It’s hard to believe – especially for some of us Of A Certain Age – that this year sees the fortieth anniversary of legendary German thrashers Destruction. Frontman Marcel “Schmier” Schirmer might be the last man standing from the band’s original line-up (co-founder and guitarist Mike Sifringer having left last year) but the band’s fifteenth full length studio album, Diabolical (Napalm Records) still manages to recapture that old fiery attitude.
In the thirty-two years since the savage double gut-punch of Reign In Blood (DefJam) and Darkness Descends (Combat), the popularity and aesthetic of Thrash Metal has gone on an undulating journey, from the progressive convolutions of …And Justice For All (Vertigo), through the refining and streamlining of a Persistence of Time (Island), to a decade in the wasteland where ideas and delivery effectively choked in the dust of a seemingly redundant style. Resurrection was found in the party Thrash rebirth headed by the likes of Municipal Waste, and then the more fundamental stylings of Evile and the like. But throughout it all, the Metal underground never lost sight of the devastation that 1986 brutality – the extreme edge of Thrash espoused by Dark Angel, Kreator and Sodom – and the effectiveness of vicious riffing, feral vocals and a relentless battery brings, it’s just that nowadays it’s possible to bring the noise to a wider audience.