Up until quite recently putting together a Complete Fleetwood Mac playlist wasn’t even possible. If you had explored the band’s catalog across all streaming services, you would’ve encountered the same problem: While every record from the Stevie Nicks-Lindsey Buckingham era was available (including expanded editions of Rumours, Tusk, and the crazy underrated Tango in the Night), and the Peter Green-era titles, while hobbled by a few nit-picky omissions, were largely intact, the stretch of albums linking these two periods was totally MIA.Of course, the fact that Kiln House (1970), Future Games (1971), Bare Trees (1972), Penguin (1973), Mystery to Me (1973), and Heroes Are Hard to Find (1974) have been added to the group’s streaming catalog shouldn’t register the same level of excitement as, say, AC/DC or Bob Seger opening up their discographies to Spotify and Apple Music for the very first time. Nevertheless, they are vital titles that deserve love from serious classic-rock fans. Not only are they key to understanding Fleetwood Mac’s gradual (and frequently bumpy) journey from British blues and hard rock to sun-drenched California pop, they boast some of the best tunes of the band’s long and winding career. Bare Trees is particularly sublime. A favorite for more than a few longtime Mac obsessives, it’s a hazy, zoned-out, comedown album showcasing a trio of gifted songwriters in Christine McVie, Danny Kirwan, and Bob Welch.When encountering these albums, the uninitiated will immediately notice they’re all over the stylistic map. After all, they document a band searching for an identity after the hasty departure of founding member Green, whose moody vision and six-string genius dominated the group (despite him splitting lead vocal duties with ’50s-rock fetishist Jeremy Spencer). Where McVie’s “Spare Me a Little of Your Love” is a moving slice of singer/songwriter fare infused with gospel’s ecstatic longing, Kirwan’s “Sometimes” is rambling, countrified folk-rock that sounds as if it could’ve been recorded in a remote English cottage. The American-born Welch—who, along with McVie, was the outfit’s most dependable songwriter during this time—complicates things further, penning both hyper-lush pop ballads (“Sentimental Lady”) and post-psychedelic jams drawing in touches of fusion and The Grateful Dead (“Coming Home”).But despite their deliciously messy nature, these records also show how Mac began moving towards tightly crafted pop-rock before Buckingham and Nicks’ entrance at the tail end of 1974. The most obvious instances are the McVie cuts “Prove Your Love” and “Remember Me,” which find her deep, enigmatic voice and genius for melancholic balladry already locked in place. But there’s also odd stuff like “Forever,” from Mystery to Me: Benefitting from Mick Fleetwood’s interest in African music and percussion, the rhythmic ditty totally hints at the quirky shuffles that Buckingham had the drummer work into both Tusk and Tango in the Night.At this point, fans adamant that Fleetwood Mac peaked during the Buckingham and Nicks years (something I won’t argue against) might be wondering why I haven’t delved into those records as much. Well, they’ve been picked apart and examined so intensely I decided to devote more words to the group’s lesser-known recordings in hopes of exposing folks to music they possibly haven’t heard. That said, I do want to touch on the otherworldly and exotic Tango in the Night—which everybody reading this needs to add to their library ASAP—because it’s a goddamn great record: kind of like Tusk in how it packs a lot of eccentric sounds and ideas into songs that are insanely catchy, only this time around Buckingham decides to be a ruthless editor. A perfect example is the title track, which pushes his fascination with rhythm as a compositional element to new extremes, sounding like some kind of classic-rock interpretation of 4AD-style dream pop. Just brilliant—so much so, in fact, that my playlist has more tracks from it than Buckingham and Nicks’ 1975 debut with the band. Risky, but I think you won’t be disappointed

At this point in our young century, Dan Auerbach’s trademark sound is damn near inescapable. His entrancingly fuzzy slide work, moody atmospherics, velvety reverb, and love for prominently framed percussion all pop up in albums by garage punks, shaggy hard rockers, folkies, rappers, and even pop divas. Of course, it’s through the wildly influential jams of The Black Keys (whom Auerbach has co-produced for most of the duo’s career) that his sound has left such a profound impact on modern music, but that’s not its only path. After all, in addition to maintaining a solo career—including his upcoming June 2017 release Waiting On a Song—as well as a clutch of side projects (The Arcs record from 2015 is a particularly tasty highlight), he has evolved