A small number of bands took thrash and asked it to do things it had no business doing: concept albums, dissonance, odd time signatures, narrative across a whole record. Almost none of them were rewarded for it at the time and almost all of them are cited now.
Progressive thrash is the ambitious wing, as distinct from the technical wing, and the difference between the two is worth establishing before the names start.
Progressive versus technical
Technical thrash is about difficulty: complex rhythms, unusual intervals, playing that is hard to execute. Progressive thrash is about scope: what a record is allowed to be, how long a piece can run, whether there can be a story.
The two overlap heavily and they are not the same ambition. Watchtower are technical. Voivod are progressive. Coroner are both, which is why they turn up in every version of this article.
Voivod
The defining case. Four men from a paper mill town in Quebec who built an entire science fiction universe across five albums, with the artwork drawn by their own drummer and the music becoming stranger with each instalment.
Denis D'Amour wrote using dissonant chord shapes and intervals that rock guitarists simply did not use, arrived at by trial rather than by theory, and the rhythm section came from progressive rock rather than from hardcore. Dimension Hatross and Nothingface are where it comes together, and there is nothing else in metal that sounds like either.
Toxik
From New York, and the most underrated band in this article. Think This in 1989 is a concept record about information control and manufactured consent, with spoken interludes, a genuine structure and a singer in Charles Sabin who could hit notes most of the genre could not reach.
It should have made them. It arrived in 1989, sold poorly, and the band dissolved shortly afterwards.
Sieges Even
From Germany, and the furthest out of the three. Life Cycle in 1988 is thrash with jazz fusion arrangements and time signatures that require counting, and the band moved steadily further from metal with each record until they were something else entirely.
They are the clearest illustration of where this road leads: follow the ambition consistently enough and you leave the genre.
| Band | Record | Year | The ambition |
|---|---|---|---|
| Watchtower | Energetic Disassembly | 1985 | Time signatures, and bass as lead |
| Voivod | Dimension Hatross | 1988 | A five album science fiction cycle |
| Sieges Even | Life Cycle | 1988 | Fusion arrangements |
| Deathrow | Deception Ignored | 1988 | Crude to progressive in three years |
| Toxik | Think This | 1989 | A concept, properly structured |
| Coroner | Mental Vortex | 1991 | Harmonic strangeness |
| Vektor | Terminal Redux | 2016 | All of the above, thirty years later |
Why it was punished
Because the thrash audience of 1989 had been assembled on a promise of directness, and asking those listeners to follow a plot across forty five minutes was asking for something the genre had explicitly refused to require.
There is also a practical problem. A progressive record needs the sleeve, the lyrics and an uninterrupted hour, and the format most of this music was consumed in was a fourth generation cassette in a car. The ambition was invisible to a substantial part of the audience through no fault of anybody's.
What it turned into
Progressive metal as a commercial category, which arrived in the early 1990s and mostly did not come from these bands. The successful version was cleaner, more melodic and closer to progressive rock, and it sold considerably better than any of the names above.
The line that runs from Voivod goes somewhere else: into the dissonant and technical end of death metal, into a strand of black metal, and eventually to Vektor, whose Terminal Redux in 2016 is the first record in thirty years to attempt everything on this page at once and succeed.
None of these bands ever played to the audiences their contemporaries reached at the end of the decade, which is its own story: Thrash Goes to the Arena. The full account of the period is in The Golden Years.
The records that do not fit anywhere
Three more belong in this article and defeat the categories used in it.
Celtic Frost's Into the Pandemonium in 1987 has orchestration, female operatic vocals, a cover of a new wave song and a track that is essentially industrial. It was made by a band who had been playing the crudest music in Europe three years earlier, it baffled everybody, and it is now regarded as one of the most important records of the decade.
Blind Illusion's The Sane Asylum in 1988 has two future members of Primus on it and a harmonic sense that belongs to no genre at all. And Sabbat's Dreamweaver in 1989 is a concept album about a novel, sung by a man writing about Anglo-Saxon paganism.
What unites those three with everything above is a willingness to be wrong in public, which is the actual precondition for this kind of record and the reason so few bands attempted it.
How to approach the wing
Start with Nothingface, which is the most immediately rewarding, and give it three plays before deciding. The chords are strange enough that the first listen registers as wrongness and the third registers as a language.
Then Think This, which is the most conventional structurally and the most interesting lyrically. Save Sieges Even and the deeper Voivod records until the vocabulary is familiar, because they assume it.
The cost of being early
Every band on this page arrived with an idea that the audience was not ready for, and every one of them paid for it in the same currency: poor sales, a confused reception and a short career.
Thirty years later the same ideas are ordinary. Dissonant chord voicings, concept records, unusual time signatures and long form structures are unremarkable in modern metal, and a band doing any of them now is working inside a tradition rather than inventing one.
That is what being early costs and what it buys. None of these groups got the audience; all of them got the influence, and in a genre where the reputations were set by distribution deals, influence has turned out to last considerably longer.
Sources and notes
Years refer to original pressings. The distinction between progressive and technical drawn here is a working one rather than a term the bands used.
