The Golden Years (1986–1990)

Fifty five months. That is the whole thing. Between March 1986 and October 1990 thrash metal released very nearly every record it will be remembered for, and if you deleted everything the genre has made outside that window the loss to the world would be real but not catastrophic.

No other style of popular music has a peak this concentrated or this steep on both sides. What is worth asking is not why it was so good, which is comparatively easy to answer, but why it stopped, because the same forces that produced the run were the ones that ended it, and they were already visible in the middle of it.

Eight months in 1986

Start with the year everybody quotes, and then look at what is actually in it.

On 3 March, Metallica released Master of Puppets: eight songs, fifty four minutes, an instrumental, an acoustic introduction, and a level of arrangement that no heavy band had previously attempted at that tempo. On 19 September, Megadeth released Peace Sells... but Who's Buying?, the record on which Mustaine's writing becomes coherent and the sneer acquires an argument. On 7 October, Slayer released Reign in Blood and ended the discussion about speed in twenty nine minutes.

In the same twelve months, Kreator made Pleasure to Kill, Dark Angel made Darkness Descends, Nuclear Assault made Game Over, Sepultura made Morbid Visions, Tankard made Zombie Attack, Voivod were halfway to Killing Technology, and Cro-Mags made The Age of Quarrel. Any one of those years would be a good decade for most genres.

And then, at around seven in the morning on 27 September, on a road outside Ljungby in Sweden, Metallica's tour bus left the carriageway and Cliff Burton was killed. He was twenty four. The most inventive musician in the biggest band in the genre died in the middle of its best year, and the band that continued was never quite the same band.

Why the concentration happened

Four conditions held at once between 1985 and 1988, and all four expired.

The first is craft timing. Every founding band was three or four years old, which is the exact point at which a group can execute what it imagines but has not yet run out of things to imagine. That window is short and it closes on its own.

The second is competition. They had all heard each other. When Reign in Blood appeared, everybody else had to answer it, and the answers are the records in the table below. Nothing improves a scene like six bands who are frightened of each other.

The third is money, in exactly the right quantity. The independents were still signing and the majors had started paying but had not yet started interfering. A band in 1987 could get a real studio and a real producer without being asked for a single, and that combination lasted about three years.

The fourth is that nobody had done any of it yet. Every technical problem was open. How fast can a drummer play this. Can a thrash song be eight minutes long. Can it have an acoustic passage. Can it be dry. Nobody knew, so everybody tried, and the answers all arrived at once.

1987: the class that was not a fluke

If 1986 was the explosion, 1987 proved it was a scene and not four bands.

Anthrax made Among the Living, which remains the most enjoyable record any of the big four produced. Testament arrived with The Legacy, a debut of alarming completeness by a band whose average age was around twenty two. Overkill made Taking Over. Kreator made Terrible Certainty, Sodom made Persecution Mania, Destruction made Release from Agony, Sarcofago made I.N.R.I., Voivod made Killing Technology, and Coroner arrived from Zurich with R.I.P..

The pattern in that list is worth noticing. In 1983 there were perhaps a dozen bands in the world playing this music. By 1987 there were several hundred on four continents, and the good ones were no longer clustered anywhere in particular.

The Bay Area's second wave

The East Bay had built the genre's first scene, and by 1986 the founders had either left, signed to majors, or self destructed. What replaced them was a generation that had grown up watching those bands from the front row.

Testament came out of a band called Legacy, and when Chuck Billy replaced Steve Souza the line up settled into what it would be for most of forty years, with Alex Skolnick playing lead guitar with a fluency and a harmonic vocabulary the genre had not had before. Death Angel were five Filipino American cousins from Daly City who had been playing together since childhood; their drummer was fourteen when they recorded their first demo with Kirk Hammett producing, and The Ultra-Violence in 1987 is one of the most startling debuts in the genre.

Forbidden, Vio-lence, Heathen, Defiance, Mordred: a whole second tier arrived at once, and the standard was high enough that several of those records would be considered classics if they had been made anywhere else. What the second wave lacked was not quality but timing, because by the time most of them had a second album the window was closing.

The genre grows up, and pays for it

The middle of the run is where thrash starts to take itself seriously as composition, and the results are magnificent and slightly worrying in equal measure.

Metallica's ...And Justice for All in 1988 is nine minutes a song, in multiple movements, with almost no bass audible in the mix, and it reached number six in America, which for a record that difficult is close to absurd. Coroner's No More Color in 1989 is thrash written as actual composition, by a Swiss trio who had been Celtic Frost's roadies. Megadeth's Rust in Peace in 1990, with Marty Friedman and Nick Menza, is the hardest record in the genre to play and still the benchmark for the technical wing.

The worrying part is what technicality does to a music whose founding virtue was urgency. Once the question becomes how well can we play this rather than how hard can we hit it, a genre has changed its criteria, and some of what made it dangerous does not survive the change. Nobody has ever accused Rust in Peace of being unexciting, but it is admired in a way that Show No Mercy is not, and admiration is a colder emotion.

What they were writing about by now

The other thing that matures across these five years is the subject matter, and it deserves more credit than it usually gets. The founding records were about damnation, war and speed. By 1988 the best lyricists in the genre were writing about specific institutions and specific failures, and doing it with a level of research that no other branch of heavy music was attempting.

Metallica gave a whole album to systems that grind people up: the courts, the military, censorship, environmental damage, and a nine minute song narrated from inside a body that cannot move or speak. Megadeth wrote about arms dealing, about the American treatment of Native Americans, about a man being handed a rifle and told who to point it at. Anthrax wrote about the Ku Klux Klan and about the treatment of the homeless, and also about a comic book character, because they were Anthrax.

