Below the famous names and below the well documented second rank sits a layer of bands who released one or two records on labels with no distribution, split up inside three years, and were rediscovered decades later by people trading files rather than cassettes.
This is where the genre gets genuinely interesting for anybody who has heard the obvious, and it is also where most of the disappointment lives, so a guide helps.
Blind Illusion
A Bay Area band whose line up included Les Claypool and Larry LaLonde, both of whom went on to Primus, produced by Kirk Hammett. Thrash with a genuinely strange harmonic sense and a bass player doing things nobody else in the scene attempted. It sold almost nothing and is the single best entry point to this layer.
Sadus
Self released from a small town in California's Central Valley, with Steve DiGiorgio playing fretless bass at a speed that should not be possible. The songs are savage and the bass is the reason to be here; DiGiorgio went on to play with half the extreme bands in America.
Morbid Saint
Wisconsin, 1988, and a record whose reputation was built almost entirely on a cassette. It circulated for a decade, acquired a legend disproportionate to its availability, and turned out on reissue to deserve it.
Hallows Eve
Atlanta, on Metal Blade, and among the first American thrash bands from outside California and New York. Rough, early and considerably better than their obscurity suggests.
Demolition Hammer
The heaviest band on the American East Coast and effectively the bridge into death metal. Tortured Existence and Epidemic of Violence are unpleasant in the best sense and have been rediscovered enthusiastically in the last decade.
Deathrow
Dusseldorf, and a band who went from crude to genuinely progressive across three records. Deception Ignored is technical, dissonant and years ahead of what anybody expected from them.
Realm
Milwaukee, absurd instrumental ability, a singer with a very high clean voice, and a Beatles cover that is the most famous thing about them. An oddity, and a rewarding one.
Hobbs Angel of Death and Slaughter Lord
Australia, and the extreme end of the isolation problem. Slaughter Lord never released a proper album at all; the demos are still traded and still cited.
| Band | Where from | Start with | Year | The hook |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hallows Eve | Atlanta | Tales of Terror | 1985 | Early, and not from either coast |
| Blind Illusion | Bay Area | The Sane Asylum | 1988 | Two future members of Primus |
| Sadus | Central Valley | Illusions | 1988 | Fretless bass at speed |
| Realm | Milwaukee | Endless War | 1988 | Technique and a Beatles cover |
| Deathrow | Dusseldorf | Deception Ignored | 1988 | Progressive, unexpectedly |
| Morbid Saint | Wisconsin | Spectrum of Death | 1988 | A legend built on a tape |
| Demolition Hammer | New York | Tortured Existence | 1990 | The bridge to death metal |
| Slaughter Lord | Sydney | The demos | 1986 | No album, and a reputation anyway |
How to dig properly
Three methods, in ascending order of reward.
Follow the labels. Combat, Metal Blade, Roadrunner, Noise, Steamhammer and Cogumelo each have a catalogue from this period, and working through one chronologically will surface twenty bands nobody has recommended to you.
Follow the personnel. A bass player who later appeared on a record you love was in something in 1988, and that something is usually worth an hour. This is how most people find Blind Illusion.
And follow the geography. Pick a country that is not America or Germany and work through what it produced between 1985 and 1991. Poland, Denmark, Japan, Brazil and Australia will each give you three or four bands worth keeping.
What to expect
Honesty about the hit rate helps. Most of this layer is ordinary: bands who had one good riff and a demo, records that are historically interesting and musically thin. That is normal and it is not a reason to stop.
What you are looking for is the record where a band with no money and no audience did something that the funded bands would not risk. Those exist in surprising numbers, and finding one yourself is a considerably better experience than being handed a list, which is the only real argument against articles like this one.
The visual identity that all of these bands shared, and which is frequently the only thing that survives of them, is in Thrash Metal Logos. The full map is in the bands you need to know.
The international underground
Everything above is American and German, and the same layer exists in a dozen other countries with even less documentation and, frequently, better records.
Brazil has Vulcano, Chakal, Holocausto and Mutilator, all on Cogumelo, all operating with no expectation of ever leaving the country. Poland has Kat and Turbo, both making records under a state controlled pressing system, and Vader, who spent most of the eighties on demo tapes because there was no other route. Japan has Doom, Outrage and a network of small labels the rest of the world barely knew existed. Greece, Mexico and Czechoslovakia each have three or four bands worth an evening.
The pattern is identical everywhere and it is worth stating once more: the harder it was to hear the source records, the stranger and more extreme the result. The countries with the worst access produced the most original music, which is the single most reliable rule in this whole history.
What the reissue labels changed
Almost all of this material is now available, which was not true fifteen years ago, and the change came from a small number of specialist labels doing painstaking work with defunct catalogues and surviving tapes.
Records that existed as a two thousand copy pressing have been licensed, remastered and reissued with the demos attached. The effect on the historical picture has been real: bands assumed to be following a trend turn out to have got there first, and the chronology of who heard what has been quietly rewritten more than once by somebody finding a master tape in a garage.
Sources and notes
Years refer to original pressings, several of which had extremely limited distribution. Recording and release dates diverge for more than one of these records.
