The East Coast is the third scene and the one that gets described last, which is unfair, because it produced the genre's two most durable bands, both of its important record labels and the crossover that gave thrash its audience. What it did not produce is a myth, and in a story this dependent on retelling that turns out to matter.
It also sounds different, and the difference is easy to name once you have heard it: East Coast thrash bounces where the Bay Area grinds.
Two bands, four hundred years of touring between them
Anthrax formed in Queens in 1981 and Overkill in New Jersey around the same time, and between them they have been working almost continuously ever since. Neither has ever had a Metallica sized commercial moment and neither has ever stopped, which over four decades turns out to be the more impressive achievement.
Anthrax are the genre's most likeable band and the least like everybody else in it. Joey Belladonna is an actual melodic singer, which is why these records have a swing the West Coast never had, and the writing is the most engaged in thrash: Stephen King, Judge Dredd, the treatment of Native Americans, all on one album in 1987. They wore shorts, gave interviews, made jokes and appeared on prime time television, and every one of those decisions cost them credibility with people who confuse seriousness with misery.
Overkill went the other way and became the most consistent band in the genre. Bobby Blitz shrieks higher than anybody, D.D. Verni writes the songs, and The Years Of Decay, made with Terry Date in 1989, is the best album New Jersey produced and still the most underrated record in American thrash.
The hardcore is not an influence, it is the room
The single biggest difference between the coasts is proximity to hardcore punk. In the Bay Area the two audiences met at Ruthie's Inn because a promoter put them on the same bill. In New York they were the same audience, in the same rooms, with overlapping bands.
The Sunday hardcore matinees at CBGB, L'Amour in Brooklyn and City Gardens in Trenton put metal bands in front of hardcore crowds every week for years, and the result is a scene where the crossover is structural rather than occasional. Agnostic Front and the Cro-Mags are part of this story whether or not they belong to this genre.
The proof is S.O.D., formed out of Anthrax's downtime in 1985 and recorded in about three days, which put the word mosh in front of a metal audience and became one of the founding documents of crossover by accident. No Bay Area band would have made that record, because no Bay Area band was that close to the other side.
| Band | From | The record | What they are |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anthrax | Queens | Among The Living (1987) | The genre's most engaged writing, and a real singer |
| Overkill | New Jersey | The Years Of Decay (1989) | The most consistent band in thrash |
| Nuclear Assault | New York | Game Over (1986) | The bomb, as an entire career |
| S.O.D. | New York | Speak English Or Die (1985) | A joke band that named the vocabulary |
| Whiplash | New Jersey | Power And Pain (1986) | Fast, cheap and unfairly forgotten |
| Carnivore | Brooklyn | Carnivore (1985) | Peter Steele, before Type O Negative |
| Demolition Hammer | New York | Epidemic Of Violence (1992) | The heaviest thrash record ever made |
| Prong | New York | Beg To Differ (1990) | CBGB's sound engineer, and the way out |
East Coast thrash bounces where the Bay Area grinds.
Why it swings
Three mechanical reasons. The drumming carries more of the hardcore beat's original push and pull rather than drilling it flat, so the groove survives at speed. Charlie Benante's playing on the Anthrax records is closer to a funk drummer's sense of placement than to a metronome.
The vocals sit differently: Belladonna sings, Blitz shrieks up high, and both leave the middle of the range open, where a Bay Area bark fills it. And the riffs are shorter and more repetitive, with more space between the notes, which is a hardcore instinct rather than a metal one. Put those together and you get music you can move to rather than music you have to withstand.
The rooms
L'Amour in Brooklyn is the building this scene is organised around, a club that billed itself as the rock capital of Brooklyn and booked metal five nights a week for the whole decade. Every band in the table above played it repeatedly, and the touring acts from Europe and California played it on the way through, which meant a New York band could watch its competition at close range every week.
Around it sat CBGB on the Bowery, whose Sunday hardcore matinees are where the crossover actually happened, and City Gardens in Trenton, a room that took anything and is remembered for exactly that. What the East Coast had that the Bay Area did not is population density: a scene inside a metropolitan area of eighteen million people does not need everybody to live twenty minutes apart, because the audience is large enough to sustain a circuit on its own.
The infrastructure was here, not there
This is the part the California-centred version of the story loses. Both labels that mattered to American thrash were on the East Coast. Megaforce came out of a flea market stall in East Brunswick, New Jersey, and released the first records by Metallica, Anthrax, Overkill and Testament. Combat operated out of Brooklyn and carried Exodus, Possessed, Dark Angel, Death, Heathen and Forbidden.
So the Bay Area bands were signed, funded, pressed and distributed from three thousand miles away, and several of them were recorded there too, at Pyramid Sound in upstate New York with Alex Perialas. The music was made in California; the industry that made it available was in New York and New Jersey.
The one that got away twice
Nuclear Assault are the scene's best argument about what a career costs. Dan Lilker had been a founder member of Anthrax and left in 1984; he formed Nuclear Assault, put the subject in the name and spent five years writing about nuclear proliferation and institutional stupidity with more conviction than anybody in the genre.
The records are excellent and the band never approached the size of the one he had left, which is the ordinary outcome for a musician who prioritises the subject over the audience. He also played on Speak English Or Die, so his 1985 is a founding crossover record and a founding political thrash record inside twelve months, and almost nobody outside the genre knows his name.
What happened to it
It did not collapse the way the Bay Area did, and the reason is that it had never been as dependent on a single scene. Anthrax lost Belladonna in 1992 and kept going. Overkill simply never stopped, and have released more albums than any band in this article. Nuclear Assault came apart, reformed and came apart again. Prong walked out of the genre entirely and into something industrial.
What the coast lost was the crossover audience, which went to hardcore proper and then to the tougher end of the 1990s, and the sense of being one thing. But the two big bands are still working, still touring and still making records, which is more than the county that gets all the attention can claim for its own founders.
Where the East Coast sits against the two cities it is usually compared to is the wider story. The Brooklyn label that carried half the genre's underground is Combat Records.
