Eight months. Between March and October 1986 thrash metal released the best record of its American wing, the best of its German wing, the most extreme record anybody had yet made and the sharpest politically, and half a dozen albums that would have led any other twelve months.
Then, on 27 September, on a road in Sweden, the genre's most inventive musician was killed at twenty four. That is 1986, and no other year in the history of any genre looks like it.
What came out
On 3 March, Master of Puppets. On 19 September, Peace Sells... but Who's Buying?. On 7 October, Reign in Blood. In November, Pleasure to Kill.
Around them, in the same twelve months: Dark Angel's Darkness Descends, Nuclear Assault's Game Over, Sepultura's Morbid Visions, Tankard's Zombie Attack, Cro-Mags' The Age of Quarrel, Destruction's Eternal Devastation, Voivod's Rrroooaaarrr and Slayer's Live Undead reaching a wider audience.
Why it happened
Four conditions held simultaneously and every one of them expired within four years.
Craft timing. Every founding band was three or four years old, which is the precise point at which a group can execute what it imagines and has not yet run out of things to imagine. That window closes on its own.
Competition. They had all heard each other, and several of the records above are direct answers to other records above. Nothing improves a scene like six bands who are frightened of being outdone.
Money, in exactly the right quantity. The independents were still signing and the majors had begun paying without yet interfering. A band in 1986 could get a real studio and a real producer without anybody asking for a single.
And nobody had done any of it. How fast can a drummer play this. Can a thrash song be eight minutes long. Can it have an acoustic introduction. Can it be recorded completely dry. Every question was open, so everybody tried, and the answers all landed inside eight months.
The two poles
Reign in Blood and Pleasure to Kill came out six weeks apart and represent opposite solutions to the same problem, which is how to make a record as extreme as possible.
Rick Rubin took everything away from Slayer. No reverb, no delay, no blanket of double tracking, so that every note of a riff at two hundred and twenty beats per minute is legible and the violence comes from clarity.
Harris Johns left everything in for Kreator. The guitars are fused into one mass, the drums bleed into everything, and the violence comes from weight. One is a scalpel and the other is a landslide, and both are correct.
27 September
At around seven in the morning, on the road between Stockholm and Copenhagen near Ljungby, Metallica's tour bus left the carriageway and Cliff Burton was killed.
He was twenty four, he was the most musically educated person in the band, and he had spent four years pushing a garage group towards arrangements with movements rather than sections. Master of Puppets, released six months earlier, is the record that argument produced.
The band continued, and did so with the surviving members' agreement that stopping was not what he would have wanted, and everything they made afterwards is a different band's work. That is not a criticism of Jason Newsted, who did an impossible job. It is simply what happens when the person who was arguing for ambition is no longer in the room.
| Date | Release or event |
|---|---|
| 3 March | Metallica, Master of Puppets |
| July | Tankard, Zombie Attack; Destruction, Eternal Devastation |
| September | Megadeth, Peace Sells... but Who's Buying?; Nuclear Assault, Game Over |
| 27 September | Cliff Burton killed near Ljungby, Sweden |
| 7 October | Slayer, Reign in Blood |
| November | Kreator, Pleasure to Kill; Dark Angel, Darkness Descends |
| Through the year | Sepultura, Cro-Mags, Voivod, Onslaught, Mortal Sin |
What 1986 did to everybody else
It raised the ceiling and then removed the obvious next move.
Once Reign in Blood existed there was no percentage in trying to be faster, because faster had been done and had taken twenty nine minutes. So the rest of the genre went looking for other questions, and the answers turned into technicality, into groove, into death metal, and eventually into the thing that ended thrash's commercial moment.
The second peak arrived two years later and looked completely different: longer songs, bigger production, more ambition and less speed. That is 1988: The Second Peak, and the full account of the run is in The Golden Years.
What else was happening that year
The records are only part of it, and the surrounding conditions explain why so much landed at once.
The independents that had built the scene were at their strongest. Megaforce, Metal Blade, Combat, Noise and Steamhammer all had functioning catalogues, distribution and adverts in the fanzines, and none of them had yet been absorbed or outbid. A band could get a record out in 1986 without a major label taking an interest.
The tape network was at its widest. Demos were moving between California, New Jersey, the Ruhr, Ontario, Stockholm and Sao Paulo in a matter of weeks, and the German and Brazilian bands were hearing the American records for the first time while the Americans were hearing theirs.
And nobody was rich. Every band named above was still touring in vans, still sharing rooms and still making decisions on the assumption that this would not last. That assumption is audible on every one of these records.
How to hear the year properly
Take the four principal albums in release order over one afternoon: Master of Puppets, Peace Sells, Reign in Blood, Pleasure to Kill. Four hours, four completely different ideas about what the same genre is for.
Then add Darkness Descends, which is faster than any of them and was released with no promotion into the same eight weeks. The gap between how well known that record is and how good it is remains the single clearest illustration of how this genre's reputations were actually decided.
Sources and notes
Release dates refer to original pressings; several European independents distributed on different dates by country. The Ljungby crash is dated 27 September 1986.
