10 Best Thrash Metal Albums Of The 21st Century

For today’s younger metalheads, it’s hard to think of a time when thrash wasn’t the all-encompassing, extreme beast that it is now in the 2010s.

Thanks to names like the Big Four, Testament, Exodus, Annihilator and so on, the speed metal niche is probably the most popular subsect of heavy music, but – as hard as it is to believe now – there was a time in the early-to-mid-2000s when old-school thrash was “passé”, usurped by subgenres like nu metal and metalcore.

It wasn’t until 2008 that extreme speed had its glorious renaissance, thanks to a slew of huge albums over a very short period of time: Death Magnetic, The Formation of Damnation, Endgame, Conclusion of an Age, Killing Season, The Way of All Flesh and more all hit shelves that very year, smacking metalheads right in their nostalgia (and their wallets).

To celebrate a decade since thrash’s momentous comeback in the metal scene, it only makes sense to look at the subgenre’s recent best, from acts both new and old alike.

Also, before we get going, honourable mentions should be given to Municipal Waste’s The Art of Partying, Trivium’s Shogun and Astronoid’s Air. They’re really good albums, listen to them!

When you think of 2001 and the state of metal at the time (especially in the USA), very few thrash records come to mind. After all, this was a year dominated by Slipknot’s Iowa, Drowning Pool’s Sinner, System of a Down’s Toxicity and Rammstein’s Mutter. So, being the extreme stalwarts that they are, Slayer looked up and said “Yeah, f*ck your sh*t”, releasing the inflamattory God Hates Us All in September, 2001.

As if to make up for the past several years of Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach, Slayer’s ninth album was as heavy as an anvil the size of a plane, bolstered by the incessant speed of live mainstay “Disciple” and the grooving weight of single “Bloodline”.

Fitting thirteen incendiary tracks into 42 minutes, God Hates Us All is an exercise in ceaselessly frantic insanity, delivering an all-killer-no-filler assault that demonstrated that, beneath all the nu metal, there was still a market for balls-to-the-wall musical madness.

With this record, Slayer had delivered easily their best album in more than a decade; for thrash, it could not have come at a more vital time. God Hates Us All was a light in the black, signalling that speed metal still had the fan-base and the potential to return to its former glories.