Five things, not one, and the famous answer is the least important of them. Grunge gets the blame because it is the tidiest story and because it arrived at the right moment to be blamed, and it was fourth on the list at best.
One: death metal took the audience
By 1991 the listeners who wanted extremity had somewhere better to go. Florida, Stockholm and Birmingham were producing music that did everything thrash had promised and went further, made by people the same age as the audience rather than by men approaching thirty with a major label contract.
The teenagers who would have formed a thrash band in 1985 formed a death metal band in 1991, and the ones who would have bought a thrash album bought a death metal album. The bitter joke is that thrash had built the thing that replaced it: the vocal, the tempo and the refusal of melody all came out of German and Brazilian thrash records.
Two: the black album
In August 1991 the biggest band in the genre released a mid tempo record that sold in excess of thirty million copies. It is an excellent album and that is precisely the problem.
Every label with a thrash band on its books now had proof of what slowing down was worth, and from 1992 onwards those bands were invited, in the polite language of the industry, to consider the direction of their next record. A budget was usually attached to the invitation.
Three: groove
Pantera were a great band and Vulgar Display of Power is a great record, and the imitation was catastrophic. Groove is much easier to fake than speed: a band that cannot play fast can play slow and heavy and sound acceptable.
Between 1992 and 1997 a very large number of bands who should have been writing thrash riffs wrote groove riffs instead and were much worse at it than Pantera, and the genre spent five years sounding like a slower version of itself performed by people who had lost their nerve.
Four: grunge
The cultural challenge rather than the musical one. Musically a great deal of grunge is slow heavy metal played by people who liked Black Sabbath. What arrived in late 1991 was aimed at everything thrash had become by 1990: the virtuosity, the eight minute compositions, the solos, the leather.
Radio changed format. Magazines changed their covers. And a band who had spent three months getting a drum sound looked ridiculous next to a man in a cardigan singing about how none of it mattered.
Five: the circuit collapsed
The least discussed and possibly the most damaging. The halls that had taken a thrash bill on a Tuesday found they could not sell the tickets, and a venue that stops booking a genre does not start again when the genre recovers.
Labels dropped the second and third tier, which is where most of the interesting bands were. Booking agents moved on. That infrastructure took fifteen years to rebuild, and its absence is why a good band with a good album in 1995 had nowhere to play it.
| Cause | When | What it took |
|---|---|---|
| Death metal | 1989 to 1992 | The young audience and the young musicians |
| The black album | August 1991 | The industry's expectations |
| Groove | 1992 to 1997 | The bands' own nerve |
| Grunge | Late 1991 | Radio, press and the mainstream |
| The circuit | 1992 to 1995 | Somewhere to play |
What did not kill it
Two things that get blamed and should not be.
The bands running out of ideas. The records released in 1990 and 1991 are among the best the genre made, and Rust in Peace, Seasons in the Abyss, Arise and Horrorscope would have been career albums in 1988. They arrived in the wrong year, which is the only thing wrong with them.
And the audience getting bored. The audience did not get bored; it got older, and a new one was not being recruited because the young musicians had gone to a different genre and the circuit that would have introduced them had closed.
Why it came back
Because none of the five causes was permanent, and because the internet removed the thing that had actually been fatal, which was the absence of a route from a bedroom to an audience.
By 2006 a band could record at home, put it online, book a tour by email and sell shirts from a website with no label involved at any point. That is the same independence the founding bands had in 1983 through the post, restored with better tools, and it is the actual mechanism of the revival.
The tempo that did most of the damage has a piece of its own in Groove Metal, and the wider account is in The Fall and the Revival.
The economics underneath
One layer below the five causes sits the money, and it explains why the collapse was as complete as it was.
A band that has toured at arena scale has crew, production, management and expectations attached, and those costs do not scale down gracefully. When the audience moved after 1992, several of these groups were running a machine built for a crowd that had stopped coming, and the choice was to restyle or to shrink drastically.
The bands who had never scaled up had nothing to dismantle. That is why the honour roll of the decade is Overkill, Sodom and Tankard rather than anybody who had been on a major label: refusing was easier when nobody had offered you anything.
What it felt like at the time
Sudden, by every account. A genre that had been on arena bills in the summer of 1991 was, within about eighteen months, unbookable in most American cities.
Bands describe turning up to venues that had been sold out two years earlier and finding two hundred people. Labels stopped returning calls. Magazines that had put thrash on the cover in 1990 were covering something else entirely by 1993, and the coverage that remained was frequently written in the past tense about bands who were still touring.
Sources and notes
Sales figures for the 1991 Metallica album are widely reported worldwide totals and should be read as an order of magnitude. Years refer to original releases.
