Brazil, Canada and the Rest of the World (1984–1991)

Every account of this music is written from California, and California is where the least interesting part of it happened. Between 1984 and 1991 thrash metal was built a second time, in places where there was no record shop that stocked it, no label to sign you, no club that would put you on and no chance of an American ever hearing the result. The people who did it were working from cassettes that had been copied four times and arrived by post six months late, and they were guessing.

They guessed wrong, repeatedly, and the mistakes are the point. Belo Horizonte misheard the German records and got the blueprint for black metal. Jonquiere in Quebec had a guitarist who did not know which chords he was supposed to be using and invented a new vocabulary. What comes out of this chapter is a simple and slightly uncomfortable fact: nearly everything that happened to heavy music after 1990 came from outside the two countries that invented it.

The tape in the envelope

Understand the physical situation first, because it explains the sound.

A teenager in Brazil in 1985 who wanted to hear a German thrash record had three options and all of them were bad. An imported LP, if a shop in Sao Paulo had one, cost a significant fraction of a monthly wage under an inflation rate that at points ran to four figures a year. A tape from a trader abroad took months and arrived third or fourth generation, hissing, with the top end gone. Or a friend of a friend had a copy of a copy and you recorded it onto whatever cassette you could find.

So the reference was not the record. The reference was a degraded rumour of the record, in which the guitars are a smear, the cymbals have vanished into noise and the vocal is a texture. When you set out to make something that sounds like what you heard, you make the smear on purpose. That is not a metaphor. It is a direct technical explanation for why the international scenes came out rawer, faster and more extreme than their sources.

What a record cost in Belo Horizonte

Belo Horizonte is a mining city in Minas Gerais, and in the early 1980s Brazil was in the last years of a military dictatorship, with an economy in a state that the word crisis does not adequately cover. There was no metal industry. There were no venues. There was a record shop.

Cogumelo was a shop that sold imports, and in 1985 its owner decided to become a label because nobody else was going to. Its first release was a split album: one side by a band called Overdose, the other by four teenagers who called themselves Sepultura. Max Cavalera was sixteen. Igor was fourteen. Their father had died two years before.

Morbid Visions followed in 1986, recorded in conditions that make the German budgets look luxurious, sung in English that the band did not speak, and it is genuinely difficult listening even now. It is also unmistakably alive. Somebody with a fourth generation tape of In the Sign of Evil and no way of knowing what the record was supposed to sound like made something with its own weather in it.

The wing that went further

The other Cogumelo band went further than Sepultura and got nothing for it except the respect of everybody who came after.

Sarcofago were formed in the same city by Wagner Lamounier, briefly Sepultura's singer, and their 1987 album I.N.R.I. did several things years before anybody in Europe did them. There is corpse paint on the sleeve, in 1987. There are bullet belts and spikes. And the drumming, played by a teenager on a kit he could barely afford, is doing something close to a blast beat at a point when the technique had no name.

Norwegian black metal musicians have said in print that this record and this sleeve were on the table when they were deciding what their bands should look like. The visual language that the world associates with a Scandinavian forest was photographed in Minas Gerais.

Around them: Vulcano from Santos, whose Bloody Vengeance in 1986 is as primitive and as convinced as anything from the period; Chakal, Holocausto, Mutilator. A whole underground that operated with no expectation of ever leaving the country, which is exactly the condition under which people make records that do not compromise.

Nas Nuvens, and the way out

In 1989 Sepultura got Scott Burns, who had been recording Florida death metal bands, to come to Rio de Janeiro and work at Nas Nuvens studio. The band had a fortnight and had rehearsed the material until they could play it in their sleep, which is fortunate, because the sessions were cut with almost no time for second attempts.

Beneath the Remains is one of the four or five best thrash albums ever made and the first great one from outside the United States and Germany. It is also the moment the map changed, because Roadrunner put it out worldwide and it sold, and after that no American label could pretend that the interesting bands were all within driving distance.

What makes it work is that the band had stopped imitating. The riffs are theirs. The drumming is not trying to be Lombardo. The lyrics are about a country that had just come out of a dictatorship, written by people who had lived in it. Sepultura went on to sell millions and to have a famous and bitter split, and neither fact changes what happened in that fortnight in Rio.

Quebec, and a guitarist who did not know the rules

Jonquiere is a small town in the Saguenay region of Quebec, several hours north of Montreal, and there was no reason whatsoever for one of the strangest bands in metal to come out of it.

Voivod started in 1982 as a crude, fast, Venom influenced group and by 1987 were making music that has no real precedent. The reason is Denis D'Amour, who wrote using dissonant chord shapes and intervals that rock guitarists simply did not use, not out of theory but out of not having been taught what was forbidden. Add Away's drumming, which is closer to progressive rock than to hardcore, and Snake's flat delivery over the top, and you have a band that arrived at a place nobody else was standing.

Killing Technology in 1987 and Nothingface in 1989 are the records where it comes together, and they are science fiction in the proper sense: a band from a paper mill town building an entire imagined universe, complete with its own artwork by their own drummer, and then writing music that sounds like it comes from there.

Canada gave the genre a great deal more. Exciter from Ottawa were arguably making speed metal before anybody in California, with Heavy Metal Maniac in 1983 on Mike Varney's Shrapnel. Razor from Guelph were relentless and prolific. Sacrifice from Toronto made Forward to Termination, which deserves to be as well known as any American record of 1987. And Annihilator arrived in 1989 with Alice in Hell, on which Jeff Waters played almost everything himself and demonstrated a level of guitar writing that the genre had not previously had to deal with.

