Megaforce is the label with the story: a couple, a flea market stall and a second mortgage. Combat has no story of that kind, and it released more of the records this genre is actually built on than anybody. It was founded in New York in 1982 as a subsidiary of a record distributor, which is to say it was a business decision rather than an act of faith, and that difference explains almost everything it did.
A distributor's label does not need a hit. It needs volume, a steady release schedule and titles that will move a few thousand copies each through a system it already owns, and that is exactly the economic shape that lets somebody sign Possessed.
The label that took the bands nobody else would
Look at what Combat put out between 1985 and 1988 and the pattern is unmistakable. Possessed's Seven Churches, made at Prairie Sun in a week in the spring of 1985 by teenagers whose demo had already named a genre. Dark Angel's Darkness Descends, the most exhausting American record of 1986. Death's Scream Bloody Gore in 1987 and Leprosy in 1988, which are death metal's founding documents.
None of those were commercial propositions when they were signed. All three are now load bearing in the history of extreme music, and the reason they exist is that a distributor in New York could absorb a record that sold four thousand copies without anybody losing a house over it.
The one that paid for the rest
Megadeth's Killing Is My Business... And Business Is Good! arrived in 1985 and became the label's bestseller, moving beyond two hundred thousand copies, which for an independent metal record in the middle of the decade is an enormous number.
Dave Mustaine has spent forty years complaining about that record's production and the money that was and was not spent on it, and both his complaint and the label's position are comprehensible. A distributor's subsidiary works on thin margins across many titles; a band with something to prove wants everything spent on theirs. The record sounds cheap because it was cheap, and it sold anyway, and the profit from it underwrote a great deal of what follows in this article.
| Year | Band | Album | What it turned out to be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1985 | Megadeth | Killing Is My Business... | The label's bestseller, over 200,000 copies |
| 1985 | Possessed | Seven Churches | The bridge from thrash into death metal |
| 1986 | Dark Angel | Darkness Descends | The most extreme American record of its year |
| 1986 | Nuclear Assault | Game Over | New York, and the bomb |
| 1986 | Possessed | Beyond The Gates | The follow up nobody talks about |
| 1987 | Death | Scream Bloody Gore | Death metal's founding album |
| 1987 | Heathen | Breaking The Silence | Produced by Ronnie Montrose, and overlooked |
| 1987 | Exodus | Pleasures Of The Flesh | The Bay Area's founders, on a New York label |
| 1988 | Death | Leprosy | The genre consolidating |
| 1988 | Forbidden | Forbidden Evil | The best record of the Bay Area second wave |
| 1988 | Blind Illusion | The Sane Asylum | One album, and two thirds of Primus |
A distributor's label does not need a hit. That is exactly the economic shape that lets somebody sign Possessed.
Where thrash turned into death metal, financially
This is Combat's real historical position and it is rarely stated. The transition from thrash to death metal did not happen because of a manifesto or a scene. It happened because one company was willing to keep pressing records by bands who were getting steadily more extreme, at a moment when nobody else would touch them.
Possessed in 1985, Death in 1987, Death again in 1988: that is a label following its bands out of one genre and into another, over three years, without apparently deciding to. Every subsequent death metal label in America was building on a market Combat had demonstrated existed.
Two labels, two theories of a record company
Set Combat beside Megaforce and you have the two available answers to the same question, both operating in the same state at the same time.
Megaforce was one couple who heard a demo, believed it, and put their house behind it. That model produces conviction, an enormous emotional investment in a small number of bands, and a company that is finished the moment its biggest act leaves for a major, which is exactly what happened.
Combat was a line item inside a distribution business. That model produces no conviction at all and a great deal of catalogue, because the question asked of each record is not whether it will be important but whether it will move three thousand units through a warehouse the company already runs. Over five years that indifference signed Possessed, Dark Angel and Death, none of whom any believer would have backed.
The uncomfortable conclusion is that the second model served the music better. Belief gets one band a career. Indifference at scale gets forty bands a record, and it is the records that survive.
The hardcore half
The roster also ran sideways into punk, which is the other thing a distributor's label can afford to do. Agnostic Front and the Circle Jerks appear in the catalogue alongside Dark Angel, and the crossover audience that had been forming in New York since the CBGB matinees now had a label that carried both halves of what it listened to.
That is a smaller achievement than the death metal one and it matters for the same reason. Crossover needed somebody to press it, and a company with a warehouse and a distribution network was in a better position to do that than a company with a conviction.
What it was not good at
Everything after the pressing. Combat's reputation among the bands who were on it is mixed at best, and the complaints are consistent: small budgets, minimal promotion, accounting nobody could follow, and no ability to take a record beyond the specialist shops. Forbidden Evil is the best thrash album of 1988 and almost nobody heard it, and that is not entirely the market's fault.
The trade was real and it went both ways. A band on Combat got made and got distributed, which was more than most bands of the period got at all, and it did not get a career built for it. Several of the most important records in extreme metal exist because of that bargain, and several of the bands who made them never earned anything from it.
What happened to it
The usual corporate arc. The parent distributor changed hands, the label was absorbed, revived, sold and revived again, and it has spent the last three decades as a name attached to different companies rather than as an operation with a point of view. David Ellefson relaunched it in 2017 and sold it in 2026, and it now operates from Germany.
What survives is the catalogue, which is the only thing that ever mattered. Between 1985 and 1988 one distributor's subsidiary in New York released the record that bridged two genres, the record that founded a third, the most extreme American thrash album of the decade and the best record of the Bay Area's second wave, and did all of it while its accountants were thinking about shipping volumes.
Where that sits against the label everybody does tell stories about is this part of the history. What the bands on these rosters were doing to each other while all this was going on is The Rivalries That Drove Thrash Metal.
