Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1984

Teutonic thrash

Emerged 1984 Origin Germany Subgenres — Vocals Shouted
Heaviness
9
Speed
9
Melody
4

Shouted. Barked or chanted, and you can still make out the words.

In short

The German version: dirtier, faster and much closer to what would become death and black metal.

How it sounds

  • Dirtier production with sharper guitars and distorted bass.
  • Vocals closer to a snarl than a shout — a direct step toward death metal.
  • More constant and more brutal tempos, with fewer melodic passages.

Hear what that means

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Every second here is the uploader's own, read from the recording's tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
190-260 bpm
Song length
3.5-5 min
Tuning
E standard or a semitone down, on cheap equipment played hard. The tone is thinner and nastier than the American records and that is largely a budget.
Production
Filthy, trebly and recorded fast. Where the Bay Area got progressively better studios, these bands stayed raw on purpose long after they could have afforded not to.
Written about
War, Blasphemy, Violence, Beer, on the Tankard wing

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Downpicked riffing at the top end of thrash's tempo, with almost no melodic relief and solos that are closer to noise than to lead playing. The chromaticism here is what death metal picked up.
  • Bass Distorted and clanking, played with a pick and audible in a way the American records rarely allowed.
  • Drums Skank beats taken faster than they comfortably sit, with the whole kit recorded dry and close so the sloppiness is left in.
  • Vocals Shouted with a shredded throat rather than sung — this is the point on the thrash branch where the voice stops being a singer's and starts being an extreme metal vocalist's.

What it isn't

That it was the Bay Area's poor relation. The influence runs the other way for everything extreme that followed: death metal, black metal and grindcore all take more from Kreator and Sodom than from Metallica or Testament. The American scene produced the better-known records and the German one produced the vocabulary the rest of this branch actually uses.

Told apart from

  • Bay Area thrash The American scene got better production and more melody as it developed. The German one stayed filthy on purpose, and death and black metal came out of this side rather than that one.
  • Thrash metal Teutonic thrash is one of the parent genre's two founding regional scenes, not a departure from it.
  • Death metal Death metal is what this became: the vocals, the chromatic riffing and the refusal of melody are all already here in 1986.
  • Black 'n' roll Several of these bands ended up in the black metal orbit, and the rock-and-roll wing of black metal keeps the same trebly, nasty guitar tone.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

Kreator, Sodom and Destruction appeared almost simultaneously in the Ruhr region without knowing much about each other. Sodom began so crudely that their first demos are considered proto-black metal. The genre has stayed active without interruption for forty years — Kreator still fills large halls.

Descended from

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.