no apology.

Sabbat of Nottingham. Martin Walkyier writing about paganism and English history at a level of literacy the genre has rarely matched.

Sabbat of Nagoya. No relation, formed 1983, never compromised, never split up, still going.

Mortal Sin. Sydney, self funded, and good enough to get themselves to Europe from the other side of the planet.

Exciter, Razor, Sacrifice. The Canadian foundation, all three earlier than most people assume.

Crossover

Suicidal Tendencies. Venice, California, a hardcore record on daytime television in 1983, and by the end of the decade a band that was thrash metal in everything but self description.

D.R.I.. Houston to San Francisco, twenty two songs in seventeen minutes on the first EP, and a 1987 album that named a genre.

Stormtroopers of Death. Three days, four men who were not a band, and the crossover rulebook. The music has been copied by everybody; the lyrics have been argued about for forty years and the argument is not settled.

Corrosion of Conformity. North Carolina hardcore that turned into the foundation of southern heavy rock without ever quite letting go of where it started.

Cro-Mags. The Lower East Side, and the founding text of New York hardcore, made by people who had been living on the street.

Excel and Ludichrist. The two crossover bands most worth finding once the obvious ones are done.

The ones playing next month

The list would be dishonest if it stopped in 1991, because the best thrash shows available to anybody reading this are being played by bands formed after the year 2000.

Power Trip. Dallas, out of hardcore, and Nightmare Logic in 2017 is the record that proved this music is not a period style. Riley Gale died in 2020 and the band has not continued.

Municipal Waste. Richmond, Virginia, a joke that is extremely good at being a joke, and half an hour of the fastest fun available.

Havok. Denver. Started as a tribute and turned into a band with its own politics and its own guitar sound.

Warbringer. Began in pastiche and has grown into something considerably darker and more ambitious.

Toxic Holocaust. One man from Portland, Oregon, doing Venom and Motorhead properly.

Evile. Huddersfield, England, and proof that Britain finally worked out how to do this, roughly twenty five years late.

Gama Bomb, Bonded by Blood, Skeletonwitch, Enforced. The deeper end of the modern wave, still active, still touring in vans.

How to use this

Two suggestions. First, do not start at the top. Everybody has heard Metallica; almost nobody under forty has heard Bonded by Blood or Darkness Descends, and those are the records that will tell you whether you actually like this music or merely like the famous version of it.

Second, follow the geography rather than the reputation. Pick a scene from the table, listen to its one record properly, and then work outwards from there. Nobody has ever been converted to this genre by a list; people are converted by one album that arrives at the right moment, and the odds of finding it are better if you are looking in a corner nobody else is standing in.

The other way in is by record rather than by band, and that is the companion to this piece: The Essential Thrash Metal Albums.

The ones who got away with nothing

A closing note that the format of a list tends to hide. Of the fifty odd bands above, perhaps six ever made a living from this music. The rest had day jobs, or went back to them, and a substantial number of the records named here sold in the hundreds rather than the thousands on first release.

That is not a sad story so much as an accurate one. The music was made under the assumption that nobody was going to get rich, and the assumption turned out to be correct in almost every case. What is genuinely strange is how well it has held: records pressed in tiny quantities by bands who split up within three years are now reissued, argued about and covered by groups whose members were not born when they came out.

If there is a single reason to work through a list like this rather than sticking to the four famous names, it is that. The famous version of this genre is four bands and about a dozen albums. The actual genre is several hundred bands on five continents, most of whom got nothing, and a surprising number of whom made something worth an evening of anybody's time.

What a band needs to get on a list like this

Nothing you can plan for, on the evidence. Read back through the entries and the common factor is not talent, ambition or hard work, all of which several hundred bands had.

It is a room, a small number of people who kept turning up, and one record that got out. Exodus had all three and lost the third to a label collapse. Dark Angel had the first two and the record disappeared into a crowded eight weeks. Sepultura had none of them and made it anyway.

The lesson, if there is one, is that this genre's reputations were decided by distribution and timing to a degree that would embarrass anybody who believes the best records win. The good news is that streaming has quietly undone a great deal of it, and a band who sold four hundred copies in Wisconsin in 1988 now reaches more listeners in a month than they did in a decade.

Sources and notes

Recommendations are editorial. Label and year information refers to original pressings. Bands are grouped by the scene they came out of rather than by where the members currently live. Riley Gale died on 24 August 2020.