Even the bands with the most lurid sleeves were mostly writing journalism. Sodom wrote about a defoliant and a war photographer. Kreator wrote about state violence as an administrative process. The gap between what these records look like and what they actually say is the single most persistent misunderstanding about the genre, and it was never wider than in these five years.

The tours that carried it

The live economy scaled at exactly the same rate as the records, and it is worth tracing because the collapse hit it first.

In 1986 the model was still a van, a support slot and a hall that held eight hundred. By 1988 Metallica were opening for Van Halen at the Monsters of Rock stadium shows in America, in front of audiences who had come for something else entirely. By 1990 and 1991 the Clash of the Titans tours were putting Slayer, Megadeth, Anthrax, Testament, Suicidal Tendencies and Alice in Chains on the same bill across Europe and America, which is as complete a summary of where the genre stood as any list of albums.

Two things followed from that scale. The first is that a generation of listeners in secondary cities finally got to see these bands, which is why the audience that turned up for the reunions twenty years later was so much larger than the one that had bought the records. The second is that the overheads went up permanently, and when the audience moved on after 1992, a lot of bands were left running a machine built for a crowd that had stopped coming.

What the studios learned

The production history of these five years is a straight line and it is instructive.

In 1983 a thrash album was recorded in a week for the price of a small car and sounded like it. By 1986 the good ones had a philosophy: dry, close, separated, no reverb tail to smear the attack, because a music built from sequences of fast riffs is unintelligible in a wet room. Flemming Rasmussen in Copenhagen, Rick Rubin in New York and Harris Johns in Berlin arrived at three different versions of the same insight.

By 1988 the budgets had grown and the risk changed direction. The danger was no longer a bad sounding record, it was a polished one. Bands began spending months on drum sounds. Guitar tracks were quadrupled. The one thing an eight track studio and a week of time had guaranteed, which is that the record documents a band playing, started to disappear.

You can hear the whole trajectory in Metallica's four albums of the decade, from the flat wallop of the first to the vast, brittle, bass free architecture of the fourth. Each step is a technical improvement and the cumulative effect is a band moving away from the thing it was.

Television, charts and the arrival of money

Look down the right hand column of that table and the story tells itself. In 1986 a great thrash record reached number ninety four. In 1990 a harder one reached twenty three.

Two things caused that. The first was ...And Justice for All, and specifically the video for "One", which Metallica had resisted making for years and which, once made, put an eight minute song about a mutilated soldier onto daytime television in front of an audience who had never heard anything like it. The second was simply time: the teenagers who had bought the demos in 1983 were now twenty five and had jobs.

The money arrived on schedule and behaved as money does. Tours got bigger and the vans became buses. Bands who had shared floors were now on separate floors of the same hotel. And record companies who had signed a thrash band as a cheap punt on a growing underground began, around 1990, to have opinions about choruses.

1990: the peak and the first cracks

The final year of the run is the strongest single twelve months the genre ever had, and the ending is visible inside it if you know where to look.

Rust in Peace, Seasons in the Abyss, Persistence of Time, Kreator's Coma of Souls, Death Angel's Act III, Annihilator's Never Neverland, Sepultura's Arise arriving a few months later. On paper the genre is at full strength on three continents.

Underneath, three things are happening at once. Death metal has taken the extreme audience and is doing what thrash used to do, only more so. The best young musicians who would have formed a thrash band in 1985 are forming a death metal band instead. And in Seattle a completely different set of guitar bands is about to make everything with a solo in it look ridiculous for the better part of a decade.

Thrash's answer, when it came, was to slow down and look for a groove, and that decision, taken by almost everybody at once between 1991 and 1994, is where the next chapter starts: The Fall and the Revival.

What the run actually consisted of

One last way of measuring these fifty five months. Take any serious list of the best thrash albums ever made, from any magazine, in any country, compiled in any decade since. Somewhere between seven and nine of the top ten will have been released inside this window, and the exceptions will almost always be Ride the Lightning from 1984 or Arise from 1991, which sit a few months outside either end of it.

That is not how genres normally behave. Rock, soul, hip hop and country all have peaks, but they are decades wide and the great records keep arriving on either side of them. Thrash has a spike, and the spike is fifty five months long, and everything the genre has done since has been measured against a run that ended before most of its current audience was born.

Whether that is a tragedy or simply what happens to a music built on urgency by people in their early twenties is a matter of temperament. What is not arguable is the density. Between one spring and one autumn, four years apart, a few hundred musicians with no formal training and very little money produced a body of work that has held up for four decades and shows no sign of being displaced.

What the run cost the people in it

A closing note, because the density of those fifty five months has a human side that the discographies hide.

Every band named here was touring nine or ten months a year, writing the next record in soundchecks and hotel rooms, and doing it at an age when most people are finishing an education. Several were in vans until 1987 and in arenas by 1990, which is a change of life nobody prepares you for.

The consequences show up in the second half of the decade: the addictions, the dismissals, the litigation, the line up collapses. And one bus on a Swedish road at seven in the morning. The records are the achievement, and the lives that produced them were mostly a mess, which is worth remembering whenever the run gets described as a golden age.

Sources and notes

Chart positions are the peak Billboard 200 placings for the original American releases. Release dates refer to original pressings. The Ljungby crash is dated 27 September 1986. Ages given for Death Angel refer to the period of the band's first demo.