Four candidates, one criterion each, and no possibility of a settlement. That is not a dodge, it is the actual shape of the question: ask who is best and the honest answer depends entirely on what you think this music is for.
So here is the argument laid out properly. Four cases, each stated as strongly as it can be, then the criteria under each one, then a verdict that will satisfy nobody.
The case for Slayer
Consistency and nerve. Five albums in a row without a weak one between 1983 and 1990, a sound that nobody else has ever successfully imitated, and a career of thirty five years in which they never once softened, never chased a trend that lasted and never made a record that apologised for the previous one.
They also made the record that defines the outer edge of the genre. Reign in Blood is the album every extreme band since has been measured against, and no amount of arguing about production or lyrics has displaced it in four decades.
The case against: one bad album in 1998, a rhythm section problem that took eighteen years to resolve, and a narrower range than any of the other three.
The case for Metallica
Range and importance. Four albums between 1983 and 1988 that constitute the strongest run in the genre, an ambition nobody else attempted at that tempo, and the band who took this music out of the fanzines and into shopping centres.
They also had Cliff Burton, who pushed a garage band towards arrangements with movements, and Flemming Rasmussen, who worked out how to record it. Without both, the genre's ceiling is considerably lower.
The case against: they stopped playing thrash in 1991 and have spent thirty five years being something else, which for a question about the best thrash band is not a small objection.
The case for Megadeth
Writing. Nobody in this genre has written riffs of that complexity, and nobody has combined technical difficulty with actual songs as consistently. From Peace Sells through Rust in Peace to Endgame the standard of composition is simply higher than anybody else's.
The case against: the most unstable line up in metal, a catalogue that swings from indispensable to indefensible, and one album in 1999 that is the worst record any major band in this genre has made.
The case for Kreator
Longevity at a high level. This is the argument nobody makes and it is the strongest one on pure musical grounds. Kreator made the most violent record of 1986, lost their way completely for five years in the nineties, came back in 2001 with Violent Revolution, and have not made a weak album in the twenty five years since.
No other band in this genre can say that. The Americans either stopped, softened or spent a decade recovering. Kreator are the only founding thrash band whose late catalogue stands comparison with their early one.
The case against: five years in the wilderness, and a smaller footprint outside Europe than any of the other three.
| Criterion | Winner | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Consistency 1983 to 1990 | Slayer | Five albums, no weak one |
| Best single record | Slayer | Reign in Blood, undisplaced |
| Ambition and range | Metallica | Four albums, four different problems solved |
| Songwriting craft | Megadeth | Nobody else writes like that |
| Whole career quality | Kreator | Still making great records at forty |
| Influence on everything after | Metallica | By an enormous margin |
| Never compromised | Slayer | One misstep in thirty five years |
The verdict
If the question is which band made the best thrash records, it is Slayer, on consistency and on having made the one album nobody has displaced.
If the question is which band matters most, it is Metallica, and it is not close, and that answer is about history rather than about music.
If the question is which band you would rather listen to today, made by people still making new records worth hearing, it is Kreator.
Anybody who tells you there is a single answer is telling you which of those three questions they think is the real one, and pretending it is the only one available.
The bands that should be in this argument and are not
Three names get excluded by the framing rather than by the music, and it is worth saying so.
Exodus were there first, taught half the East Bay to play, and lost a year to a collapsing label. Overkill have twenty studio albums and not one bad one, which is a claim no band above can make. Sepultura came out of a country with no industry, made one of the four best albums the genre has, and outsold two of the four names in this article.
None of them are in the standard argument because the standard argument was set by a marketing bracket in 1986. That is a fact about the record business and not about music, which is worth remembering every time somebody asks this question.
The full map of who is worth hearing is in the bands you need to know, and a straightforward ranking, with all the problems a ranking brings, is in Top 10 Thrash Metal Bands.
How the argument is usually conducted badly
Three failure modes turn up in every version of this discussion, and naming them makes the conversation better.
The first is ranking by sales and calling it quality. Metallica have outsold everybody in this genre combined, which tells you about distribution and about a video for a song about a mutilated soldier, and nothing at all about riffs.
The second is ranking by the peak. A band with one perfect record and eight ordinary ones is not obviously better than a band with twelve very good ones, and pretending the question is settled by best album is a decision rather than an observation.
The third is treating the big four as the shortlist. It was a phrase invented by journalists in about 1986 to describe which thrash bands you could buy in an ordinary record shop, and using it as a list of the four best bands forty years later is repeating a marketing decision as if it were a verdict.
What the musicians say
Almost uniformly, and almost uselessly, they point at each other. Members of all four bands have named Exodus, Diamond Head, Venom and Motorhead as the important ones. Nobody claims the crown, everybody praises the competition, and the answers are so consistently generous that they carry no information.
What is informative is who they cover. Bands reach for Diamond Head, for Motorhead, for the early Bay Area material, and very rarely for each other's famous albums. The working musicians' view of this genre is a great deal more interested in the sources than in the league table.
Sources and notes
Judgements are editorial. Album quality assessments refer to original releases. The characterisation of the big four as a marketing bracket follows the documented origin of the phrase in the mid 1980s music press.
