On 25 February 1992, Atco Records put a photograph of a fist landing on a man's face into the racks. Eleven songs sat behind it. Every one of them had read the sleeve.
The Texas quartet that had already kicked the door off its hinges with Cowboys from Hell two years earlier, Pantera, went back in 1991 to Pantego Sound Studio in Pantego, Texas, owned by Jerry Abbott, father of the guitarist and the drummer, with Terry Date and Vinnie Paul sharing the producer's chair, and came out with Vulgar Display of Power, a record that knocked the last polite teeth out of heavy metal's mouth. No gloves on this one. Not even tape.
Here is why a metalcore and nu metal editor signs it. This is where the groove my whole beat runs on was poured, set and left to harden: the stomp, the bounce, the riff that waits for the floor instead of outrunning it. The later generations built whole careers on this canvas. You can trace the line from these eleven songs to half the bands that fill a room on a Tuesday night now, and the line is short.
That record came so naturally to us in the studio... That record just flowed naturally and seamlessly out of us, because as a band, we were so tight coming out of playing non-stop.
Rex Brown, Consequence, 25 February 2022
You can hear the road in it. Four men who had spent the previous stretch playing every night climbed through the ropes already warm, already bleeding a little, already sure of each other's footwork.
Six punches, bare fists
"Mouth for War" opens the account and gets straight to the jaw. The riff is the swing, and Philip Anselmo is the shout that comes with it. He has stopped trying to sing like a heavy metal frontman. What comes out instead is a bark and a roar, a drill sergeant with his knuckles wrapped in nothing, leaning over the top rope and screaming the next combination straight into your ear, every syllable a fist rather than a note. It was the first single. It sounded like a declaration of war on the whole leather and hairspray bastion of the decade before, because it was one.
"A New Level" keeps the pressure on, and then comes the one that matters most to my side of the building. "Walk" does not hurry. The riff circles you like a bare-knuckle fighter who already knows your ribs are gone, dropping its whole weight on the downbeat, each stomp driving a dent into the canvas you are lying on, and it never needs to speed up because it has already taken the fight out of you. That riff is the blueprint. Every bounce a nu metal band ever asked a crowd for, every breakdown a metalcore band ever built a bridge around, stands in the dent that "Walk" left. It is the most enduring single on the record, and it deserves to be.
"Fucking Hostile" is the shortest thing here, two minutes and forty-eight seconds, and it is the car park brawl after the licensed fight has ended. No ring, no ropes, no referee. Vinnie Paul drives it like a man kicking in a steel door, and the rhythm section under Dimebag Darrell's riff is locked so tight you could not slide a razor blade between the kick drum and the bass. This is the track where the hardcore kids plant their flag on a metal record. They have never given it back.
Then "This Love", the longest song on the record at six minutes and thirty-two seconds, and the one place the fighter drops his hands. Quiet verses, a feint, and then the chorus comes over the top and puts you on the canvas anyway. It breaks the record's own mould, and it proves the offensive was never just speed. "Rise" closes the opening flurry, the last clean shot of a combination that started with "Mouth for War", and by the time it lands the fight is already won.
Over all of it hangs a production that Terry Date keeps as clear as ring lights and as brutal as the sound of a skull meeting the boards. Every hit is audible. Nothing is buried in the crowd noise. Dimebag's tone is the heaviest weapon in the arsenal, and Date lets it land every single time.
The first six punches end the fight. The rest of the record is the long ten count.
Standing over a man already down
Here is the limit, and it is the only one worth naming. Stack your six hardest shots at the front of the evening, drop the other man before the bell has finished echoing off the rafters, and you will spend the remainder of the night pacing the canvas with your arms raised while the crowd is already pulling on its coats, and that is the shape of this record once "Rise" is over. "No Good (Attack the Radical)", "Live in a Hole", "Regular People (Conceit)", "By Demons Be Driven" and "Hollow" are not weak songs. They are punches thrown at somebody already counted out.
The back half has its heavy moments and the same four men are still throwing hard. But the momentum of the front six never comes back. It was spent on purpose.
Who it is for
I have stood beside enough merch tables to know which shirt still sells to kids born long after this came out. It is the one with the punch on it.
So here is the deal. If you came up on metalcore, nu metal or anything that asks a crowd to move on the one, this is the gym where your favourite band learned to throw, and skipping it means you have only ever watched the sparring. Dimebag Darrell, killed in 2004, and Vinnie Paul, gone since 2018, left behind the hardest thing two brothers ever built in their father's studio. Put it on from the top. By the sixth song the lights are up, the man is face down on the canvas, and you are the one who took the punch.