A history of thrash metal

From the Big Four - Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth - to the new wave

Joel McIver (Total Guitar), Thu 29 Apr 2010, 1:06 pm BST

Metallica

Metallica circa 1985 with a Big Four-letter word © Ross Marino/Retna Ltd./Corbis

Pioneered by Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth, thrash was the fastest and nastiest music of the '80s. In honour of Metal Week on MusicRadar we hit the throttle and track thrash from its defiant conception to its present day carnage, courtesy of Total Guitar magazine.

"Authority pisses me off. I think everyone should be able to drink and get loud whenever they want." When James Hetfield uttered those immortal words, he was of course talking about the loudest and most intoxicating form of music to come out of the '80s: thrash metal.

Nearly three decades after the movement emerged in 1981, the Big Four of thrash - LA's Slayer and Megadeth, San Francisco adoptees Metallica and New York's Anthrax - are still levelling crowds the world over. What's more, a whole new thrash scene has arisen in their wake and it's just as aggressive as the bands that inspired it.

As Tony Foresta of Municipal Waste said recently, his band's aim is "to thrash people's faces off and have fun doing it!"

In the beginning…

The story of thrash metal has been told many times before, more often than not with a degree of uncertainty over which band came first and who played what. The reason for this is because thrash was primarily born from the metal underground, where clubs were sweaty and deals dodgy, and where no-one bothered to keep detailed records because they were usually passed out drunk on the floor.

But what we do know for sure is that in 1981, a Newcastle band called Venom released their debut album, Welcome To Hell, around the same time that New Jersey act Overkill recorded a song called Unleash The Beast (Within) and LA high-school act Leather Charm wrote a song entitled Hit The Lights. All three recordings featured high-speed riffage with a frenetic bass drum pattern - the two essential elements of what came to be known as thrash metal.

The basic thrash metal sound evolved from combining this crucial drum beat (itself borrowed from the hardcore punk scene) with the technical playing of New Wave Of British Heavy Metal bands such as Iron Maiden and the speed-freak tempos of Motörhead, Venom, Overkill and Leather Charm (along with a slew of other bands).

Leather Charm singer James Hetfield soon dumped his band and hooked up with a drummer called Lars Ulrich to form Metallica, releasing two demo cassettes in 1982, both of which were snapped up by the metal underground. The fearsome precision of Hetfield's picking and the sheer speed of his songs impressed a whole raft of musicians in the States and elsewhere, who - also spurred on by Venom's increasingly faster and nastier music - set about forming their own thrash metal bands.