The drummer is the reason this genre exists. Take the hardcore derived beat away and thrash is fast heavy metal; put it back and the guitar technique, the song lengths and the arrangements all follow.
This is what the job actually consists of, where each component came from, and what it does to the person doing it.
The double kick floor
Two bass drums, or one with two pedals, running continuously underneath the song rather than appearing as a fill. Phil Taylor did it under an entire track in 1979 and nobody in rock had used it that way before.
The consequence is structural. Once the kick runs continuously, the space above it has to be filled, and the only way to fill it at that tempo is with continuous downstrokes. The thrash right hand is implied by the thrash left foot.
The skank beat
Snare on every offbeat over a driving kick, with the ride or hi hat running eighths. Played fast, the snare hits twice as often as a rock backbeat, and the effect is to remove the swing entirely and make the pulse a flat line.
It came from hardcore punk, and specifically from Discharge, whose stripped down version is so identified with them that the pattern carries their initial. A rock beat makes a listener nod; this one makes them move continuously or not at all.
The half time drop
Every good thrash band arrived at the same solution to the same problem, which is that unrelenting is exhausting. Cut the pulse in half for a section: the snare moves back to two and four, the tempo appears to collapse, and the riff underneath suddenly sounds enormous.
Nothing has actually slowed down. The drummer has simply stopped hitting the offbeats, and the effect on a room is instant and physical. It is the single most reliable device in the genre and the reason a Bay Area song has somewhere for the crowd to go.
What the job demands
Three simultaneous things. Hold the offbeat snare pattern at a tempo that makes it manual labour. Run the kick as a continuous floor underneath. And write parts rather than keep time, because in a music made of riff sequences the drums have to signal the changes.
Any two of those is difficult. All three, for forty five minutes, four nights a week, is why the founding generation of thrash drummers has a surgical history: tendon damage, back injuries, elbow operations and hearing loss run right through it.
| Element | Origin | Function |
|---|---|---|
| Continuous double kick | Motorhead, 1979 | The floor the guitars sit on |
| Offbeat snare | Discharge and hardcore | Removes the swing |
| Half time drop | Invented independently everywhere | Relief, and the crowd's cue |
| Blast beat | Sarcofago and grindcore | The pulse becomes texture |
| China cymbal accent | Bay Area practice | Marks the section change |
How to listen to a thrash drummer
Follow the kick rather than the snare. The snare pattern is largely fixed and the kick is where the writing happens: which beats it fills, where it drops out, how it sets up a change. The difference between a good thrash drummer and a great one is almost always audible down there.
Then listen for what happens at a section change. A rock drummer fills; a thrash drummer signals, frequently with a single crash and an abrupt change of pattern rather than with a run round the toms. That restraint is a stylistic decision and it is why these records are as legible as they are at speed.
What the recordings hide
Everything above was played in full takes onto tape, with no grid to snap a hit to and no sampler waiting to replace a weak snare. If the third verse fell apart, the drummer played the song again from the top.
So the small inconsistencies audible on these records are the performance rather than a failure of it, and the sense of a person just barely holding a tempo is not an illusion. Modern recordings of the same material sound tighter and considerably less alive, and most of the surviving drummers from this period have said some version of that in print.
The whole decade this technique was built in is set out in the eighties timeline, and the full account of the run is in The Golden Years.
The kit itself
Thrash kits grew and then shrank again, and the arc is informative. The founding records were played on ordinary rock kits with two mounted toms and either two kick drums or a double pedal. By 1989 the technical wing had arrived at large configurations with multiple rack toms and several crashes, because the arrangements had become complicated enough to need the colours.
The modern revival went back to four pieces. Power Trip, Municipal Waste and most of their contemporaries play small kits hard, which is a deliberate statement: the point is not what you can reach, it is what you can hit.
Who to listen to first
Dave Lombardo on Reign in Blood for the combination of speed and swing, which nobody else in the genre managed. Gene Hoglan on Darkness Descends for limb independence and for parts that are genuinely written rather than played. Charlie Benante on Among the Living for feel, which is the hardest of the three to describe and the easiest to hear.
Then Jurgen Reil on Pleasure to Kill, for the opposite philosophy entirely: a drummer audibly at the limit of what he can hold, which is the entire effect of that record and a reminder that control is not the only virtue available.
The blast beat, and where the road ends
One further development belongs here, because it is what happened when somebody took the offbeat snare to its logical conclusion.
The blast beat alternates snare and kick at maximum speed, and at that rate the ear stops hearing individual hits and starts hearing texture. The pulse is no longer a pulse; it is a wall of noise with a tempo somewhere inside it.
Sarcofago's drummer was doing something very close to it in Brazil in 1987, on a kit he could barely afford, before the technique had a name. Grindcore in Birmingham arrived at it independently, and death metal adopted it as standard within five years.
What that meant for thrash is that the extreme end of the rhythmic argument had been settled and settled elsewhere. A thrash drummer in 1991 could not go faster without becoming a death metal drummer, which is one more version of the same pressure that was acting on every other part of the genre at the same moment.
Sources and notes
Technique descriptions refer to the studio recordings named. The naming of the D beat after Discharge is conventional usage and postdates the record.
