Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1983

Thrash metal

Emerged 1983 Origin California / Germany Subgenres 4 Vocals Shouted
Heaviness
8
Speed
9
Melody
6

Shouted. Barked or chanted, and you can still make out the words.

In short

NWOBHM plus hardcore punk: palm-muted riffs, brutal tempos and lyrics about war and society. The first truly extreme branch.

How it sounds

  • Palm-muted riffs in sixteenths, played with relentless downpicking.
  • Tempos of 180 to 250 bpm with skank beats and double kick.
  • Barked or shouted but still intelligible vocals, and fast aggressive solos.

Hear what that means

  • The downpicking

    Metallica - Master of Puppets

    Every note of the opening riff is a downstroke, at around 220 bpm. That is the physical fact the genre is built on - an upstroke would be easier and would not sound like this, because a downstroke lands harder and all of them land identically.

    Open on YouTube
  • Where the rain stops from 24:42

    Slayer - Reign in Blood

    Fifty seconds of rain, and then the most-quoted riff in metal. Listen to the snare underneath it: on every upbeat, at a tempo where that is barely playable. That is the skank beat, and it is the hardest thing a thrash drummer does.

    Open on YouTube at 24:42
  • The German version

    Kreator - Pleasure to Kill

    The same tempo and picking hand as the Californians, recorded filthier and sung by someone with no interest in being understood. This is the record that thrash's descendants on the extreme side actually came from.

    Open on YouTube

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 1 of 3 is cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
180-250 bpm
Song length
4-6.5 min
Tuning
E standard, or a semitone below it. Thrash predates the down-tuning arms race — the weight comes from the picking hand, not from the string gauge.
Production
Dry, bright and close-miked, with the guitars stacked hard left and right and almost no reverb on the snare. Nothing is allowed to blur, because the riff is sixteenth notes and blurring would cost you the notes.
Written about
Nuclear war, Institutional corruption, Addiction, The horror film

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Palm-muted eighths and sixteenths, every one of them a downstroke. That is what makes a thrash riff a rhythm part before it is a melody, and it is why the genre is exhausting to play.
  • Bass Doubling the guitar's root notes almost exactly, and mixed low enough that its absence took people a while to notice — which is the joke about ...And Justice for All.
  • Drums The skank beat: snare on every upbeat at a tempo where that is barely possible. Double kick is saved for fills rather than run underneath the whole song, the way death metal would.
  • Vocals Barked at the top of the chest voice, landing on the beat with the riff rather than floating over it — and still intelligible without a lyric sheet.

What it isn't

That thrash is simply metal played fast. Speed is the least of it — the genre's actual invention is rhythmic, and it is in the right hand. A thrash riff is a drum part played on a guitar: palm-muted, downpicked, syncopated against the kick, and written so that the pitch matters less than the placement. That is why a thrash riff still works hummed as a rhythm with no notes in it, and why bands that merely played fast in 1985 sounded nothing like this.

Told apart from

  • Speed metal Speed metal is traditional metal played fast: the riffs still sit underneath a singer and a chorus. Thrash puts the riff in charge and makes the vocal follow it.
  • Crossover thrash Crossover is hardcore played by people who learned thrash riffs. The tell is length — crossover is usually done inside two minutes, and thrash takes five.
  • Death metal Death metal took thrash's tempos and threw out the verse, the chorus and the intelligible vocal. If you can shout it back, it is thrash.
  • Groove metal Groove metal is thrash at half speed with a swing in it. The same riffs, the opposite relationship to the beat.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

A handful of Californian teenagers listened to NWOBHM and hardcore punk at the same time and drew the logical conclusion. Metallica released Kill 'Em All in 1983, Slayer went more extreme, Megadeth more technical, Anthrax closer to hardcore. In Germany, Kreator and Sodom took the sound somewhere filthier still, and death and black metal were born out of it.

Descended from

Branches into

On the timeline

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

  • Screamo 2.4 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
  • Hardcore punk 2.8 apart by rating · no shared ancestor

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim. These share no ancestor with it at all.