Thrash is the one heavy genre in which singing well is not obviously an advantage. What the voice is doing here is rhythmic rather than melodic, and once that is understood the strange collection of deliveries this music produced starts to make sense.
What the voice is for
Locking into the riff. In this genre the vocal is another layer of accent, and its primary job is to land with the guitars rather than to float above them.
That is why pitch is negotiable and timing is not. A thrash singer who is slightly flat is fine; a thrash singer who is slightly late ruins the arrangement, because everything depends on the parts hitting together.
The second job is legibility. At two hundred beats per minute a sung melody smears and a barked line does not, so the shout is not a failure to sing, it is the only delivery that survives the tempo.
The bark
Paul Baloff on Bonded by Blood is the purest example: no attempt at a note, total commitment, and the sound of somebody who would rather be fighting. It is the founding thrash vocal and by conventional standards it is not singing at all.
The bark is also the most honest delivery in the genre, in the sense that there is nothing to hide behind. A singer who cannot carry conviction has nowhere to go.
The flat declamation
Tom Araya's approach, and the most misunderstood in the genre. He barely sings on the classic Slayer records; what he does is a forward, unhysterical, almost reportorial delivery that treats atrocity as testimony.
The refusal to editorialise is exactly what makes those records frightening, and it is considerably harder to do than screaming. A singer who dramatises that material makes it into a horror film; a singer who reads it flat makes it into evidence.
The sung vocal
Joey Belladonna singing in a real tenor over thrash riffs got Anthrax dismissed as the soft one for a decade, and it is a substantial part of why Among the Living is the most enjoyable record any of the big four made.
The technical objection was always weak. A melodic vocal works at these tempos if the phrasing lands with the riff, and Belladonna's does.
The roar
Chuck Billy is the most versatile voice in the genre: a genuine singer who can also growl, and the only vocalist of the founding generation who is demonstrably better now than at twenty five. Testament's late catalogue is carried by it.
The German rasp
Mille Petrozza, Tom Angelripper and Schmier: low, forward, no attempt at a note, delivered as an indictment. It is a straight line from there to the vocal of every death metal band that formed in the following five years, and it has proved remarkably durable, which is close to miraculous for that technique.
| Style | Exemplar | Hear it on | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| The bark | Paul Baloff | Bonded by Blood | Conviction, nowhere to hide |
| Flat declamation | Tom Araya | Reign in Blood | Testimony rather than theatre |
| The sneer | Dave Mustaine | Peace Sells... | A narrator with a personality |
| The sung vocal | Joey Belladonna | Among the Living | Melody, at speed |
| The roar | Chuck Billy | The New Order | Range, and durability |
| The German rasp | Mille Petrozza | Pleasure to Kill | The ancestor of death metal |
| The shout with a top | Bobby Blitz | The Years of Decay | Forty years without tiring |
What survives and what does not
A practical note before listening to any live recording made after 2000. The shout is physically survivable and the scream is not.
Singers who barked from the diaphragm still sound the same at sixty. Singers who pushed the throat have mostly lost the top of their range, and several have had surgery. That is why some of these voices are unchanged on stage and others are noticeably different, and it is a matter of technique rather than of effort.
What changed in the ear
The founding vocals now sound clear and articulate rather than extreme, and nothing about the records has changed. Thirty years of death metal moved the reference point, and a delivery that was genuinely shocking in 1986 reads as a shouted lyric today.
That is worth holding in mind when reading contemporary reviews of these albums, which frequently describe the singing as unlistenable. The reviewers were not wrong about what they heard; they were simply hearing it from the other side of a change that had not happened yet.
The technique the voice has to lock into is covered in Thrash Guitar, and the full account of the period is in The Golden Years.
The lyrics underneath
Worth a section, because the delivery has consistently distracted people from the content.
Read the lyric sheets of the founding albums and you find nuclear proliferation, heroin, mental hospitals, the arms trade, chemical defoliants, capital punishment, the treatment of Native Americans, and a nine minute song narrated from inside a body that cannot move or speak. Thrash is the most journalistic genre heavy music has produced.
A listener who assumes the shouting means the words are about Satan is missing most of what these records are doing. The one band whose catalogue genuinely is atrocity and damnation had its reputation applied backwards to forty others who were writing about arms control.
The women who were doing it
Very few, and worth naming. Sabina Classen of Holy Moses in Germany was performing an extreme vocal in 1986 that most male singers in the genre were not attempting, and she is a direct ancestor of a great deal of what followed in death metal. Betsy Bitch fronted Bitch on Metal Blade from the first Metal Massacre onwards. Debbie Gunn sang for Sentinel Beast and Znowhite.
The scene was overwhelmingly male and largely unwelcoming, which is a plain fact rather than a controversial one, and the obscurity of those three is difficult to explain on any musical basis.
Sources and notes
Descriptions refer to the studio recordings named. Paul Baloff died on 2 February 2002.
