Thrash and black metal share an ancestor and almost nothing else. That is the surprising part, because on paper they ought to be close relatives: both are fast, both are built on distorted guitar, both were made by young men in cold rooms with no money, and both can be traced back through the same handful of records made in England and Scandinavia at the start of the 1980s. In practice the two genres want opposite things from a listener and go about getting them by opposite means, and the traffic between them has always been remarkably light.
The shared grandfather
Venom gave both genres something. To thrash they gave speed, volume and a licence to be unserious about being serious. To black metal they gave a name, printed on the cover of an album in 1982, and an entire visual and lyrical vocabulary that the Norwegians would take a great deal more literally than Newcastle had ever intended.
What is usually called first wave black metal, meaning Bathory in Sweden, Hellhammer and then Celtic Frost in Switzerland, and Sodom's earliest recordings in West Germany, is close enough to thrash that the categories barely separate. Sodom's In The Sign Of Evil in 1984 is a thrash record by every mechanical test and a black metal record by every other one. Those bands were doing the same thing badly on purpose, and the two genres had not yet decided which parts of the badness they were keeping.
Norway decided the difference
The split happened between 1991 and 1994 and it happened in one country. Darkthrone make the clearest case, because they crossed the line in public: Soulside Journey in 1991 is a competent death metal album, and A Blaze In The Northern Sky, released the following year, is something else entirely, recorded deliberately worse and built out of completely different materials. Mayhem, Burzum, Emperor and Immortal arrived alongside them, and within three years the genre had a fixed grammar that has barely changed since.
Four decisions, all inverted
The right hand. Thrash palm mutes and downpicks, so that each note arrives as a separate blow. Black metal tremolo picks: the same note repeated as fast as the wrist will manage, unmuted, so that the individual attacks dissolve into one continuous sheet of sound. One technique articulates. The other blurs, and blurring is the point.
The riff. A thrash riff is short, chromatic, repeated exactly and then replaced by a different one. A black metal riff is long, minor key and frequently melodic, held over many bars while the drums change underneath it. Thrash writes paragraphs. Black metal writes weather.
The voice. Thrash barks in the middle of the range and you can understand the words. Black metal shrieks or rasps high above it, and the words are usually as unintelligible as a death growl, though by a completely different mechanism. This is the marker most people get backwards: death metal goes down, black metal goes up.
The production. Here the inversion is total and it is deliberate. Thrash is mixed dry, close and separated so that a listener can dismantle a riff while it is still playing. Black metal buries its detail on purpose: treble heavy, thin, distant, frequently recorded on equipment its makers could have afforded better than. Darkthrone's early records sound the way they do because that was the intention, not the budget.
Black metal is often slower than it sounds
Here is the counter intuitive part. Put a metronome on a black metal record and a thrash record and the thrash record is frequently the faster of the two. What creates the impression of extreme speed in black metal is density rather than tempo: tremolo picking puts sixteen or thirty two attacks into a bar where thrash puts eight, and a blast beat fills every remaining gap, so the surface activity is enormous while the underlying pulse may be sitting at a comfortable mid tempo.
Thrash does the opposite. The pulse is genuinely fast and the surface is comparatively sparse, because the palm mute puts a fraction of silence in front of every note. One music is fast and legible; the other is moderate and overwhelming. That distinction explains why a listener coming from thrash often finds black metal exhausting rather than exciting, and why a listener coming the other way finds thrash oddly polite.
Thrash writes paragraphs. Black metal writes weather.
| Element | Thrash | Black metal |
|---|---|---|
| Right hand | Palm muted downpicking | Unmuted tremolo picking |
| Riff shape | Short, chromatic, replaced | Long, minor key, sustained |
| Vocal | Barked, mid range, intelligible | Shrieked or rasped, high, obscured |
| Drums | Skank beat, double kick as accent | Blast beats, continuous |
| Production | Dry, close, every part legible | Thin, treble heavy, detail hidden by choice |
| Words | Nuclear war, addiction, the news | The supernatural, misanthropy, cold, landscape |
| Wants from you | Impact and comprehension | Atmosphere and immersion |
Song length, and repetition as a method
A thrash song runs four or five minutes and spends them getting through material. Six riffs, a solo, a half time drop, out. Repetition is functional: a riff comes round twice so the room learns it, and then it is replaced.
Black metal uses repetition as the method rather than as an aid. A single figure can run for two or three minutes with only the drums shifting beneath it, and the song can pass ten minutes without anything that a thrash band would recognise as an event. The intention is hypnotic, and it requires a listener to stop waiting for the next thing. Nothing in thrash asks that of anybody, which is precisely why thrash was the one that got onto MTV.
What they are actually about
The lyrical distance is the widest of all. Thrash looks out of the window and writes about what it sees: the arms race, the television, prisons, addiction, institutional rot. It is journalism at two hundred beats per minute and it was made at the height of the Cold War by teenagers who were frightened of specific, nameable things.
Black metal turns away from the world entirely, towards the supernatural, towards landscape and winter, and towards a hostility to Christianity that in Norway in the early 1990s stopped being a lyrical position. Between 1992 and 1996 a series of church arsons were carried out by people associated with the scene, and in August 1993 Varg Vikernes killed Oystein Aarseth of Mayhem; he was convicted in 1994, sentenced to twenty one years, and released in 2009. Those events belong in any honest account of the genre, and they have no equivalent anywhere in thrash's history.
Blackened thrash, the third category
What does exist, and confuses everybody, is a deliberate hybrid. Blackened thrash takes thrash's riff writing, its tempo and often its song lengths, and puts black metal's shriek, imagery and treble heavy production on top of it. Aura Noir out of Norway, Destroyer 666, Nifelheim and, in the United States, Toxic Holocaust are the standard names.
The point about that category is that it was assembled on purpose, decades after the split, by musicians who had grown up with both and wanted the combination. It is not a survival of the 1984 grey zone and it is not evidence that the border is soft. It is a third thing, built deliberately out of two finished ones, and treating it as either parent does it no favours.
Why so few bands crossed
Almost nobody has made the journey in either direction, and the reason is that the two genres are technically incompatible in the hands. A guitarist who has spent five years drilling palm muted downstrokes has built exactly the wrong muscle for tremolo picking, and a rhythm section that has learned to articulate sections cannot easily learn to sustain a single texture for six minutes.
The exceptions are all early, from the years before the split hardened: Sodom went towards thrash and stayed, Celtic Frost went somewhere entirely of their own making, Bathory left for Viking metal. After 1993 the border is effectively closed, and bands who want elements of both, of whom there are now a great many, are placed in a third category rather than being said to have crossed.
Which leaves thrash where it started, defined as much by what it refused as by what it chose, and that refusal is the substance of this part of the history. The comparison that matters most for anybody arriving from ordinary rock, and the one thrash fans argue about least, is Thrash Metal vs Heavy Metal.
