Thrash metal did not die in the nineties. It was demoted, which is worse, because dying at least confers a legend and demotion just means a decade of playing to four hundred people in rooms that used to hold two thousand.
Four things happened at once between 1991 and 1994 and each of them alone would have been survivable. Together they took the genre apart: the biggest band in it made a record that showed everybody a better way to sell albums, a completely different guitar music arrived from Seattle and made the whole visual language look absurd, a band from Texas invented a tempo that everybody copied badly, and the club circuit that had carried the underground quietly went out of business. Then, roughly fifteen years later, it all came back, and the reason it came back is more interesting than the reason it fell.
The record that won everything
In August 1991 Metallica released an album with no title and a black sleeve, produced by Bob Rock, and it has now sold something in excess of thirty million copies worldwide. It is a very good record. That is the problem.
What Bob Rock did was strip the arrangements back to one central riff per song, put the tempo at a speed a room full of ordinary people can move to, tune the guitars for weight instead of speed, and record a singer actually singing. Every one of those decisions is defensible on its own terms and the results are enormous, mid tempo, physical and hard to argue with.
The consequence was catastrophic for everybody else. Every record company with a thrash band on its books now had proof that a heavy group could sell thirty million albums by slowing down, and from 1992 onwards every one of those bands was invited, in the polite language of the industry, to consider the direction their next record might take. Some resisted. Most did not. Almost none of the ones who complied made anything worth keeping.
The room empties
Then Seattle. It is customary to blame grunge for killing thrash and the accusation is not quite right, but it is not wrong either.
What arrived in late 1991 was not primarily a musical challenge. Musically, a great deal of grunge is slow heavy metal played by people who liked Black Sabbath. The challenge was cultural, and it was aimed precisely at everything thrash had become by 1990: the virtuosity, the eight minute compositions, the guitar solos, the leather, the sense that this was a craft with standards. Against a man in a cardigan singing about how none of it mattered, a band who had spent three months getting a drum sound looked ridiculous overnight.
The commercial effect was instant. Radio changed format. Magazines changed their covers. Labels dropped the second and third tier, which is where most of the interesting bands were, and by 1994 a band who had made a classic album in 1988 could find itself without a label, without a booking agent and without a support slot.
The circuit went with it. 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. That infrastructure took fifteen years to rebuild.
Pantera and the new tempo
The third blow came from Texas, and it was not intended as one.
Pantera were a genuinely great band and Vulgar Display of Power is a genuinely great record. Dimebag Darrell was doing something new: a heavily processed, extremely tight, mid paced riff with a pinch harmonic on the end of it, played with a precision that owed everything to thrash technique and nothing to thrash tempo.
What made it destructive was imitation. Groove is much easier to fake than speed. A band that cannot play fast can play slow and heavy and sound acceptable, and between 1993 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. The genre spent five years sounding like a slower version of itself performed by people who had lost their nerve.
The restyling, band by band
What follows is uncomfortable and it is the part most histories skip, so here it is plainly. Almost every major band in this genre made at least one record between 1993 and 1999 that its own members now decline to defend.
The honourable exception is Sepultura. Chaos A.D. in 1993 slowed down, brought in Brazilian percussion and a hardcore directness, and produced something the band could not have made at their old tempo. Roots in 1996 went further still. Then Max Cavalera left after a family bereavement and an argument about management, and the band and the singer have been separate entities ever since, both making decent records that are not the thing either of them was.
| Band | Record | Year | What changed | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Metallica | Metallica | 1991 | Mid tempo, one riff per song, Bob Rock | Excellent record, ruinous precedent |
| Sepultura | Chaos A.D. | 1993 | Slower, tribal percussion, hardcore edge | The one that worked |
| Anthrax | Sound of White Noise | 1993 | New singer, alternative rock production | Good, then three albums of drift |
| Testament | Low | 1994 | Downtuned, no Skolnick | Underrated, then lost the plot on Demonic |
| Kreator | Outcast | 1997 | Industrial samples, gothic vocals | Their worst album, and they say so |
| Slayer | Diabolus in Musica | 1998 | Drop tuning, nu metal rhythms | The one Slayer album nobody defends |
| Megadeth | Risk | 1999 | Dance beats, radio rock, no thrash | Indefensible |
It is worth being fair about why this happened. These were men in their early thirties with mortgages, children and a professional skill that had abruptly stopped paying. A record company offering a budget on the condition that the next album sounds more current is not making an artistic suggestion, it is describing the only available terms. Most of them took the terms. Given the same circumstances most people would.
The cause nobody blames
There is a fifth cause, usually left off the list altogether, and it did more damage than grunge. 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, and crucially it was being 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, and the producers and studios were often the same. A genre was displaced by its own child, which is the least dramatic and most common way these things actually happen.
Add to that the plain economics: music got expensive to make and cheap to copy. Recording budgets collapsed across the industry at exactly the point the thrash bands lost their contracts, and a band without a label in 1995 had no way of reaching anybody. That did not change until broadband did, and it is not a coincidence that the revival begins within a few years of a young listener being able to hear a 1987 album without owning it.
Who kept the lights on
Two groups came through the decade with their credibility intact, and it is instructive that neither had much to lose.
