Underrated is a slippery word and it is worth defining before using it. A band is underrated here if the quality of the records is out of proportion to the size of the reputation, and if the reason for the gap is something other than the music.
That excludes bands who are obscure because they were not very good, which is most of them, and it includes several who sold well and are still not talked about properly.
Dark Angel
The most underrated band in American thrash. Darkness Descends is faster than Reign in Blood, was released six weeks after it, and is barely mentioned in the standard histories. Gene Hoglan's drumming on it changed what the instrument was expected to do in this genre.
Why the gap: an independent label with no promotional budget, a line up that changed constantly, and the misfortune of releasing the year's most extreme record into the same eight weeks as the year's two most famous ones.
Metal Church
From Washington state, and stranded between categories: too heavy for the traditional metal audience and too melodic for the thrash one. The first two albums are excellent and the band have spent forty years being described as almost thrash, which is a description of a marketing problem rather than of music.
Forbidden
The best of the Bay Area's second rank on pure technique, with two guitarists who could genuinely play and a singer with real range. Forbidden Evil arrived in 1988 into a crowded field and disappeared, and it is better than several records that did not.
Heathen
Melodic, ambitious and chronically unlucky. Victims of Deception came out in 1991, which is the worst possible year for an ambitious thrash record, and the band effectively stopped for fifteen years.
Artillery
Denmark, with eastern scales woven into the riff writing and a level of musicianship nobody was expecting from Copenhagen. By Inheritance is quoted constantly by guitarists and was bought by almost nobody.
Sacred Reich
Phoenix, Arizona, and seventeen year olds writing seriously about American foreign policy in 1987. They are remembered as a second tier band and the first two records are better than that, and they reformed and made a genuinely strong album in 2019.
Deathrow
Dusseldorf, and the most dramatic improvement curve in the genre: crude in 1985 and genuinely progressive by 1988. Deception Ignored baffled their own audience and is now cited as a lost classic.
Whiplash
Three men from New Jersey playing faster than was reasonable in 1985. Power and Pain is rough, honest and has been ignored for four decades.
| Band | The record | Year | Why the reputation is small |
|---|---|---|---|
| Whiplash | Power and Pain | 1985 | No promotion, tiny label |
| Dark Angel | Darkness Descends | 1986 | Released into the same eight weeks as two classics |
| Sacred Reich | Ignorance | 1987 | Filed as second tier and never refiled |
| Forbidden | Forbidden Evil | 1988 | A crowded field, a year late |
| Deathrow | Deception Ignored | 1988 | Too progressive for their own audience |
| Metal Church | Blessing in Disguise | 1989 | Between two categories |
| Artillery | By Inheritance | 1990 | Danish, with no distribution |
| Heathen | Victims of Deception | 1991 | The worst possible year |
The pattern
Read down that right hand column and the causes are almost never musical. A small label. A release date eight weeks after somebody else's classic. A country with no distribution. A band that was too interesting for the audience it had.
What that tells you is that the reputation league table in this genre is largely a record of who had a distribution deal in 1987, and it has been repeated so often since that it now looks like a judgement about quality. It is not.
The overrated question
Fairness requires the other half, briefly, and there is really only one honest entry.
Nothing in this genre is badly overrated, which is unusual. The famous records mostly deserve their reputations; the problem is not that Master of Puppets is overpraised, it is that Darkness Descends is not praised at all. The distortion in thrash criticism is one of omission rather than of inflation.
The one exception, and it is a mild one, is ...And Justice for All, which is routinely placed above records it does not beat on any criterion except ambition.
Further down the same seam are the bands who never got as far as a reputation at all: Underground Thrash Metal Bands. The full map is in the bands you need to know.
The bands who were underrated and are not any more
Worth recording, because the picture has genuinely changed in the last fifteen years and it shows the mechanism working.
Coroner spent two decades as a name that guitarists mentioned to each other and are now widely accepted as one of the best bands the genre produced. Voivod went from being treated as an oddity to being cited across metal, progressive rock and beyond. Demolition Hammer were forgotten and have been enthusiastically rediscovered. Morbid Saint went from a cassette legend to an album you can buy.
What changed was access. When a listener can hear a 1988 record in ten seconds instead of hunting a second hand shop for a year, reputation stops being a function of distribution and starts being a function of the music, which is roughly what everybody always claimed it was.
Where to start with each
One record apiece, for anybody who wants to test the claims above rather than take them on trust.
Dark Angel, Darkness Descends. Metal Church, the self titled debut. Forbidden, Forbidden Evil. Heathen, Victims of Deception. Artillery, By Inheritance. Sacred Reich, Ignorance. Deathrow, Deception Ignored. Whiplash, Power and Pain.
Eight records, about six hours, and a considerably better picture of what this genre actually contained than any amount of rereading the famous dozen will give you.
The word itself
One last note on the term, because it gets used carelessly. Underrated is a claim about a gap between quality and reputation, and it only means anything if you say what the reputation currently is.
Dark Angel are underrated by the general audience and rated correctly by anybody who plays drums. Metal Church are underrated in Europe and reasonably well regarded in the United States. Artillery are underrated everywhere except among guitarists. Heathen are simply unknown.
Those are four different situations and they call for four different responses, and lumping them together as underrated flattens the interesting part. The useful question is always who is doing the underrating and why.
Sources and notes
Years refer to original pressings. Judgements are editorial. Reasons for each band's obscurity follow documented label and release histories rather than speculation.
