Autumn 1986, two rooms, five weeks apart. In one of them a New York producer with a hip hop label was stripping a Los Angeles thrash band down to twenty nine minutes of the cleanest, fastest, most precisely engineered noise anybody had made, and Reign in Blood came out that October. In the other, a Floridian guitarist and a seventeen year old drummer were in Los Angeles too, with a smaller budget and a producer on his second job of this kind, tuning down and slowing the riffs until they stopped resolving.
That is the fork, and you can date it to within a month. One branch of thrash went up: faster, tighter, better recorded, sold to people who owned no other metal. The other went down. Both were arguments about extremity and neither could win on the other's terms. The narrative account of those years is the break from thrash. What follows is the mechanics of it, part by part.
What death metal kept
Start with the inheritance, because people forget how much of it there is. The right hand came over intact: the locked downstroke, the palm mute, the tremolo picked figure held until it becomes a texture. So did the architecture, which in both genres is riff to riff rather than verse to chorus, a sequence of blocks joined at the edges. So did the double kick as a permanent condition rather than a fill. So did the horror lyric, the hand drawn logo and the economics, which is to say no budget, no producer asking for a single, and a demo posted in a padded envelope.
And so did the speed, although this is the part where the two genres part company fastest. Thrash used velocity as a proof of competence. Death metal took the same tempos and used them to bury the notes, which is the same tool doing the opposite job.
What it threw out
Six things were excised, and the order matters because they went in roughly this sequence. First the sung chorus, which is the single biggest structural difference between a thrash song and a death metal song. Then pitch in the vocal, replaced by a growl that carries rhythm and consonants but no melody. Then tonal resolution: a thrash riff usually returns to a root note and lands, and a death metal riff is written specifically not to.
Then the gallop, that triplet figure inherited from British heavy metal, which by 1987 sounded like a costume. Then the solo as a melodic showpiece, replaced by an atonal squall that functions as noise rather than as a tune. And finally the audience contract: thrash tempos are tempos you can move to in a room, and a great deal of death metal is deliberately written at speeds no crowd can follow.
| Kept from thrash | Thrown out | Added |
|---|---|---|
| Downpicking and the palm mute | The sung chorus | The growl as a fixed instrument, not an effect |
| Riff to riff song architecture | Pitch in the vocal line | Tuning down a tone or more |
| Continuous double kick | Riffs that resolve to a root | The blast beat |
| Tremolo picking | The gallop | Chromatic writing with no key centre |
| Horror lyrics and hand drawn logos | The melodic guitar solo | Songs that end without returning to anything |
| Demos, post and no budget | Tempos a crowd can follow | A guitar tone built out of low mids and dirt |
What it added that thrash never had
Three additions did the real work, and only one of them is the one everybody names. The growl is the obvious one, and its importance is not that it is low but that it is fixed: a thrash singer moves, a death metal singer holds one register for forty minutes, so the voice stops being a lead line and becomes a rhythm instrument sitting in the same frequency range as the guitars.
The second is tuning. Drop the guitars a tone or more and a chord stops being a chord and becomes a weight, and the riff has to be rewritten around that, because the shapes that worked in E do not speak the same way lower down. The third is the blast beat, which is not a faster beat. It is the sound of a beat being ground off. Once the snare stops marking anything the whole band is free to abandon the bar, and the moment that happened the genre could no longer be described as a fast version of anything.
Thrash used speed to prove competence. Death metal used the same tempos to bury the notes. Same tool, opposite job.
The records where you can hear the hinge
Hell Awaits, out on Metal Blade on 8 April 1985 and recorded at Eldorado in Los Angeles with Brian Slagel, is where most people put the first crack: the production is thick and sludgy, the tempos will not hold still and the atmosphere got borrowed by everybody who came after. Then the same band made the cleanest record of their lives eighteen months later and walked off in the other direction.
It gave me a lot of inspiration. A milestone, almost but not quite a good foundational album for death metal.
Trey Azagthoth of Morbid Angel, on Slayer's "Hell Awaits"
The rest of the hinge records are foreign. Sodom made Obsessed by Cruelty in 1986 with almost no technique and all the right instincts. Kreator made Pleasure to Kill the same year and got closer to the finished thing than any American thrash band did. Sepultura put Morbid Visions out on Cogumelo in 1986 sounding like both genres at once because in Belo Horizonte nobody had told them there was a schism. And Possessed had already done the halfway version in November 1985, with death metal on top and Bay Area thrash underneath it.
The bands who crossed the line in public
The most useful evidence is the bands who did both, because you can hear the apostasy happen between two albums. Pestilence from Enschede made Malleus Maleficarum in 1988 as a thrash record with a rasp on top, then recorded Consuming Impulse at Music Lab in Berlin with Harris Johns and released it at the end of 1989 as something else entirely: doom weight borrowed from Celtic Frost, atonal soloing, and Martin van Drunen's voice sitting down in the marrow of the mix.
Atheist did the same trick in reverse order, starting as a thrash band called R.A.V.A.G.E. and arriving somewhere no genre had a name for. And Sepultura crossed the other way, from the murk of 1986 to the clean, furious thrash of Arise in 1991. The line was never a wall. It was a direction of travel, and plenty of bands changed their minds about which way they were going.
Why the split held
Because by 1988 the two branches had different audiences, different labels, different venues and different economics, and neither needed the other any more. Thrash had major distribution and a video budget. Death metal had a post office box, a studio in Tampa and a European mailing list, and it grew faster than anybody with a video budget expected. The whole arc, from those first hinge records to the modern scene, is laid out in the roots, the boom and the revival.
One footnote that is not a footnote. The word had already gone out ahead of the music while all this was happening, attached to bands who were doing none of it, which is a separate and much stranger story: how Death Metal Got Its Name.