into one of the music industry’s most in-demand producers.Much like The Black Keys’ music, Auerbach’s immediately identifiable work behind the boards has become more sophisticated with time. Patrick Sweany’s “Them Shoes,” from 2007, is a slab of husky, stripped-down blues rock that’s light years removed from the intensely textural swamp funk and gris-gris soul comprising Dr. John’s 2012 gem Locked Down, one of Auerbach’s most ambitious productions to date. Even when Auerbach, who possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of music history, steps outside of his rock ‘n’ blues comfort zone, he leaves a unique sonic imprint on the work of other artists. This is certainly the case with Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence, on which he wraps the singer’s art-pop noir in layers of nostalgia-kissed echo and sustain so plush, your ears will sink into them. This is also true of Nikki Lane’s outlaw-country epic All Or Nothin, which boasts the same throbbing groove hypnotics heard on the Keys’ albums.Compiling tunes from all these albums and a whole mess more, including some overlooked production nuggets like the Buffalo Killers’ stoner-rock trip Let it Ride, our playlist is sure to impress even the most diehard Auerbach fans.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

There’s a tragic feeling of incompleteness to Sharon Jones’ career, and it’s best be summed up with the phrase "discovered too late and gone way too soon." The soul and funk vocalist’s story is a well-told one: a criminally overlooked session powerhouse—who clearly possessed the chops and sheer life-force to be a star when she first turned professional in the ’70s—finally achieves fame in her late-’40s only to have pancreatic cancer claim her life in 2016 at the age of 60. Fortunately for the world, the Grammy-nominated Jones and her band, the Dap-Kings, made the most of her all-too-brief stardom, dropping seven stellar studio albums, including the posthumously released Soul of a Woman, recorded as the singer underwent debilitating chemotherapy treatments.What makes the group so unique is their ability to feel unapologetically old-school, yet without any residue of weepy nostalgia. Anchored not just by Jones’ attention-seizing voice, but the group’s agilely stabbing horns and preternaturally metronomic rhythm section as well, their music pops, sizzles, and jumps with a sweaty, determined modernism. (Especially relevant in this context is their funk-spiked reworking of Janet Jackson’s “What Have You Done for Me Lately?”) It’s a sound that has exerted a huge impact on 21st-century pop, pushing retro-soul into the mainstream while also making the Dap-Kings, as well as their sister outfit the Dap Kings Horn Section, in-demand session musicians in the same vein as the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section or the Wrecking Crew.Arguably the first artist to take notice was the late Amy Winehouse, who employed the Dap-Kings when crafting her own fusion of retro and contemporary R&B for 2006’s game-changing Back to Black. The album’s co-producer, Mark Ronson, then used the ensemble’s crack horn section on his massive retro-pop hit “Uptown Funk,” featuring dynamo singer Bruno Mars. More recently, the digitally minded Kesha used those soul-piercing horns on her crushing, feminist anthem “Woman,” from her emotional tour de force Rainbow.But not every session/appearance fits snugly between the poles of R&B and pop—there’s a slew of leftfield examples, too. On her self-titled full-length from 2014, avant-garde singer-songwriter St. Vincent leans heavily on the unswerving pulse of Dap-Kings drummer Homer Steinweiss (who also plays skins for the Dan Auerbach-led Arcs), while her collaborative effort with David Byrne, Love This Giant, weaves their horns into the duo’s art-rock pointillism. Other standouts include The Black Lips, whose garage-punk rave-up Underneath the Rainbow utilizes the services of baritone guitarist Thomas Brenneck and trumpeter David Guy, and country outlaw Sturgill Simpson, who worked with the the Dap-Kings horns on A Sailor’s Guide to Earth and then brought them onstage for his 2017 Grammy performance.On top of featuring cuts from each of the artists already mentioned, our playlists dips into the Dap-Kings many related projects (including The Budos Band and Menahan Street Band), as well as veteran soul and funk singers Charles Bradley, Lee Fields, and Rickey Calloway who, like Jones, found a welcoming home on Daptone, easily retro-soul’s most important record label. Of course, the absence left by Jones’ death will forever be felt; she was, after all, a once-in a-generation talent. But it becomes all too clear when exploring this diverse array of songs that her vision and style will continue to echo throughout modern music for a long time to come.

