The Best Thrash / Speed Metal Album - Metal Storm Awards 2024

Adorior - Bleed On My Teeth

Adorior are the epitome of evil extreme metal, blending the fast riffs of thrash, the nightmarish atmosphere of black metal, and the brutality of death metal into an unstoppable, addictive assault on the senses. Vocalist Melissa Gray, the clear standout on the album, delivers a combination of absolutely devilish growls and clean shrieks, emphasizing the hellish soundscape of Bleed On My Teeth and invoking the imagery of tortured souls wailing in a pit of fire as wrathful demons cackle and mock the damned.

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Bütcher - On Fowl Of Tyrant Wing

Bütcher's third Speed Metal Attakk is a brewtal blitzzkrieggge öf flying shrapknell: eight trakks öf metallik guitar murdur and piercing shreeks keep the steele flamin' höt för (almöst) 45 minutes öf 45 RPM Metal. This is bestial fukkin' thrash metal öf the blakk darkk evil night that döesn't slöw döwn för anybödy: nöt Satan, nöt grandma, nöt even itself. Öld-skööl evil hevy metull göes intö the Big Fukkin' Blender öf Destruktiön and cömes öut Fast+++, Föwl+++, and Serrated+++, chökk fvll öf grimhideöus nitemare shredding and skreechy höwls. Ön Föwl Öf Tyrant Wing is as steele, as dethe, as 666 göats carrying my chariöt as Bütcher has ever been.

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Dead Head - Shadow Soul

The collective of Dutch metal veterans known as Dead Head offer with their eighth studio album an amazing marriage of bludgeoning death metal and blistering thrash metal. The frenzied thrash side and the heavier death metal side combine in ferocious musicianship, complemented by the fittingly filthy vocals: a vile blending of grating rasps, devilish yelps, and slimy growls. From the first wave of distorted guitar riffs to the final ebb of unsettling ambience, this album grabs your attention and doesn't let go.

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Dungeon Crawl - Maze Controller

There's a moment of exquisite tension just before a mosh pit first erupts, an interminable phase shift where everything hangs in infinite transition. It's the same moment as when your character confidently strides through an unknown door into an unexplored area and your friend's voice tells you from behind a screen, "Roll for initiative". Dungeon Crawl recognize this and unify these vastly different and completely identical experiences into an album of proggy, symphonic thrash with just a smidge of dungeon synth. Maze Controller swipes all the vicious technicality and icy blackness that bands like Vektor apply to science fiction and makes them work for fantasy, then it acquires the cheesy orchestrations of symphonic power metal and bends them to the pursuit of a magic even more real than that of Tolkien: friendship. ...and being frustrated as shit when you draw The Void from the Deck of Many Things and collapse into a lifeless heap in the middle of the final dungeon with the rest of your party either incapacitated or having aligned with the big bad (true story). Anyway, whether you are a nerd or you just push them into lockers, you'll need to be around when Dungeon Crawl cast Circle of Death.

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Hemotoxin - When Time Becomes Loss

Despite approaching a decade since the last Vektor album, progressive thrash seems to have been undergoing a resurgence in the past couple of years, and no better was this on display in 2024 than on When Time Becomes Loss. Exhibiting obvious influence from latter-day Death in addition to its thrash elements, the latest Hemotoxin record is a blistering half-hour rampage of death/thrash ferocity jam-packed with savage riffs, staggering technical basslines, and a plethora of memorable melodic solos. The concise album length is a godsend for everyone in danger of breaking their neck through the relentless headbanging this record will induce in them.

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Mayhemic - Toba

There's an art to riding the crest of chaos. Push too far and you fall into a formless, sloppy mess; reel in too close and it's apparent that you're making compromises. But if you can walk the razor's edge, if you can keep yourself just controlled enough that you don't descend into complete oblivion, you come out with the type of total overriding bedlam that electrifies like nothing else. That's the energy that courses through Mayhemic's veins. Toba is so fast and furious that it spends the entire album pushing itself out of its own way, so blinded in frenzy that it's always a hair's breadth away from collapsing into noise. This is blackened thrash played absolutely without polish, with total abandon, with sheer passion and nothing else.

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Morbid Saint - Swallowed By Hell

Morbid Saint’s Swallowed By Hell is the band's eagerly anticipated return, after literally decades of inactivity and multiple failed recording attempts. The album - their first since 1992 - has the original lineup remaining faithful to the band’s roots while including some modern elements here and there. It presents a raw, unrelenting thrash sound, blending some early death metal influences with pure thrash, making it stand out from recent releases in the genre. While it may not be entirely groundbreaking in terms of originality, its ferocious riffs, explosive guitar solos, high-energy drumming, and strong, biting vocals still pack a lot of punch. Swallowed By Hell demonstrates that Morbid Saint still has the chops to deliver a solid and enjoyable thrash performance.

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Oxygen Destroyer - Guardian Of The Universe

If you’re unfamiliar with classic kaiju films, you may be unaware that that massive tusked tortoise standing front-and-center amidst a gutsplosion of monster viscera and the flaming ruins of a former urban population center is, in fact, the friend to all children. Yeah, it’s not that convincing; ol’ Gamera doesn’t look all that benign in that image, does he? Well, it suits the music: Oxygen Destroyer are themselves friends to no one but asphalt-tearing speed. Guardian Of The Universe is a short but chaotic burst of armor-plated death-thrash, all vile riffs barbed with distortion, ugly growls as foul as atomic breath, and frenetic solos that sound like some ridiculous laser weapon charging up in Barugon’s rainbow spines. Oxygen Destroyer are mean and brutal and they know a lot about popular tokusatsu franchises, so go ahead and join them in doing the Monster Mosh.

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The Troops Of Doom - A Mass To The Grotesque

A while ago, you could make the case that Sepultura's Morbid Visions was an underrated, overlooked album. Nowadays, not only did the Cavalera brothers re-record it, but the band's original guitarist from those recordings, Jairo "Tormentor", is on the loose with his own death-thrash outfit in The Troops Of Doom. Second album A Mass To The Grotesque outdoes the debut in striking that crushing balance between the death and thrash sounds from the '80s. It's simple, it's in-your-face, and it shows how well the wheel was reinvented back in the day.

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Wraith - Fueled By Fear

While our current world may be Fueled By Fear, Wraith are fueled by the power of sizzling hot blackened thrash metal fun. In a style reminiscient of Toxic Holocaust, chugging riffs and blistering guitar solos blend together into a roaring torrent of rapid-fire aggression that's simply too catchy to resist. Whether it's mid-tempo groove to bob your head along to or guitar wizardry performed at lightspeed, Wraith provide the perfect soundtrack for wild, neck-snapping enjoyment in the mosh-pit.

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