Teutonic Thrash: Kreator, Sodom, Destruction and the Ruhr (1983–1990)

There is a version of the story in which Germany heard the Bay Area and copied it. It is wrong in every particular, including the dates. The first German thrash records were being made at the same time as the American ones, by teenagers who had never heard Kill 'Em All, in a part of the country where the pits were closing and there was nothing else to do on a Saturday, and what they produced was uglier, dirtier and considerably more consequential than anybody in California realised at the time.

Three bands, three cities inside forty miles of each other, and a fourth in Frankfurt who thought the whole thing should be funnier. Between 1984 and 1990 they built the version of thrash metal that death metal and black metal were actually made out of. Norway did not grow out of Metallica. Norway grew out of Gelsenkirchen.

Coal, steel and nothing else on

The Ruhr is the industrial basin of West Germany, and in the early 1980s it was in the middle of a slow collapse that everybody living there could see coming. Pits shut. Steelworks shed shifts. The towns were built for one employer each and the employer was leaving. Kreator came out of Essen, Sodom out of Gelsenkirchen, and Tom Angelripper of Sodom went down a working mine as a teenager and stayed there for years while the band existed.

You do not have to make this into poetry, and it would be dishonest to pretend the music is about coal. But the economics are real and they show. These were bands with no rehearsal room worth the name, no money for gear, and an entirely realistic assessment of what was likely to happen to them, and the records sound like people who had nothing to protect.

Destruction came from slightly further south, from Weil am Rhein on the Swiss border, and were the most technically able of the three from the beginning. But the temperament is shared, and it is the opposite of the American one. The Bay Area wanted to be understood. The Ruhr wanted to be unbearable.

What they had listened to

This is the crux, and it explains everything that follows. The founding German bands took their bearings from Venom, Motorhead and Accept's "Fast as a Shark", not from Diamond Head. Their model of a heavy record was a Neat Records album cut in three days by people who could not play, and their model of a good singer was a man shouting.

The Americans, by contrast, had grown up on the New Wave of British Heavy Metal riff, which is melodic, which resolves, and which implies harmonised twin leads. That single difference in the reference library produces two entirely separate musics from the same instruments. The Bay Area gives you sections that go somewhere. The Ruhr gives you a wall coming towards you.

It also produced the vocal. American thrash singers shout in pitch. Mille Petrozza, Angelripper and Schmier rasp, low and forward and without any attempt at a note, and it is a straight line from there to the vocal of every death metal band that formed in the following five years.

Berlin, Noise and the men with the contracts

The German industry that carried this music was tiny and it was concentrated in two places. Karl Ulrich Walterbach ran Noise Records out of West Berlin, having come out of the anarchist punk scene, and signed most of what mattered. SPV and its Steamhammer imprint in Hanover took the rest. Neither was generous and both were essential.

The other half of the infrastructure was two studios and one engineer. Caet Studio in Berlin recorded the first Destruction, Sodom and Kreator releases in a run of about a year, on budgets that would not have covered a day in Copenhagen. Then Musiclab, also in Berlin, and a man named Harris Johns, who engineered or produced a startling proportion of everything good that came out of German thrash and did it with a philosophy that suited the bands perfectly: get the room, get the take, do not fix it.

Sodom's In the Sign of Evil is nineteen minutes long, was recorded almost live, and is barely competent by any conventional measure. It is also one of the three or four most influential extreme metal releases ever made, because a generation of Scandinavian teenagers heard it and understood that the point was not to be good.

Three bands, three first records

Destruction went first, with Sentence of Death in November 1984, and it is the sharpest of the early German releases: real riffs, real arrangements, a guitarist in Mike Sifringer who could already do things the others could not. Sodom followed in January 1985 with the aforementioned nineteen minutes of noise. Kreator arrived in October 1985 with Endless Pain, on which two members swap the vocal from song to song because neither wanted to be the singer.

What is remarkable, looking at the dates, is how compressed this is. Fourteen months, three bands, three debuts, one studio, and none of them had heard the others until they were all out. That is not a scene copying itself, it is three groups arriving at the same conclusion independently because they had the same records and the same problems.

1986, when the Germans went past everybody

Then Kreator made Pleasure to Kill, and the argument stopped.

It came out in November 1986, cut at Musiclab with Harris Johns, and it is the point at which German thrash stops following anything. The tempos are beyond what the Americans were playing. The guitars are not separated in the mix, they are fused into a single mass. Ventor's drumming is barely holding on and that is the entire effect: a record that sounds like it might come apart, played by people who will not slow down to prevent it.

Put it next to Reign in Blood, released six weeks earlier, and you have the two poles of the genre in one autumn. Rubin took everything away from Slayer so you could hear each blow land. Johns left everything in and let it pile up. Both records are about extremity; one is a scalpel and the other is a landslide, and no serious listener should have to choose.

Pleasure to Kill is also the record that death metal came out of. Chuck Schuldiner, Trey Azagthoth and half of Sweden have said so in print. The vocal, the tremolo picked riff and the refusal of melody are all sitting there in 1986, three years before anybody used the phrase.

The one that thought it was funny

Frankfurt is not the Ruhr and Tankard were not miners. They were four young men who liked beer, and having noticed that every other German thrash band was writing about nuclear war and damnation, they decided to write about beer instead, and then kept doing it for forty years without ever once breaking character.

