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Heavy Metal Thunder Crossover Thrash

Genres Heavy Metal Speed Metal Thrash Metal Crossover Thrash

Crossover Thrash

Hardcore bands discovering thrash and refusing to write longer songs. Fast, funny, furious — and the reason metalcore exists at all.

Active years
1985 – present
Origin
USA (New York / Texas / California)
Family
Metalcore
Bands here
16

Start here

Four records in order of how easy they are to get into — which is not the same as best first.

  1. Cause for Alarm Agnostic Front, 1986 The landmark

    Widely called the definitive crossover record. Adding a second guitarist pushed Agnostic Front towards metal while the songs stayed at hardcore length, which split their audience at the time and set the template everyone else followed.

    Listen to Cause for Alarm

  2. Crossover D.R.I., 1987

    The record that named the thing. D.R.I. arrived from hardcore and slowed down just enough to let the riffs land, and the album title did the rest of the work.

    Listen to Crossover

  3. Hazardous Mutation Municipal Waste, 2005

    Proof the genre still works. Twenty-eight minutes, no song over three, and an entirely unembarrassed love of skateboards and beer.

    Listen to Hazardous Mutation

  4. Join the Army Suicidal Tendencies, 1987

    The awkward middle record where a hardcore band worked out it wanted to be a metal band. Messy, and the mess is the point.

    Listen to Join the Army

What it sounds like

Two-minute songs at full tilt. Crossover takes hardcore punk's brevity, shouted gang vocals and refusal to solo, then borrows thrash metal's palm-muted riffing and double-time drumming — so the riffs are metal but the songs are still built like punk, over almost before they start. Very little of it is dark. The lyrics run to politics, skateboarding, beer and jokes at the expense of both scenes it came from, and the whole thing is played with an audible grin. If thrash is a craft and hardcore is a stance, crossover is what happens when a band cannot be bothered to choose. It is also the missing link in this family: everything from Metalcore onwards descends from this collision rather than from metal alone.

  • Heaviness 3 out of 5
  • Speed 5 out of 5
  • Aggression 5 out of 5
  • Technicality 2 out of 5
  • Darkness 2 out of 5
  • Melody 2 out of 5

Where the name came from

Named after D.R.I.'s second album Crossover (1987), on which the Texan hardcore band moved to an openly metal sound. The traffic had been going both ways for a couple of years before that — S.O.D.'s Speak English or Die (1985) and Suicidal Tendencies' Join the Army (1987) are the same impulse — but D.R.I. gave the thing its name, and it stuck because it described exactly what was happening: two audiences who had been suspicious of each other discovering they wanted the same records.

The bands

Hear these first

  • Agnostic Front USA
  • D.R.I. USA
  • Suicidal Tendencies USA
  • Municipal Waste USA
  • S.O.D. USA

And 11 more

  • Cro-Mags USA
  • Leeway USA
  • Ludichrist USA
  • M.O.D. USA
  • Crumbsuckers USA
  • Corrosion of Conformity USA
  • Cryptic Slaughter USA
  • Excel USA
  • Nuclear Assault USA
  • Iron Reagan USA
  • Power Trip USA

Where it happened

Counting this genre and everything descended from it.

If you liked this

Closest in sound outside this family, leaning towards the similar or the gentler rather than straight into the deep end.