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The first time I heard Iron Maiden’s debut album, I was actually pissed off. Not because it was bad—quite the opposite—but because some jackass at my high school had been walking around in an Eddie t-shirt for months claiming to be Maiden’s biggest fan, and I’d nodded along assuming they were just another NWOBHM band I hadn’t gotten around to yet. Turns out, I’d been living in ignorance of what would become my musical north star for the next four decades. I mean, talk about a missed opportunity. Could’ve discovered them six months earlier if I wasn’t so busy pretending I already knew every metal band worth knowing. Pride makes fools of us all, especially teenage metalheads.

It was spring of 1987, and I was digging through the used bin at Sound Garden Records when I found it—that iconic cover with Eddie’s streetlamp-lit grimace staring back at me. Seven bucks later (which was exactly $2 more than I’d budgeted for record shopping that day, meaning I’d be walking the three miles home instead of taking the bus), I was clutching what I assumed was just another cool addition to my growing collection. I had no idea I was holding a piece of music that would still be part of my life when I had gray hair and reading glasses.

That first listen was… confusing, if I’m being honest. Where was the soaring operatic voice I’d heard when older kids played “Number of the Beast” or “Powerslave”? Who was this snarling punk-adjacent vocalist? And where were the sprawling epic compositions? This was lean, mean, and surprisingly direct. It sounded more like a pub band with unusually ambitious guitarists than the symphonic metal titans I’d been expecting. I almost felt cheated, like I’d picked up the wrong band’s record by mistake.

But then “Phantom of the Opera” kicked in around the middle of Side One, and I got it. I fucking got it. That track was the bridge between what they were and what they would become—a perfect snapshot of a band with one foot in the gritty London metal scene and the other already reaching for something grander. The instrumental section in that song still gives me goosebumps when I play it now, even on my stupidly expensive turntable that reveals every production limitation of that 1980 recording.

Paul Di’Anno’s voice is the thing most people fixate on when comparing early Maiden to the Bruce Dickinson era, and yeah, it’s the most obvious difference. But what fascinates me more is how the band was already structurally ambitious while working within a raw, almost primitive sound palette. Listen to “Strange World”—there’s a delicacy there that feels almost fragile compared to the rest of the album’s street-fighting energy. Even back then, these guys weren’t content to stay in one lane.

I’ve had this argument with fellow Maiden obsessives approximately 349 times (most recently last month at a bar after seeing a Maiden tribute band, where I nearly lost my voice trying to make this point over both the crowd noise and the alcohol): the debut isn’t a primitive version of what would come later; it’s its own fully realized thing. It’s not Iron Maiden failing to be the epic metal band they’d become—it’s Iron Maiden succeeding brilliantly at being a hungry, fierce band with something to prove.

The production—by Will Malone, who seemingly set up microphones in approximately the right direction and then went to lunch—is both the album’s limitation and its strength. You can practically smell the sweat and beer of those small club gigs where they honed these songs. There’s an urgency here that sometimes got lost in their more polished later work. Don’t get me wrong, I love the expansive sound they developed, but there’s something special about the way this album feels like it might go off the rails at any moment.

My original copy of the debut got played so much that by 1990, it sounded like someone was frying bacon in the background of every track. I’ve replaced it twice since then, most recently with that 2014 remaster that finally gave the bass some presence in the mix. My current copy lives in a special section of my vinyl shelves that I call the “Desert Island Dozen”—the records I’d grab first in a fire, the ones I know note for note, word for word.

“Running Free” was my gateway drug into this album. It’s the most immediate track, the one that grabs you by the throat from the first listen. But the album’s staying power comes from its deeper cuts. “Remember Tomorrow” reveals more with every listen, that quiet-loud dynamic showing an emotional range most of their contemporaries couldn’t touch. And “Transylvania” might be the most underrated instrumental in metal history—those galloping bass lines from Steve Harris were revolutionary. Nobody was playing bass like that in metal before him, and his influence still echoes through the genre forty-plus years later.

I took my nephew to his first Maiden show in 2018—the kid was 16 and had only ever known the later epic stuff. He’d listened to the debut a few times on my recommendation but didn’t really get it. “It’s too punk or something,” he said, which both made me feel ancient and oddly proud of his musical discernment. After the show (where they played “Iron Maiden” from the debut as part of the encore), he looked at me with new understanding. “I heard it,” he said. “That old stuff—it’s like the DNA of everything they did after.” Smart kid. Smarter than I was at his age.

The thing about this album that keeps me coming back—beyond nostalgia, beyond my completist tendencies, beyond my irritating habit of insisting that every band’s early work was their best (I’m working on this character flaw, I swear)—is its perfect capturing of potential energy. It’s like listening to a coiled spring. You can hear exactly what they are in that moment, but you can also hear everything they could become.

