10 Greatest Thrash Metal Albums Of All Time

Thrash metal: an explosion of psychotic audio rage that took hold of the metal world during the mid 80s. Great Britain did the world the great favour of creating metal in the 70s and America revolutionised it in the next decade. Thrash metal guaranteed several things for thrill-seeking listeners: the fastest music, the heaviest music, the angriest music and, often times, the drunkest music.

Spreading like a Biblical plague out of the Bay Area initially, the frequently evil-oriented shredders of thrash successfully demolished the barriers between heavy metal and hardcore punk. Spitting venomous lyrics about a whole host of grim, gritty topics including (but not limited to) WWIII and Satanic rituals, thrash metal brought horror movie sensibilities into the audio world. The musical extremes reached forever changed the world of heavy metal and ushered in generations of increasingly extreme, risqué rock stars and metal troupes.

Among all the headbangers across the globe, most simply could not thrash to the life-endangering extreme of the genre’s finest. From America’s Big Four to Germany’s Big Three and everything in between, thrash metal was and is (and probably always will be) music at its face-punching finest.

German thrash metal was a world entirely its own, separate from the American scene and dominated by 3 bands: Destruction, Sodom and Kreator. Kicking things into high gear with the 1985 release of Endless Pain, Kreator outdid themselves with the explosively brutal Pleasure to Kill 1 year later.

The Essen quartet provide a feral, ferocious frenzy of headbanging rage with charmingly titled tracks such as Ripping Corpse, Riot of Violence and the titular Pleasure to Kill. Frontman Mille Petrozza’s vocals provide a bloodthirsty series of raspy lyrics to bounce off the furious riffs and pounding drum beats.

Inspired musically by the likes of Possessed and Slayer, Kreator were obsessed with creating the angriest, most apocalyptic music the world had ever heard. Lyrical inspiration came from Faces of Death, a 1978 film studying various ways of dying across the planet. Each and every song, in turn, depicts a different (but all too grisly) way to kick the bucket. A smash hit in the German metal scene, it solidified Kreator as pioneers of the international thrash genre for many years to come.