Thrash began when metal musicians adopted some elements of hardcore punk. Once thrash had established itself as a distinct style, several artists emerged whose sound leaned back in a punk direction. Chief of these is the Los Angeles group Suicidal Tendencies, who broke with the single “Institutionalized,” a youth angst anthem if there ever was one, with a vaguely metal verse riff and a chorus that is clearly punk.
It was with their second album, Join the Army, that ST created the fully realized hardcore/thrash crossover sound. One highlight, “War Inside My Head,” is typical: Singer Mike Muir portrays a struggle with insanity — not Metallica’s supernatural or traumatic post-war madness, but some form of internally fueled raging urban burnout — while guitarist Rocky George transforms a mostly punk arrangement with classic thrash motifs.
Lest you think the blending of punk and thrash merged two discrete fan bases together into one loving family, remember that these are also styles whose fans are intensely territorial. In Get Thrashed, Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian recalls the animosity:
“We played a show out here in LA in 1986 at the Olympic Auditorium where it was just, it was chaos. You had 3,000 people there…and they all hated each other. It had nothing to do with moshing or slam-dancing. It was fights; it was packs of gangs chasing other people.”
This didn’t stop Ian from indulging his fascination with hardcore by launching S.O.D. (“Stormtroopers of Death”), a crossover group with abrasively satirical lyrics that failed to speak to those in the punk crowd who didn’t get the joke.
Acronyms seemed a popular naming convention; other groups in the movement include D.R.I. (“Dirty Rotten Imbeciles”), M.O.D. (“Methods of Destruction”) and C.O.C. (“Corrosion of Conformity”). Another trend in crossover is extremely short song forms. Some tracks by M.O.D. clock in at under 20 seconds — a device mirrored in grindcore, another offshoot of hardcore that developed in the United Kingdom.
Napalm Death were the pioneers of grindcore. They responded to metal and punk’s fascination with fast tempos by taking speed to its ultimate extreme. The blastbeat has since became a staple of hardcore and metal drumming. Their debut album, Scum, has a total running time of 33:04 despite containing 28 tracks.
From Scum, the song “You Suffer” was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s shortest song, clocking in at 1.316 seconds. The full lyrics are, “You suffer, but why?”