The shoring up of thrash metal into an identifiable genre—one with founders (i.e., the oft-invoked, if frequently debated Big Four), weirdo outliers, and delineated boundaries—occurred fairly late in the movement’s genesis. After all, back in the ’80s (and even into the early ’90s, actually) the phrase was used to describe just about any metal or hardcore band blurring the lines between them. Nowadays, we like to use micro-terms like "crossover thrash" when heaping praise on the mosh-pit belligerence of Suicidal Tendencies or Victim in Pain-era Agnostic Front, and "thrashcore" when gushing about the crap-fi eccentricities of Septic Death. Moreover, it isn’t at all inappropriate to apply the thrash label to Venom, the primary bridge between the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and early Slayer, or Possessed, perhaps the first shredders to make the leap to guttural death-metal terrain, or even the Exhorder-obsessed Pantera, who slowed down the music’s blazing tempos to help kickstart groove metal. Ultimately, though, all these bands are deliciously grotesque fruit fallen from the thrash family tree.Even modern revivalists—some of whom are like computer programs in their uncanny ability to recreate the feel of old, ’80s jams—can’t escape this fuzziness. Municipal Waste’s 2007 album The Art of Partying, frequently hailed as one of the great modern thrash albums (and every bit as rude and aggressive as the vintage stuff), worships the manic crossover of Suicidal Tendencies more than it does the canonical thrash of Slayer or Metallica. Another modern classic is The Haunted’s self-titled debut from 1998, and it’s clearly informed by the tight, mechanically disciplined rhythms of melodic death metal (which makes total sense considering the Swedes’ ties to At the Gates). But maybe the most radical examples are groups like Power Trip and Vektor, who drag thrash into the post-everything 21st-century by blending it with blackened blurs, noise-rock’s wall-of-distortion, layers of in-studio sound manipulation, and (in the case of the latter) proggy expanses and epic space-rock runs. But then again, this merely is par for the course for a genre that, despite its thrash or die!!! expression of purity, has always preferred messy splatters to well-groomed orderliness. For more, check out our New School of Thrash playlist. This feature is part of our Thrash 101 online course that was produced in partnership with the good rocking folks at GimmeRadio, a free 24/7 metal radio station hosted by heavy-music experts like Megadeths Dave Mustaine and Lamb of Gods Randy Blythe. Check them out here and sign up for the Thrash 101 course here.