The joke works because the music does not wink. Zombie Attack, also 1986, also Berlin, also Harris Johns, is a fast, well played, genuinely aggressive thrash record that happens to be about drinking, and Tankard have outlasted almost everybody by the simple expedient of never having had a reputation to lose. They are still on the same label. They have never split up. There is a lesson in there somewhere about the survival value of not taking yourself seriously.

Behind them stood a second tier that deserves better than it gets: Deathrow from Dusseldorf, who went from crude to genuinely progressive in three albums; Assassin, Iron Angel, Living Death, Darkness. And in Switzerland, Coroner, who were roadies for Celtic Frost and turned into the most technically formidable band in European thrash, and Celtic Frost themselves, who were not really thrash at all and changed more than most bands who were.

Why the German records sound the way they do

It is tempting to attribute the rawness to poverty alone, and the budgets certainly were tiny. But that is not the whole answer, because the same bands stayed raw when they had money, and it is worth being precise about the mechanics.

Three things. First, the guitars are not double tracked into separation, they are stacked into a single wall, so no individual note is legible and the sensation is of mass rather than of detail. Second, the drums are recorded in the room with the cymbals bleeding into everything, which the Americans went to great trouble to prevent. Third, the vocal sits inside the mix rather than on top of it, so the voice becomes another instrument in the wall instead of a narrator standing in front of it.

The result is a record that cannot be taken apart while it plays, and that was the intention. You are not supposed to be admiring the riff construction. You are supposed to be underneath it.

From Persecution Mania to Coma of Souls

The second half of the decade is where the German bands learned to play, and the interesting question is what they gave up in exchange.

Sodom's Persecution Mania in 1987 brought in Frank Blackfire on guitar and turned a noise band into a functioning one without losing the menace. Two years later Agent Orange did something none of them had managed: it sold. Roughly a hundred thousand copies in Germany, top forty at home, an album about a defoliant sprayed over a war Germany had not fought, made by a man who had worked underground. It remains the commercial high water mark of the whole scene.

Destruction went the other way, into technicality. Release from Agony in 1987 is their most ambitious record, with a third guitarist and arrangements that go where nobody expects, and it is also the point at which the band began to come apart. Within two years Schmier was out, and the version of Destruction that continued without him is politely described as a difficult period.

Kreator, meanwhile, went to Hollywood. Extreme Aggression and Coma of Souls were cut in Los Angeles with Randy Burns, and they are the two best produced German thrash albums of the era: cleaner, wider, still fast, with Petrozza writing the sharpest lyrics of his life. Whether that clarity was worth the loss of the 1986 murk is the argument German thrash fans have been having ever since, and there is no correct answer.

What they were actually writing about

The sleeves are demons and the song titles are damnation, and if you stop at the sleeves you will get these bands completely wrong. Read the lyric sheets and the German scene turns out to be the most politically engaged wing of the whole genre, for a reason that is not hard to work out: these were young men living in the country the next war was going to be fought across.

West Germany in the mid 1980s held more nuclear warheads per square kilometre than anywhere else on earth, aimed east, with the reciprocal aimed back. Pershing missiles arrived in 1983 and put hundreds of thousands of people on the streets. Every teenager in the Ruhr understood that the phrase theatre of operations meant the street they lived on.

So Sodom write about a defoliant and about a war photographer. Kreator write about state violence, about the machinery of belief, about extermination as an administrative process. The early Satanism was a costume borrowed from Venom and most of them dropped it inside two albums; what replaced it was a bleak, specific, entirely secular account of what the twentieth century had done, written by people whose grandparents had done some of it.

1990, and what the wall did

The scene's high point and its ending are separated by about eighteen months, and the coincidence with German reunification is too neat to be pure coincidence. Coma of Souls came out in November 1990, a month after the two Germanies became one, and it is the last great record of the era.

What followed was the same collapse that hit everywhere else, arriving slightly later and hitting harder because the German bands had less cushion. Noise Records ran into trouble. Audiences moved to death metal, which the German bands had helped invent and which now took their crowd. Destruction lost their singer and released records their own fans disown. Kreator spent the middle of the decade making industrial and gothic influenced albums that sold poorly and are now defended by roughly nobody, including the band.

The recovery, when it came, was more complete than in America. Kreator returned in 2001 with Violent Revolution and have not made a weak record since. Sodom never stopped. Destruction got Schmier back in 1999 and became a functioning band again. Tankard, of course, never noticed anything had happened.

What Norway heard

In the late 1980s, in a country with a population of four million and no metal scene to speak of, a small number of teenagers were receiving German records in the post. What they took from them was not the riffs.

What they took was the aesthetic position: that a recording could be deliberately primitive, that production values were a form of dishonesty, that the corpse paint and the inverted crosses on the Venom and Sodom sleeves were a starting point rather than a joke. In the Sign of Evil in particular was treated by the second wave of Norwegian black metal as something close to a founding document, and its influence on the sound of the early 1990s is larger than that of any American thrash record.

The same records went south as well, to a mining town in Minas Gerais where four teenagers were building something out of German and British imports that arrived months late and cost a fortune. That is the next chapter: Brazil, Canada and the Rest of the World.

Sources and notes

Studio, producer and date information is taken from original pressings and label discographies. Sales figures for Agent Orange are the widely reported German domestic figures and should be read as an order of magnitude. Attributions of influence to later death and black metal musicians are drawn from published interviews rather than inferred from the music.