Neither, strictly, and the fact that the question is impossible to answer cleanly is the most interesting thing about the band.
Venom sit at the junction of two genres, having invented the name of one and supplied the licence for the other, while playing something that is technically neither. What follows is the case for each label, the case against, and the description that actually fits.
The case for thrash
They are fast. The tempos on Welcome to Hell and Black Metal are in thrash territory and were faster than nearly anything else in 1981. The aggression is thrash aggression. The vocal is a shout rather than a sung line. And a very large number of thrash musicians cite them as the reason their bands exist, which is a form of evidence.
Play "Witching Hour" to somebody with no context and they will place it in the right five year window and probably in the right family.
The case against thrash
The technique is wrong, and the technique is what defines the genre.
Thrash is built on systematically palm muted, downpicked rhythm guitar, which produces a run of separate blows rather than a smear. Venom's guitar playing is open, loose and heavily distorted, closer to Motorhead than to anything from the Bay Area. The drumming is rock drumming played fast, not the hardcore derived skank beat. And the songs are structured conventionally, with verses and choruses, rather than as sequences of distinct riffs.
Three of the four defining criteria are absent. Whatever this is, it is not the same music that Exodus and Kreator were making four years later.
The case for black metal
They put the words on a sleeve in 1982, which is where the genre got its name and is not a small thing. The imagery, the pseudonyms, the inverted crosses and the theatrical Satanism are all part of the visual grammar that the Norwegian scene adopted a decade later. And the Norwegians themselves have been explicit about the debt.
The case against black metal
Musically it does not resemble black metal at all. There is no tremolo picking, no blast beat, no thin trebly production, no rasped vocal, none of the atmosphere and none of the melodic sensibility. Venom sound like a loud rock band. Black metal as it was actually made from 1991 onwards sounds like almost nothing else in music.
And the Satanism was a costume, admitted as such by everybody involved, whereas the thing that made the Norwegian scene what it was, for better and considerably for worse, was that a small number of its participants meant it.
| Criterion | Venom | Thrash | Black metal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Palm muted downpicking | No | Yes | No |
| Hardcore derived beat | No | Yes | Blast beat instead |
| Riff sequence songs | No | Yes | Sometimes |
| Tremolo picking | No | Rarely | Yes |
| Rasped vocal | Shouted | Shouted | Yes |
| Occult presentation | Yes, as costume | Sometimes | Yes, in earnest |
What they actually were
A very fast, very loud heavy metal band who could barely play, who committed completely to a theatrical presentation that nobody else was attempting, and who happened to be standing at the exact point where several later genres would branch off.
The most accurate label is the least satisfying one: Venom are proto extreme metal. They come before the split. Asking whether they are thrash or black metal is like asking whether a common ancestor is a wolf or a dog, and the answer is that it is the thing both of those came out of.
Why this matters beyond taxonomy
Because the way this band gets filed changes how the history reads. File Venom as thrash and the genre acquires a British founder and a 1981 start date, which distorts everything downstream. File them as black metal and you have to explain why the music sounds nothing like it. File them where they belong, at the root of the branch, and both later genres make sense.
It also matters because Venom are the standing rebuttal to the idea that genres are defined by sound alone. Almost nothing about this band's music is thrash or black metal. Almost everything about their position, their attitude and their consequences is foundational to both. A history written purely from the recordings would miss them entirely, and would be wrong.
The record that did the actual work is dealt with in detail elsewhere, and the other accidental founding document, made in Germany by a band who wanted no part of it, is Accept's "Fast as a Shark". The period they both belong to is where this sits in the story.
What Venom said about it
Not much, and what they did say has changed with the decade, which is itself informative.
In the early period the band presented the whole thing with a straight face, because the presentation only works if nobody breaks character. Later, as the influence became undeniable and the Norwegian scene turned genuinely dark, the tone shifted towards amused ownership: yes they named it, no they did not mean any of it, and the people who took it seriously were not their responsibility.
Conrad Lant in particular has spent forty years being asked to adjudicate a taxonomy he never intended to create, and his answers have generally amounted to a shrug. That is probably the correct response. A band who set out to be the most objectionable thing in Newcastle cannot reasonably be asked to police the categories that grew out of them.
Why the ancestors are always hard to file
Venom are not a special case. Every genre has a group at its root who fit none of the categories that came afterwards, for the simple reason that they came before the categories.
Black Sabbath are not heavy metal by the standards of 1984, and heavy metal came out of them. Motorhead are not thrash and half of thrash is built on them. The Stooges are not punk in the sense the word acquired in 1977. In each case a later scene looked back, chose an ancestor, and applied a name that had not existed when the records were made.
What that means practically is that the question in this article's title is unanswerable by design. Venom sit at the branching point, and the branches are named after what they became rather than after where they started. The useful move is to stop trying to file the root and start asking what grew out of it, which in this case is a great deal: thrash's permission, black metal's name and appearance, and death metal's taste for extremity as a stated goal rather than a side effect.
Sources and notes
Black Metal was released by Neat Records in 1982. Claims about the band's intentions and about the Norwegian scene's debt follow published interviews with the musicians concerned.