Thank you for checking out the eighth installment our Thrash 101 program, produced in conjunction with GimmeRadio, your free 24/7 radio station hosted by heavy-music experts and artists. Get it all free right here.The shoring up of thrash metal into an identifiable genre—one with founders (i.e., the oft-invoked, if frequently debated Big Four), weirdo outliers, and delineated boundaries—occurred fairly late in the movement’s genesis. After all, back in the ’80s (and even into the early ’90s, actually) the phrase was used to describe just about any metal or hardcore band blurring the lines between them. Nowadays, we like to use micro-terms like "crossover thrash" when heaping praise on the mosh-pit belligerence of Suicidal Tendencies or Victim in Pain-era Agnostic Front, and "thrashcore" when gushing about the crap-fi eccentricities of Septic Death. Moreover, it isn’t at all inappropriate to apply the thrash label to Venom, the primary bridge between the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and early Slayer, or Possessed, perhaps the first shredders to make the leap to guttural death-metal terrain, or even the Exhorder-obsessed Pantera, who slowed down the music’s blazing tempos to help kickstart groove metal. Ultimately, though, all these bands are deliciously grotesque fruit fallen from the thrash family tree.Even modern revivalists—some of whom are like computer programs in their uncanny ability to recreate the feel of old, ’80s jams—can’t escape this fuzziness. Municipal Waste’s 2007 album The Art of Partying, frequently hailed as one of the great modern thrash albums (and every bit as rude and aggressive as the vintage stuff), worships the manic crossover of Suicidal Tendencies more than it does the canonical thrash of Slayer or Metallica. Another modern classic is The Haunted’s self-titled debut from 1998, and it’s clearly informed by the tight, mechanically disciplined rhythms of melodic death metal (which makes total sense considering the Swedes’ ties to At the Gates). But maybe the most radical examples are groups like Power Trip and Vektor, who drag thrash into the post-everything 21st-century by blending it with blackened blurs, noise-rock’s wall-of-distortion, layers of in-studio sound manipulation, and (in the case of the latter) proggy expanses and epic space-rock runs. But then again, this merely is par for the course for a genre that, despite its thrash or die!!! expression of purity, has always preferred messy splatters to well-groomed orderliness. Your next Thrash 101 chapter will go even deeper into this new school...

Psychedelic culture stands at the cusp of mainstream acceptance. This may sound odd given the fact that the United States still includes LSD, psilocybin, and numerous other hallucinogens on the list of Schedule I substances, but there are many signs. Academia is in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance, with Johns Hopkins University leading the way in exploring the therapeutic benefits, while tales abound of California techies microdosing. And though marijuana is not an hallucinogen, per se, it is culturally linked to psychedelics, and it’s legal in 30 states and counting. Then there’s the recent publication of How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. The book, written by celebrated author and journalist Michael Pollan, cracked the Top 10 of Amazon’s books charts and is sure to further accelerate the field’s growing respectability.Such developments were unthinkable in the mid-’60s when psychedelics, helping fuel the counterculture’s alienation from mainstream American culture and politics, were pushed underground through prohibition. Having been booted out of Harvard University in 1963, outlaw psychonaut Timothy Leary (in)famously exhorted America’s youth to “turn on, tune in, drop out”; Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, meanwhile, kickstarted the hippie movement with their Bay Area Acid Tests. Rock ’n’ roll played a central role in the spreading of this psychedelic gospel. As musicians themselves experimented with hallucinogens, they in turn penned anthems charting their consciousness-expanding adventures.The first wave of anthems, probably more inspired by cannabis than hallucinogens, sound rather innocuous, even goofy in hindsight. Bob Dylan’s double entendre-laced “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” wraps early “head” humor inside a marching band sing-along, and The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream” sways with childlike innocence as John Sebastian croons the slyly suggestive lines, “And you can be sure that if you’re feeling right/ A day dream will last long into the night.”In 1966, however, the folksy playfulness of these tunes gave way to noggin-blurring proselytizing. The Beatles—whom Leary, in one of his typically hyperbolic bursts of cosmic thought, described as being “endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species”—led the charge. The group dropped both “Tomorrow Never Knows,” perhaps the first rock song to truly drone, and “She Said She Said,” a cryptic reference to an acid trip with Easy Rider actor Peter Fonda, into the sonically phantasmagoric Revolver. The Byrds kept apace, unleashing “Eight Miles High,” which certainly matched “Tomorrow Never Knows” in its ability to express the acid experience through mystical lyricism and raga-flavored music.The following year, 1967, saw the Jefferson Airplane and The Doors up the ante with “White Rabbit” and “Break On Through (To