Britain, which had invented the parts and could not use them

There is something almost comic about the British position. Every component of this music came out of Britain, and Britain then spent the entire decade failing to produce a thrash scene worth the name.

The reasons are structural rather than musical. The British music press had moved on to other things and treated metal with open contempt. The venue circuit that had carried the New Wave of British Heavy Metal had thinned out. And the audience that might have supported it had largely gone to hardcore or to goth.

What Britain did produce was a small number of genuinely good records made in isolation. Onslaught from Bristol came out of anarcho punk and made The Force in 1986, which is the first British thrash album that needs no excuses. Sabbat from Nottingham had Martin Walkyier writing about paganism and English history in a register nobody else was attempting, and History of a Time to Come in 1988 remains one of the most literate records the genre has. Xentrix, Acid Reign and Re Animator filled the space around them and were treated by the domestic press as a joke.

Japan, Australia and the long tail

Japan had a scene that operated on its own logic entirely, because the import economics were even harder and the audience took the music extremely seriously. Sabbat from Nagoya, no relation to the English band, began in 1983 and have never once compromised or broken up. Doom, Outrage and a network of small labels supported an underground that the rest of the world barely knew existed until the internet arrived.

Australia had the isolation problem in its purest form: no touring bands, no imports without a long wait, and an enormous distance to anywhere. Mortal Sin from Sydney made Mayhemic Destruction in 1986 on their own money and it got them to Europe. Hobbs Angel of Death and Slaughter Lord made records that circulate to this day among people who care about such things.

And the pattern repeats across a dozen more countries: Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Mexico, Greece. In every case, the same mechanism. Somebody gets a tape. It sounds wrong. They copy the wrongness. Something new appears.

Behind the curtain

The hardest place in the world to be in a thrash band in 1986 was on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, and the bands that managed it are the ones this history most often forgets.

In Poland, where the state controlled the pressing plants and Western records arrived as contraband, Kat made 666 in 1986 on a state owned label, with lyrics that the censors somehow let through, and Turbo turned from hard rock to thrash over the same period. Vader formed in Olsztyn in 1983 and spent most of the decade circulating on demo tapes because there was no other way, then emerged after 1989 as one of the best death metal bands in Europe.

Czechoslovakia had Torr and Master's Hammer. Hungary had a small scene operating under the same constraints. In every case the mechanics were the same: a tape smuggled in, copied endlessly, played until it wore out, and a band formed by people for whom the mere act of playing this music carried a risk that no Californian teenager ever faced.

When the borders opened after 1989, the effect on the genre was immediate and is still visible. Poland alone has since produced more world class extreme metal per head of population than almost anywhere, and it did it on foundations laid in the 1980s by people playing through equipment they had built themselves.

The Mediterranean and the north

Southern Europe ran on the same logic. Italy had Bulldozer, whose The Day of Wrath in 1985 is as filthy as anything from the Ruhr, and Necrodeath. Greece produced a scene that fed directly into its own black metal wave. Spain had Angelus Apatrida much later, but the underground that made them possible was already there in the 1980s.

Scandinavia is the interesting case, because the thrash bands themselves are mostly forgotten while what they turned into is not. Denmark's Artillery made three superb albums that almost nobody bought at the time and that guitarists now quote as an influence. Sweden had a thrash scene that converted, almost in its entirety, into the death metal explosion of 1990 to 1992: half the members of the Stockholm bands had been in a thrash group two years earlier.

The pattern across all of it is worth stating once, plainly. Where thrash arrived late and arrived degraded, it did not produce imitations. It produced the next genre. The countries with the worst access to the original records are precisely the countries that changed heavy music most.

What the outside did to the inside

Follow the thread and the thrash metal story stops being an American story around 1988.

Death metal was made out of Brazilian and German records as much as Floridian ones. Norwegian black metal took its look from a sleeve photographed in Minas Gerais and its sound from Gelsenkirchen. The technical wing of the genre owes more to a paper mill town in Quebec and a self taught guitarist in Vancouver than to anybody in the Bay Area. Grindcore came out of Birmingham. Groove metal, in the shape Sepultura gave it, came out of Rio.

The moral is not that the Americans were overrated. It is that a scene with money, press and access converges on a house style, and a scene with none of those things has no reason not to be strange. Every important mutation in heavy music between 1985 and 1995 happened where nobody was watching.

One of those mutations was already under way in New York, in rooms where the metal kids and the hardcore kids had stopped pretending to be different audiences. That is next: Crossover.

What the outside scenes had in common

Four continents, a dozen countries and one recurring set of conditions, and it is worth listing them because the pattern is remarkably consistent.

No local industry, so nobody to impose a house style or a commercial expectation. Imports that arrived late, degraded or not at all, so the reference was a rumour of the source rather than the source. Equipment that was borrowed, homemade or repaired past the point of reason. And an absolute certainty that none of it would leave the country.

Every one of those is a disadvantage and together they produced most of what was genuinely new in heavy music between 1985 and 1995. A band that cannot hear the record properly and has nobody telling it what the record is supposed to sound like will make something else, and something else is what the genre needed.

Sources and notes

Label and release details refer to original pressings. Ages given for the Cavalera brothers are at the time of the Cogumelo split release. Claims about the influence of Sarcofago and Sodom on Norwegian black metal are drawn from published interviews with the musicians concerned. The Nas Nuvens sessions are dated to 1989.