I’ve seen Maiden live 27 times now, starting with the Seventh Tour of a Seventh Tour in ’88 (yes, I missed the Di’Anno era entirely—I’m not THAT old, despite what my lower back tells me after concerts these days). Each time they play anything from the debut, there’s a rawness that cuts through even their most elaborate stage productions. “Prowler” still sounds dangerous. “Running Free” still feels like a jail break.

My most treasured piece of Maiden memorabilia isn’t my signed Piece of Mind LP or my backstage pass from the Fear of the Dark tour. It’s a beaten-up t-shirt from their 1980 British tour that I found at a vintage clothes shop in Camden when I was in London covering a festival for Riff Raider in ’95. The original owner had apparently worn it to death—it was faded, had cigarette burns, and smelled vaguely of beer despite multiple washings. But holding it was like touching a piece of history, a physical connection to those hungry early days captured on the debut. I paid £75 for it, which was about £74 more than I should have spent given my journalist’s salary, but some purchases transcend financial sense. I’ve never worn it—it’s framed on my wall next to a UK pressing of the album.

The debut album reminds me of something I try to keep in mind whenever I’m reviewing new bands: greatness rarely arrives fully formed. Sometimes it comes disguised as something rougher, simpler, and less polished than what we eventually recognize as a band’s definitive sound. Iron Maiden taught me to listen for potential as much as polish, for hunger as much as technique. That lesson has served me well through decades of watching bands evolve, falter, and sometimes surpass all expectations.

So here’s to Iron Maiden’s self-titled debut—not just the start of something that would become immense, but a brilliant snapshot of a moment when metal was still being defined, when the barriers between punk energy and metal ambition were more permeable, and when a group of East London lads laid the cornerstone of what would become one of metal’s most enduring empires. It wasn’t just the dawn—it was a perfect sunrise in its own right.

I remember the day I first got my hands on “The $5.98 EP: Garage Days Re-Revisited” like it was yesterday—August 1987, standing in my local record store with sweat running down my back (the AC was perpetually broken that summer), holding what looked like the musical equivalent of a band exhaling after holding their breath for way too long. The sticker price was actually $6.98—an irony that wasn’t lost on sixteen-year-old me, who’d spent the morning mowing old Mrs. Henshaw’s lawn specifically to buy this record. “Inflation’s a bitch,” the guy behind the counter said with a shrug when I pointed out the price discrepancy. Whatever. I would’ve paid double.

This wasn’t just any release. This was the first official Metallica recording featuring Jason Newsted on bass after the tragedy that still feels difficult to talk about all these years later—the death of Cliff Burton. God, even typing that sentence still gives me a knot in my stomach. The bus accident in Sweden had happened less than a year earlier, and the metal community was still processing it. I mean, Cliff wasn’t just a bassist; he was the philosophical core of early Metallica, the guy who brought in the weird influences and pushed them beyond being “just” a thrash band. I’d had actual arguments with friends about whether Metallica should even continue without him. (Teenagers have a flair for the dramatic, but in our defense, it really did feel that consequential at the time.)

So here was this EP, this casual-looking collection of covers, that was actually carrying the weight of an impossible question: What is Metallica without Cliff Burton?

The brilliance of “Garage Days” was its deliberate looseness. Five covers, recorded in—you guessed it—a garage (well, Lars’ garage that they converted into “The Thunderdome” for recording). Raw production, minimal overdubs, no ballads, no epics, just the sound of four guys (including the new guy) playing the music that influenced them. It was like the band was saying, “Before we figure out what’s next, let’s remember why we started in the first place.”

I took that record home, set it on my turntable (a hand-me-down from my uncle that had definitely seen better days), and dropped the needle. The opening bass notes of “Helpless” (Diamond Head) hit, and I remember physically exhaling. Not because Jason was trying to be Cliff—he wasn’t, and couldn’t be—but because it sounded like Metallica. Different, sure, but recognizably them. I played that EP four times straight through that night while attempting to finish a history paper that was due the next day. Let’s just say Mr. Peterson learned way more about the Saxon kings than he probably wanted to, written by a kid hopped up on thrash covers at 1 AM.

The track selection told you everything about Metallica’s DNA—Diamond Head, Holocaust, Killing Joke, Budgie, and the Misfits. Not exactly Billboard chart-toppers, but crucial building blocks in Metallica’s musical foundations. Two NWOBHM bands, a post-punk band, a Welsh prog-rock/heavy metal group, and horror punk legends—it was like getting a peek at the band’s record collections, the stuff they played for each other in their earliest incarnations.