the Other Side),” respectively. Both are stirring—though radically different—evocations of West Coast’s exploding psychedelic movement. Where “White Rabbit” is a whimsical call to action drenched in Alice in Wonderland imagery, “Break On Through” comes on like a freight train threatening to jump the tracks. Its expression of a consciousness freed is reckless and unnerving (but also utterly thrilling).It’s important to remember that The Doors, named for Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, a chronicle of the author’s experiences with mescaline, weren’t flower-picking hippies; they were art-school bohemians whose music charted the shadowy side of psychedelia, especially the sense of loss and disconnect that comes with untethering the mind from reality. As Patrick Lundborg points out in his 2012 book Psychedelia: An Ancient Culture, A Modern Way of Life, “In that tumultuous era, as acidhead musicians directed their creativity towards reflecting their psychedelic experiences, the looming threat and occasional reality of dark, terrifying trips unavoidably came to influence the music.”This ominousness courses through The 13th Floor Elevators’ “Slip Inside This House” and Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive,” two of the era’s most emotionally complex anthems. The former, swirling into vortices of reverb, creates a profoundly esoteric vision, over the course of which the promise of spiritual enlightenment and the dangers of ego death coil around one another like snakes. Pink Floyd’s early anthem, on the other hand, is a cold, paranoid, and atonal portrayal of an acid trip as a rocket ride into the black expanse of space. Needless to say, both walk the existential edge, a fact that should come as no surprise considering both the Elevators’ Roky Erickson and Floyd’s Syd Barrett embodied the excesses of the psychedelic era: psychonauts who wound up venturing too far out, damaging themselves in the process.In the United States and United Kingdom, the golden era of the psychedelic anthem didn’t last all that long, roughly 1966 to 1969. By the time Woodstock went down, more and more musicians were eschewing cosmic exploration for earthbound rock heavily accented with country, soul, and blues. The visionary utopianism so profoundly linked to altered states of consciousness simply couldn’t weather the harsh realities of a war in Vietnam that seemingly had no end in sight, the ascendency of Richard M. Nixon and his Silent Majority to the Oval Office, and the brutal Civil Rights unrest of 1968. Hippies, reeling from these bitter developments, embraced more personal forms of enlightenment: yoga, meditation, and health food, to name a few. Or, they bolted for the country.Exceptions did pop up, like Funkadelic’s moodily sublime “Maggot Brain,” not an anthem in the strictest sense yet certainly a powerful expression of mind-smashing lysergia. There also were late-to-evolve psychedelic scenes in central Europe and Japan, where hippiedom didn’t take hold until the early ’70s. A perfect reflection of this is the Switzerland-based Brainticket, whose 1971 epic “Brainticket (Part Two)” really is one of the most over-the-top anthems of the era. It’s tough to imagine anything better capturing the wild, transgressive spirit of the times than when vocalist Dawn Muir moans the line “An army of thoughts retreating towards oblivion/ A square of light, a circle of thought, a triangle of nothing!!!” as though she’s descending her entire being into an LSD-fueled orgy from which there is no return.As with most of the expansive pieces on this playlist, it’s safe to say the researchers at Johns Hopkins don’t play a whole lot of Brianticket around the lab!

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!There is but a single label that’s played a key role in the evolution of reggae, post-punk, dance, industrial, and experimental music alike, and that’s On-U Sound. Founded by English producer, remixer, and bandleader Adrian Sherwood in 1979, the label’s been in the throes of a massive reissue campaign since 2016. In addition to dusting off long out-of-print titles from the likes of African Head Charge and the Singers & Players collective, Sherwood has given the green light for a slew of anthologies, including Trevor Jackson’s brilliant Science Fiction Dancehall Classics and two volumes of Sherwood At The Controls that have helped contextualize the label’s sweeping legacy.About that legacy: On U-Sound initially made a name for itself with a slew of titles that opened up the stylistic parameters of dub while at the same time remaining loyal to the movement’s spiritual core. Where albums like Creation Rebel’s Starship Africa and African Head Charge’s My Life in a Hole in the Ground—yes, that’s a cheeky Eno/Byrne reference—sound like echo-drenched alien transmissions smothered in futuristic electronics, Congo Ashanti Roy’s African Blood and Bim Sherman’s Across the Red Sea are moving meditations that ease ’70s roots music into ‘80s New Wave.But Sherwood and U-Sound were never content with remaining tethered to dub. Indeed, what made the label so innovative throughout its peak years in the ’80s was an ability to fold dub’s trademark qualities—shuddering reverb, hulking bass, tape delay, and shuffling rhythms turned inside out and upside down—into a wide range of cutting-edge genres. The Sherwood-produced collision of world grooves, tape manipulation, and punk politics heard on Mark Stewart & The Maffia’s Learning To Cope With Cowardice opened up