The Germans mostly refused. Sodom never once slowed down. Tankard carried on making the same album about beer with total consistency. Kreator did lose their way, made three records they now describe as mistakes, and then came back in 2001 with Violent Revolution and have not made a weak album since, which is a better recovery than any American band managed.
The second group is the bands who simply never got big enough to be tempted. Overkill released an album every eighteen months through the entire decade, in front of steadily smaller crowds, and never changed a thing. Vader in Poland got better every year. A dozen European and South American bands kept the actual music alive in clubs while the famous ones were being restyled, and when the revival came it came out of those clubs and not out of a boardroom.
The veterans come back and the kids take it
The recovery started around 2001 and it happened on two fronts at once.
The veterans came back first, and the returns were better than anybody expected. Kreator's Violent Revolution. Exodus reforming and making Tempo of the Damned in 2004. Testament returning in 2008 with The Formation of Damnation, the classic line up back together and playing as if nothing had happened. Death Angel, Forbidden, Heathen, Sacred Reich, all back.
And Megadeth, having made the worst record of the whole restyling, made one of the best of the recovery: Endgame in 2009 is fast, technical, furious and entirely unembarrassed, and it demonstrated that the thing had never actually been lost, only put down.
The second front was a generation who had not been born when any of this happened. The retro thrash wave of the mid 2000s produced Municipal Waste, Warbringer, Havok, Toxic Holocaust, Evile, Gama Bomb, Bonded by Blood and a hundred others, most of them from towns with no metal history at all, all of them working from records made before they were alive.
A great deal of it was pastiche and it does not much matter. What the wave did was rebuild the circuit: small venues, small festivals, a touring economy, an audience of teenagers. Within five years there was somewhere for a young thrash band to play again, which had not been true since 1991.
Power Trip, and what modern thrash actually sounds like
The revival stopped being a revival at a specific point, and the point is a band from Dallas.
Power Trip were not a retro band. They came out of hardcore, they had a singer in Riley Gale whose delivery owed nothing to 1986, and Nightmare Logic in 2017 is thirty two minutes of thrash written by people using the form to say something about the present rather than to salute the past. It was reviewed by publications that do not normally acknowledge metal exists. It got the band onto festival bills alongside acts with no connection to any of this.
Riley Gale died in August 2020 at thirty four, and the band has not continued. What that record proved, though, does not depend on what happened afterwards: this music is not a period style. Played by people with something current to say, it works exactly as well in 2017 as it did in 1986.
Around it, the healthiest thrash scene in thirty years. Havok and Warbringer have both matured out of pastiche into real bands. Kreator headline festivals. Exodus, Testament, Overkill and Death Angel are all still making records that stand comparison with their eighties work. And in 2022 a television programme put a song from 1986 into the American singles chart for the first time in its life, which tells you the audience was always larger than the industry believed.
What the revival got right, and what it got wrong
Any honest account of the last twenty years has to admit that a lot of the retro wave was terrible. Zombie artwork, high tops, lyrics about beer and moshing written by people who had never seen a pit in 1987, and a great many albums that were essentially cover versions of records the band liked, with the titles changed.
What redeems the period is that the good ones grew out of it. Warbringer's early records are pastiche and their later ones are not. Havok started as a Slayer tribute and turned into a band with its own politics and its own guitar sound. Municipal Waste were always a joke and were always also extremely good at the joke, which is a harder trick than it looks. The wave functioned exactly as a scene is supposed to: a hundred bands form, ninety go home, ten become something.
It also solved the problem that had killed the genre in the first place. In 1991 there was no route from a bedroom to a stage that did not run through a record company. By 2010 a band could record at home, put it online, book a tour by email and sell shirts from a website, and no label had to approve any of it. That is the actual mechanism of the revival, and it is why it has proved durable in a way that a fashion cycle would not.
What it costs to still be doing this
One thing rarely said about the veterans, and it should be. The bands still playing this music in their sixties are performing a physically punishing job with no realistic exit.
Downpicking for ninety minutes a night, four nights a week, is manual labour, and the injuries are real: tendon damage, hearing loss, backs, shoulders. Several of the founding drummers have had surgery. Chuck Billy of Testament survived a cancer diagnosis in 2001 and went back on the road. The catalogue mostly does not pay, because these records were signed in the 1980s on terms nobody would accept now, so touring is not a victory lap, it is the income.
That is worth holding in mind next time a forty year old band is criticised for playing the same set. They are not coasting on nostalgia. They are doing a hard job, at an age when most people have stopped, for an audience that turned up late and in many cases only turned up at all because of a streaming algorithm or a television programme.
Where this leaves it
Read the whole arc and the thrash metal story turns out not to be a rise and fall at all. It is a music invented by teenagers with nothing, briefly bought by an industry that did not understand it, dropped when the fashion moved, and then picked up again by the same kind of people who made it in the first place.
The genre is now forty years old, its founders are in their sixties, and the best new records in it are being made by people in their twenties who found it on the internet. That is roughly what a healthy tradition looks like. Nothing about it needs rescuing.
If you want the map of who is worth hearing, from the founders to the bands playing next month, that is here: The 50 Thrash Metal Bands You Need to Know.
Sources and notes
Sales figures for the 1991 Metallica album are the widely reported worldwide totals and should be read as an order of magnitude. Verdicts in the table are editorial judgements, except where a band has publicly disowned the record concerned. Riley Gale died on 24 August 2020.
