Thrash is the one heavy genre in which singing well is not obviously an advantage, and that fact has produced the strangest collection of voices in metal: a shouter with perfect timing, an operatic tenor, a bass player who barks, a Brazilian teenager who did not speak the language, and a man who has been doing the same thing since 1980 and shows no sign of stopping.
What follows is what a thrash vocal is actually for, and the voices that did it best.
What the voice is doing
Not carrying a melody. In this genre the voice is a rhythmic instrument that happens to contain words, and its primary job is to lock into the riff and add another layer of accent to it.
That is why pitch is negotiable and timing is not. A thrash singer who is slightly flat is fine; a thrash singer who is slightly late is a disaster, because the whole arrangement depends on everything landing together. It is also why so many of the great ones are not, by any conventional measure, good singers.
The second job is legibility. At two hundred beats per minute a sung melody smears, and a barked line does not. The shout is not a failure to sing; it is the only delivery that survives the tempo.
Tom Araya
The most influential delivery in the genre, and the most misunderstood. Araya barely sings at all on the classic records, and what he does instead is a flat, forward, unhysterical declamation that treats atrocity as testimony rather than as theatre. That refusal to editorialise is what makes Slayer frightening, and it is much harder to do than screaming.
Paul Baloff
The purest thrash voice there has been, and by conventional standards not a singer at all. Baloff shouts, and he means every syllable, and the effect on Bonded by Blood is of somebody who would genuinely rather be fighting. He left in 1986, rejoined in the mid nineties, and died in 2002.
Joey Belladonna
The heresy. A genuine melodic tenor with real range, singing over thrash riffs in 1985, when every other band in the genre was shouting. It got Anthrax dismissed as the soft one for a decade and it is a substantial part of why Among the Living is the most enjoyable record any of the big four made.
Chuck Billy
The most versatile in the genre: a real singer who can also growl, and the only vocalist of the founding generation who has genuinely improved with age. Testament's late catalogue is carried by a voice that is bigger now than it was at twenty five.
Mille Petrozza
The German model, and the ancestor of nearly every death metal vocal that followed: a low, forward rasp with no attempt at a note, delivered as though the lyrics were an indictment. Forty years later it has not degraded, which is close to miraculous for that technique.
Bobby Blitz Ellsworth
Overkill's singer, who has been shouting since 1980, has a genuine upper register he uses sparingly, and sounds bored in exactly none of the twenty albums. A masterclass in doing one thing extremely well for four decades.
Max Cavalera
A Brazilian teenager singing in a language he did not speak, on records made with almost no money, and the conviction carries it entirely. The delivery on Beneath the Remains is one of the most physically committed vocal performances in metal.
| Singer | Band | Type | Hear it on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tom Araya | Slayer | Flat declamation | Reign in Blood |
| Paul Baloff | Exodus | Pure shout | Bonded by Blood |
| Joey Belladonna | Anthrax | Melodic tenor | Among the Living |
| Chuck Billy | Testament | Sings and growls | The New Order |
| Mille Petrozza | Kreator | Low rasp | Pleasure to Kill |
| Bobby Blitz | Overkill | Shout with a top end | The Years of Decay |
| Max Cavalera | Sepultura | Committed bark | Beneath the Remains |
| Dave Mustaine | Megadeth | Sneer | Peace Sells... |
The sneer, which is its own category
Mustaine deserves separating out because he is doing something nobody else in the genre attempts. It is not a shout and it is not singing; it is a narrator with a distinct personality, sarcastic and slightly nasal, delivering lines that are written to be delivered rather than merely shouted.
That approach only works if the lyrics can carry it, which is why it is unique to a band whose writing is unusually literate. Copy the technique without the material and you get somebody complaining over a riff.
What happened to the voices
Two things, and both are worth knowing before listening to any live recording made after 2000.
The shout is physically survivable and the scream is not. Singers who barked from the diaphragm, like Petrozza and Ellsworth, still sound the same at sixty. Singers who pushed the throat have mostly lost the top of the range, and several have had surgery.
And the genre's own standards moved. What sounded extreme in 1986 sounds almost polite after thirty years of death metal, which is why the founding vocals now read as clear and articulate rather than as an assault. That is not a change in the records. It is a change in the ear.
The instrument that all of these voices had to lock into is covered in The Best Thrash Metal Guitarists, and the full map of the bands is in the bands you need to know.
The ones who wrote the words as well
A distinction worth drawing, because it separates a frontman from an author.
Dave Mustaine writes his own lyrics and it shows in the delivery; the sneer only works because the lines were built to be sneered. Mille Petrozza has written increasingly sharp political material for four decades. Martin Walkyier of Sabbat wrote about pagan Britain at a level of literacy the genre has rarely matched, and it is impossible to imagine anybody else singing it.
Against that, several of the great voices in this genre are interpreters rather than authors, and there is no shame in it. Tom Araya's delivery of Jeff Hanneman's lyrics is a performance decision of enormous consequence: the flatness is his, and it is what turns testimony into something frightening.
The women
Very few, and the reasons are sociological rather than musical, but the ones there were deserve naming.
Betsy Bitch fronted Bitch on Metal Blade from the first Metal Massacre onwards. Sabina Classen of Holy Moses in Germany was doing an extreme vocal in 1986 that most male singers were not attempting, and she is a direct ancestor of a great deal of what came afterwards in death metal. Debbie Gunn sang for Sentinel Beast and Znowhite.
The scene was overwhelmingly male and largely unwelcoming, and that is a plain fact rather than a controversial one. It is also worth noticing that Classen's vocal on the early Holy Moses records is more extreme than most of what her contemporaries were doing, which makes the obscurity harder to explain on any musical basis.
Sources and notes
Judgements are editorial. Paul Baloff died on 2 February 2002. Descriptions of vocal technique refer to the studio recordings named.