entire vistas of avant-garde expression that 21st-century explorers such as Gang Gang Dance and Sun Araw have since colonized. Similarly radical is Tackhead’s Whats My Mission Now? 12-inch, a speaker-shredding collage of hip-hop drum machines, fidgety electro syncopation, and aggressive industrial samples that hasn’t lost any of its radical bite.While the bulk of these tracks are drawn from the On U-Sound catalog, listeners will also encounter a handful of relevant Sherwood projects that weren’t released by the label. For example, The Slits’ “Man Next Door,” co-mixed by Sherwood, is an early example of the cross-pollination between dub and post-punk. Then there’s the long-forgotten Sherwood production “Dead Come Alive,” which didn’t see the light of day until Science Fiction Dancehall Classics. This hybrid of hip-hop and ’80s club music features a young Neneh Cherry rhyming over bubbling, pointillist electronics that are so prescient, they could’ve been created just last week—something that holds true for just about every cut on this playlist.

Resident Advisor’s playlist curation is excellent, and Early Electronic Music is no exception. A far out descent into analog-generated squiggles, bubbles, percolations, and sine waves from the genre’s formative stages, it successfully demonstrates how electronic music was born out of a unique intersection of novelty and avant-garde. After all, Raymond Scott and Perrey and Kingsley, both active in the mid-20th century, used cutting-edge technology to make silly pop throwaways. At the other end of the spectrum there’s Morton Subotnick, a serious composer who recorded for the classical label Nonesuch. RA also deserves props for diversity. Their tracklist contains a cut each from Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire, two visionary female composers who largely were written out of electronic music’s development. It’s worth noting that the playlist focuses on pieces made by electronic processes exclusively, thus explaining why hybrid examples, including Bernard Hermann’s theremin-laced scored for the science fiction landmark The Day the Earth Stood Still, have been excluded.

On one level, 1972’s “Suffragette City” is pure simplicity, an amphetamine rush that proves David Bowie could unleash high-decibel intensity just as potently as he could spacey ballads or post-modern artiness. Yet things aren’t so simple underneath its glittery crunch, where a tug-of-war is waged between nostalgia and futurism. If the pounding ivories and greasy boogie long for the ’50s, then the slashing chords and razor-sharp execution lunge toward the punk revolution that’s still a few years out. This tension, acting like a slingshot, shoots the penultimate song from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars clear out of the march of history and into that archetypal realm commonly referred to as rock music that’s so badass it’s timeless. Here are five facts to help you better appreciate Bowie’s hardest rocker.Science fiction and rock ’n’ roll.“Suffragette City,” like the rest of Ziggy Stardust, is inspired by Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (Director Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation arrived during the album’s making.) Bowie certainly wasn’t the first rocker to embrace sci-fi (see producer Joe Meek or Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd), yet he clearly was ahead of the curve by soaking up Burgess’ uniquely dystopian vision. It’s a quality that would seep not just into punk and post-punk, but also industrial and even techno in the following decades.Mick Ronson’s killer guitar.Perhaps no early Bowie track better displays his love of The Stooges and The Velvet Underground; it all begins with brilliant guitarist Mick Ronson’s opening riff, roaring and clawing like a famished tiger. It’s an aesthetic Bowie would bring with him when he mixed Iggy and the Stooges’ 1973 landmark Raw Power, a record that helped kickstart punk and hardcore.Sexuality and gender.The live version took on a life of its own, generally becoming faster and more sneering. It also adopted a performative edge, as Bowie, during concerts, often would drop to his knees and pretend to suck on Ronson’s guitar. When a photograph of this wonderfully flamboyant exhibitionism made it into Melody Maker in 1972, it helped cement glam rock’s reputation as a movement steeped in transgression and decadence.Those blaring horns aren’t really horns.It may sound like horns during the cut’s first half when they fall somewhere between vintage Memphis R&B and The Beatles’ “Savoy Truffle.” But the sound reveals its source-—an ARP 2600 synthesizer—during the static-caked surge that ripples across the final 60 seconds. You can be sure that bands like Pere Ubu, The Stranglers, Tubeway Army, The Twinkeyz, and any other punk(ish) band experimenting with the cyborg impulse were taking notes.Film and television legacy.As with many other Bowie tunes, “Suffragette City” has racked up several IMDb credits, including Gilmore Girls, Vinyl, and Californication. The most telling, however, is 2005’s Lords of Dogtown, a period piece chronicling the Venice Beach teenagers who revolutionized skateboarding in the mid-’70s. The fact that these early shredders jammed Bowie along with The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Deep Purple stands as a testament to the artist’s lofty stature not just among punks and alternative kids, but longhaired surfers and heshers as well. There’s no messing with David Bowie.

