Production is not a garnish in this genre, it is load bearing. A music built from sequences of fast riffs has a specific technical requirement: the listener has to be able to follow one riff into the next, and any recording decision that smears the attack destroys the arrangement.
Which is why thrash has an unusually clear division between records that sound right and records that do not, and why some of the worst sounding albums in the catalogue were made by the biggest bands with the largest budgets.
What a thrash record needs
Four things. Dry: little or no reverb, so the tail of one chord does not run into the attack of the next. Close: microphones near the source, so the transient survives. Separated: two guitars hard left and right playing different parts. And a kick drum you can hear individually at speed rather than as a rumble.
Everything below is judged against those four, not against whether the record sounds expensive.
The best: Reign in Blood, 1986
Rick Rubin came from hip hop, had no investment in what a metal record was supposed to sound like, and removed the reverb, the delay and the blanket of double tracking. What is left is four musicians playing at two hundred and twenty beats per minute with total clarity, and forty years later it still sounds like it was made this year.
The best, second: Bonded by Blood, 1985
Made for almost nothing and correct on every count: dry, close, separated, with a snare that cracks rather than thuds. Proof that the four requirements have nothing to do with money.
The best, third: Beneath the Remains, 1989
Scott Burns in Rio de Janeiro on overnight studio time, with a band who had rehearsed until second takes were unnecessary. Heavy without being vague, and the drums are recorded as an instrument being hit.
The honourable exception: Pleasure to Kill, 1986
Breaks two of the four rules deliberately. The guitars are not separated, they are fused into a single mass, and the drums bleed into everything. It should be a failure and it is one of the great sounding records in the genre, because the intention was mass rather than legibility and it achieves it completely.
The worst: ...And Justice for All, 1988
The most discussed mix in heavy metal, and the discussion is deserved. The bass is essentially inaudible, the guitars are thin and scooped, and the drums are so dry and so triggered sounding that the kit stops sounding like a kit. The songs are magnificent and the record is genuinely hard work.
Explanations have been offered for decades and the band have addressed it themselves. Whatever the cause, the effect is a record that is admired rather than played, and a demonstration that a large budget can make a worse sounding album than a tiny one.
The worst, more of it
Anthrax's Fistful of Metal is thin and shrill in a way that even its defenders concede. Several late eighties records suffer from the gated drum sound of the period, which puts an audible box around every hit. And a large part of the 1993 to 1999 restyling was made with production values borrowed from a completely different genre, which is a substantial part of why those records have not aged.
| Album | Dry | Close | Separated | Audible kick | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reign in Blood | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | The benchmark |
| Bonded by Blood | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | On no budget |
| Beneath the Remains | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Overnight studio time |
| Pleasure to Kill | No | Yes | No | Partly | Breaks the rules on purpose |
| Master of Puppets | Partly | Yes | Yes | Yes | A large room, handled well |
| ...And Justice for All | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes, and no bass at all | The famous problem |
Why the budget does not help
The pattern across the decade is consistent and slightly counterintuitive. The records made in a week for the price of a small car mostly sound right. The records made over three months for a major label mostly sound worse.
The reason is that a small budget forces documentation and a large budget invites construction. With four days you record a band playing and mix what you got. With three months you spend two weeks on a drum sound, quadruple the guitars, replace anything that was slightly off, and end up with something that is technically superior and no longer sounds like people in a room.
Thrash is particularly vulnerable to this because its whole effect depends on the sense of an actual human being just barely holding a tempo. Remove the strain and you remove the music.
What changed after 2000
Digital recording made all of the above much worse and then much better. The middle period, roughly 1998 to 2008, produced a great many heavy records with drums quantised onto a grid and guitars edited into inhuman tightness, and they sound like nothing is at stake.
The modern revival largely rejected that. Bands from Municipal Waste to Power Trip have deliberately recorded to tape or to tape emulation, kept the takes rather than repairing them, and mixed dry and close. It is a conscious return to the four requirements, and it is a substantial part of why the best modern thrash records sit comfortably next to the 1986 ones.
Where these judgements land in the ranking is set out in Thrash Albums Tier List, and the artwork half of the question is in The Best Thrash Album Covers.
The engineers who got it right
A short list, because the same handful of names are behind most of the records that sound correct.
Rick Rubin, who came from hip hop and had no idea what a metal record was supposed to sound like, which is precisely why he made the best one. Flemming Rasmussen at Sweet Silence in Copenhagen, who understood how to use a large room without letting it eat the attack. Harris Johns at Musiclab in Berlin, whose philosophy was get the room, get the take, do not fix it, and who is behind a startling proportion of the good German records. Scott Burns, who made records in Florida and Rio on budgets that should not have produced anything.
What they have in common is not a technique, since Rubin and Johns did opposite things. It is that each of them decided what the record was for before deciding how to record it, and then removed everything that did not serve that decision.
How to hear the difference for yourself
A practical test that takes ten minutes and settles most arguments about this.
Play thirty seconds of Reign in Blood and then thirty seconds of ...And Justice for All at the same volume, on speakers. On the first you can follow every note of the rhythm guitar and hear where the kick drum lands under it. On the second the guitars occupy a narrow band and there is nothing underneath them at all.
Then play Pleasure to Kill and notice that it breaks the rules and works anyway, because it is not trying to be legible. Three records, ninety seconds, and the whole argument about thrash production is audible without anybody having to use the word frequency.
The complete survey of the records themselves, ordered by what each one does rather than by how it sounds, is in the essential albums list.
Sources and notes
Judgements refer to original pressings. Several of these records have been remixed or remastered since, in some cases substantially, and those versions are outside the scope of this piece.
