Almost none of the famous thrash album covers were banned. That is the first thing to understand about this subject, and it is why the internet lists on it are mostly wrong. What happened instead, repeatedly and quietly, is that sleeves and titles were changed before anybody outside a record company had seen them, by distributors who told bands their product would not be stocked otherwise.
The censor in this story is not a government. It is a man with a warehouse and a list of shops, and he did his work months before release, which is why so few people know it happened at all.
A hand, a machete and a toilet
The most consequential case is the first one. Metallica's debut was to be called Metal Up Your Ass, a title they had already used for a 1982 live demo, and the planned artwork matched it: a hand rising out of a toilet bowl gripping a blade, blood on the blade, barbed wire around the bowl.
American distributors objected to the title and the sleeve together, and the objection was practical rather than moral. They did not believe shops would stock it, and a record that shops will not stock is a record a distributor cannot sell. Megaforce had a mortgage riding on this album, so the argument had one possible ending.
What the band did with their defeat is the part everybody remembers. The replacement title was their answer to the distributors themselves, said with feeling, and it went on the sleeve. Kill 'Em All came out in July 1983 with a hammer and a pool of blood on the cover, and the phrase that got there by insulting the people who had censored them is now one of the best known titles in metal.
Exodus changed two covers in three years
Exodus are the genre's clearest case, because it happened to them twice.
Bonded By Blood was recorded in July 1984 and did not reach the shops until 5 April 1985, and the artwork was part of the delay. The cover is an illustration of conjoined infant twins, one rendered as good and one as evil, and it is genuinely unsettling in a way that has nothing to do with gore. It did survive to release. But when the album was reissued in 1989 the illustration was gone, replaced by the band logo over a red and black crowd image, on the grounds that the original was too much.
The second album never got that far. Pleasures Of The Flesh, in 1987, was to carry an illustration of the band as cannibals, preparing and eating a meal in keeping with the title. It was replaced before release with a photograph of five men leaning on a bar. Nobody banned anything. Somebody simply looked at the first idea and decided a photograph would be easier to sell.
The censor in this story is not a government. It is a man with a warehouse and a list of shops.
Why thrash got off lightly
Compared with what came next, thrash had an easy time of it, and the reason is subject matter. The sleeves that genuinely got prosecuted, seized and indexed through the late 1980s and the 1990s belong to death metal and grindcore, whose artwork was explicitly anatomical and whose whole aesthetic was built to be unbearable.
Thrash covers are mostly something else: skulls, soldiers, mushroom clouds, mascots, cartoon violence, apocalyptic landscapes. That is imagery a chain store manager in 1987 had already seen on a horror paperback, and it did not trip the same wires. The genre's real provocations were in the lyrics, and a lyric sheet is inside the sleeve where nobody browsing has to look at it.
Titles did more damage than pictures
Where thrash did run into trouble, it was usually the words on the front rather than the image. S.O.D.'s Speak English Or Die, released on Megaforce on 30 August 1985, has been argued about ever since, and the argument is not really about the sleeve. The band's position has always been that it is satire and that the character singing is the joke; the counter position is that a title works as a title whether or not the record inside is ironic, and that plenty of people only ever saw the front.
The useful thing about that case is that nobody censored it. It was sold, widely, and it is one of the most influential records of the crossover era. The argument was left to the audience, which is what should have happened with all of them.
| Record | Original plan | What happened | Who decided |
|---|---|---|---|
| Metallica, 1983 | Metal Up Your Ass, hand and blade from a toilet | Retitled Kill 'Em All, new sleeve | Distributors, before release |
| Exodus, 1985 | Conjoined twin infants illustration | Released, then replaced on the 1989 reissue | The label, afterwards |
| Exodus, 1987 | The band depicted as cannibals | Replaced with a photograph of the band | Decided before release |
| Slayer, 1986 | Released as planned | Distributor refused the album, not the sleeve | Columbia |
| Slayer, 2006 | Released as planned | Withdrawn and destroyed in one country | A regional label arm |
| S.O.D., 1985 | Released as planned | Nothing. Argued about for forty years instead | Nobody |
The German instrument
Europe had a mechanism the United States never built. The German federal review board for media harmful to young people maintains a register, universally called the Index, and an indexed record cannot be sold to anyone under eighteen, cannot be advertised and cannot be displayed openly in a shop. Heavy metal was one of the board's standing concerns through the 1980s.
That is a considerably sharper tool than a warning sticker, because it does not depend on a parent noticing. A record kept out of the window and out of the advertisements has to be asked for by name by somebody who already knows it exists, which for a young band is very close to not existing at all. The German thrash bands released into that environment at home while their American contemporaries were arguing about a label.
What the changes cost
Very little, commercially, and that is worth saying plainly. Every record discussed here sold. Several of them became canonical. The distributor who forced the Metallica retitle was not wrong about what shops would take in 1983, and the album he insisted on has now sold in the millions.
The loss is archival rather than financial. A cover is a document of what a band thought it was doing at twenty years old, and when it is replaced before release the document is gone: no pressing, no proof, just a description in an interview thirty years later. Half the artwork in this article exists now only as a story about artwork, which is a strange kind of censorship to have won.
The album that actually did get refused, wholesale and by name, is The Album a Record Company Refused to Distribute, and the rest of the trouble is where this sits in the story. From the arguments to the arithmetic: The Fastest Thrash Metal Songs Ever Recorded.
