Reign in Blood: The Taxonomy of Thrash Metal

Heavy Blog
Deep Dive
Welcome back to our Taxonomy series, where we break down umbrella genres like progressive metal, post rock and doom metal and outline all of the progressions and subgenres that have matriculated over the past few decades. The dissection of thrash metal you'll find below contains a detailed dissection of the most crucial genre in extreme metal style. Thrash led to incredible innovations over the years, and in turn, a multiplicity of styles has made its way back into the genre's core traits to form some of the most forward thinking metal coming out today. Seriously, many of the bands mentioned below have released records less than a year ago, and in some cases, less than a month. There's a ton of ground to cover here, so without further ado, let's riff on some of the best thrash you can use to mosh in your bedroom.

Dust Bolt – Mass Confusion

Andrew Hatch
Reviews
The industrious thrash metallers Dust Bolt return with Mass Confusion, their third album in four years. Dust Bolt have always been inclined towards straight up old-school thrash metal in the vein of Sodom, rather than the thrash insanity that bands like Vektor have been dishing out recently. As such, Mass Confusion does not represent a musical step forward for Dust Bolt; but this is no tragedy, because Dust Bolt are very good at what they do. Just as in their previous two albums, Dust Bolt engineers the foundation of a solid album in the simplest possible way: through great riffs.