Thrash represents that pivotal point at which heavy metal turns extreme. Of course, extreme music existed before Slayer, Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, Overkill, Celtic Frost, and thousands of other vile shredders across the globe declared war on our ears in the mid-’80s. There was Motörhead’s mechanically chugging roar, Venom’s cavernous blasphemy, Diamond Head’s white-hot intricacy, and Void’s violently messy hardcore (which basically is proto-thrash). Yet these were mere glimpses when compared to thrash’s radical, across-the-board redefining of heaviness, speed, and volume, one embedded in the genetic sequence of practically every manifestation of extreme metal to follow: death metal, black metal, metalcore, grindcore, sludge, you name it.It’s generally understood that thrash is a collision of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal’s scorching complexity (including that scene’s innovative use of double-bass-drumming) with hardcore punk’s raw force and gang chant toughness. And while this certainly is true—it’s especially obvious on Anthrax’s “Caught in a Mosh” and Exodus’ “And Then There Were None”—it doesn’t fully explain the movement’s revolutionary newness. And that’s because thrash isn’t a mere blending of antecedents. When it comes to fully appreciating these sick jams, what isn’t heard is just as important as what is. Take Sepultura’s absolutely manic “Stronger Than Hate”—it was recorded a mere six years after Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills,” and yet it sounds decades removed. Melodies, ornateness, choruses—indeed, any semblance of traditional songwriting—have been ruthlessly excised. All that remains is a high-velocity explosion of vicious shredding, incensed howls and grunts, whiplash rhythms, and lyrics splattered in seething rage and graphic imagery.This last quality created quite an uproar during the disgustingly conservative and paranoid Reagan era, back when Tipper Gore’s vile PMRC and tons of Bible-banging parents viewed the genre, as well as headbanger culture in general, as the decline of Western civilization. (Too bad it wasn’t.) It resulted in thrash bands frequently being dismissed as a cross between Satan worshippers and knuckle-dragging brutes, when in fact their lyrics often tackled environmental concerns, nuclear war, genocide, and psychological alienation with a mix of holding-a-mirror-up-to-society morality and intensely black humor inspired by horror flicks. Moreover, thrash unleashed some of the most dizzyingly demanding music this side of avant-garde jazz. Far and away the most potent proof of this is the genre’s crowning achievement: Slayer’s 1986 touchstone Reign in Blood, a record that bludgeons like a club embedded with nails (especially the screaming dive bombs of guitarists Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King) while also sounding so stunningly precise, energetic, and intelligent that it’s difficult to fathom mere mortals creating such a jigsaw-like artifact.This feature is part of our Thrash 101 online course that was produced in partnership with the good rocking folks at GimmeRadio, a free 24/7 metal radio station hosted by heavy-music experts like Megadeths Dave Mustaine and Lamb of Gods Randy Blythe. Check them out here and sign up for the Thrash 101 course here.