There are four defensible answers and the argument between them is more interesting than any of them, because each one is really an argument about what the word thrash is supposed to mean.
Pick your definition and the answer changes. Ask for the first record with the complete vocabulary and you get one album. Ask for the first record that sounds extreme and you get another. Ask for the first record any band would have called thrash at the time and you get nothing, because the word did not exist yet.
The candidate everybody names
Metallica, Kill 'Em All, released by Megaforce in July 1983 and paid for by a couple who mortgaged their house after every label in America had turned it down.
The case for it is that everything is there at once and nothing else has to be argued around. Palm muted downpicked rhythm guitar at tempo. Drumming taken from hardcore rather than from rock. Songs built as riff sequences rather than around choruses. Shouted vocals. Lyrics that are not about dragons. No other record released before July 1983 has all five.
The case against it is that it was not first at any individual component, and that the band themselves were assembling something out of British records they had been playing in a garage a year earlier.
The candidate that came first
Venom, Welcome to Hell, Neat Records, December 1981. Eighteen months earlier, and if the criterion is which record made the genre psychologically possible, this is the answer.
The problem is technical. Venom are not playing thrash. The rhythm guitar is not consistently palm muted and downpicked, the drumming is rock drumming played fast and slightly out of control, and the songs are structured conventionally. What the record supplies is attitude, speed and permission, and those are enormous contributions that are nevertheless not the same thing as the form.
The candidate that nobody remembers
Accept, Restless and Wild, 1982, and specifically its opening track. "Fast as a Shark" is downpicked, double kicked, well past two hundred beats per minute, with a shrieked vocal and a solo at a speed nobody in metal was playing at.
It is, on the technical criteria, the first thrash recording. It is also one song on a hard rock album by a band who had no interest in the genre they had accidentally described, which is why almost nobody names it. Whether one track counts is a matter of how strictly you want to read the question.
The candidate for people who like arguments
Motorhead's Overkill from March 1979 gets proposed regularly, on the grounds that the tempo and the double kick and the whole aesthetic are already there. The objection is straightforward: Motorhead are a rock and roll band who played very fast, the guitar technique is not thrash technique, and Lemmy spent his life denying that he had made a metal record at all.
| Record | Date | Downpicked rhythm | Hardcore beat | Riff sequence songs | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Motorhead, Overkill | Mar 1979 | No | Partly | No | Ancestor, not the thing |
| Venom, Welcome to Hell | Dec 1981 | No | No | No | The permission, not the form |
| Accept, "Fast as a Shark" | 1982 | Yes | Yes | No | First recording, one song |
| Metallica, Kill 'Em All | Jul 1983 | Yes | Yes | Yes | First complete album |
What the answer actually is
If the question means the first album on which the whole form is present and sustained across a full record, it is Kill 'Em All, and it is not close.
If it means the first recording that meets the technical description, it is "Fast as a Shark", by a band who did not want it.
And if it means the record without which none of it would have happened, it is Welcome to Hell, which is technically not thrash at all. Three different questions, three different answers, and anybody insisting there is only one is arguing about definitions while pretending to argue about history.
The related and equally slippery question of which band got there first is handled separately in Who Was the First Thrash Metal Band?, and the full account of the period is in the wider story.
What the bands themselves say
The musicians have been unusually consistent about this and their answers are more interesting than the arguments.
Lars Ulrich has spent forty years pointing away from his own band and towards Diamond Head, Venom and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal in general, and he collected the records long before he could play. Kerry King points at Venom. Tom Angelripper of Sodom points at Venom and Motorhead, and has said plainly that the German bands had not heard the American ones when they started. Gary Holt of Exodus has cheerfully pointed out that his band were playing this music in the East Bay before anybody had a record out and that the vinyl chronology does not reflect it.
Not one of them claims to have invented anything, and that near unanimity across four decades of interviews is itself evidence. People who have built careers on this music, and who have every commercial reason to plant a flag, consistently decline to.
The two records that are not on the list and should be
Two more releases from the period deserve a mention in any honest answer, because both were doing something the famous candidates were not.
Anvil's Metal on Metal, from Canada in 1982, was faster and dirtier than anything a signed North American band had put out, and both Lars Ulrich and Scott Ian have said in print that they took it apart bar by bar. It is not quite thrash, and it is closer than most things released that year.
And Exciter's Heavy Metal Maniac, from Ottawa in 1983, arrived at roughly the same time as the first Metallica album and owes it nothing. Whether it is thrash or extremely fast heavy metal is a real argument rather than a settled one, and either way it demonstrates that the idea was in the air on both sides of a border as well as on both sides of an ocean.
Sources and notes
Dates refer to original pressings. Kill 'Em All was released on 25 July 1983. Welcome to Hell was released in December 1981 from sessions originally intended as a demo.