There’s something so nakedly honest about “Helpless” as the opener. The hunger in Hetfield’s voice isn’t affected—it’s the sound of a dude whose band had been gut-punched by tragedy, standing up again, and remembering why they do this in the first place. When he growls “We are helpless…to walk away,” it felt like both acknowledgment and defiance. Yeah, they’d lost Cliff. Yeah, it was devastating. No, they weren’t stopping.

I knew “The Small Hours” (Holocaust) already from my tape-trading days, and Metallica’s version managed to preserve the eerie, building quality of the original while Hammett’s guitar gave it this new texture that still felt coherent with the source material. That middle section where everything drops away except the drums and that creepy guitar line? I remember rewinding my cassette copy to hear that transition over and over, trying to figure out how they made something heavy feel so unsettling at the same time.

Then there’s “Killing Joke,” which—I’ll be honest—I pretended to know about before this EP but absolutely didn’t. I was that kid, the one who nodded knowingly while secretly planning to go hunt down the original as soon as humanly possible. The stomping rhythm and dissonant, angular guitar work were unlike anything else in Metallica’s catalog up to that point. It was obvious why they dug this band, though; there’s a darkness and intensity that fit perfectly with where Metallica’s heads were at.

“Crash Course in Brain Surgery” might be my favorite track on the EP, if only because it showcases that Metallica’s musical appetites were always weirder and more diverse than people gave them credit for. Budgie wasn’t an obvious influence to cite in 1987—they were this cult Welsh band that straddled the line between prog rock and early metal. The song’s got this swinging, almost bluesy quality beneath the thrash treatment. I remember my bass player friend Pete being obsessed with this track—he made me play it on repeat while he tried to figure out what Newsted was doing.

And then there’s “Last Caress/Green Hell,” the Misfits medley that closed out the EP. This was my introduction to the Misfits (yeah, I know, I was late to that particular party), and the contrast between the almost upbeat melody of “Last Caress” and its completely disturbed lyrics was a revelation. Metallica sounded like they were having fun for the first time since Burton’s death—there’s an audible smirk in Hetfield’s delivery.

The EP caught Metallica at this weird inflection point in their career—still raw from loss, not yet the commercial juggernaut they’d become with the Black Album, but clearly moving past the thrash purism of “Master of Puppets.” It’s like a snapshot of a band in transition, finding their footing again through the music that first inspired them. There’s something weirdly intimate about it, like you’re eavesdropping on their jam session.

I took that EP to school the next day (the same day I turned in that sleep-deprived history paper) and let my buddy Chris borrow it during study hall. He returned it after class with wide eyes. “Dude,” he said, “the new guy’s actually good.” It was like collective permission to move forward had been granted. If the music still hit right, maybe—just maybe—Metallica could survive this after all.

Looking back now, “Garage Days” stands as this bizarrely important release in Metallica’s evolution—musically, it’s just five covers recorded quickly with minimal fuss, but emotionally and historically, it’s the sound of a band finding their way back to themselves. It was never meant to be a big artistic statement—hell, the cover literally says “The $5.98 EP,” advertising its own modest ambitions—but sometimes the most honest art comes when you’re not trying to make capital-A Art.

Whenever I revisit it (which is more often than you might think), I’m struck by how alive it sounds. There’s a looseness, an almost punk rock energy, that Metallica sometimes sacrificed in pursuit of precision on their studio albums. You can hear the room, the bleed between instruments, the occasional missed note or rough transition. It’s gloriously imperfect in all the right ways.

Years later, I interviewed Lars for a piece I was writing about the 30th anniversary of the Black Album. After we’d covered the assigned topic, I couldn’t help myself—I asked about “Garage Days.” He got this distant look, then broke into a massive grin. “Man, we needed that so badly. We were drowning in grief and expectations, and we just needed to play, you know? Just remember what it felt like to be excited about music again.” He paused, then added, “Plus, it helped Jason feel like he was actually in the band, not just replacing someone irreplaceable.”

And that’s really what “Garage Days” represents—not just Jason Newsted’s introduction to the world as Metallica’s new bassist, but Metallica’s reintroduction to themselves. A reminder that beneath the tragedy and the pressure and the growing fame, they were still just four metalheads who loved Diamond Head and the Misfits and wanted to make a glorious racket together.

Not bad for six bucks and change.

The first time I heard King Diamond’s falsetto, I was seventeen and alone in my bedroom with a dubbed cassette that had been passed to me by Kevin Sullivan, the only other kid at West Hill High who seemed to understand that metal extended beyond whatever was getting played on Headbanger’s Ball. The tape had no case, just a scrap of lined paper with “Mercyful Fate – Don’t Break the Oath” scrawled in Kevin’s practically illegible handwriting. “Danish black metal,” he’d said mysteriously, as if imparting forbidden knowledge. “Prepare to have your mind blown.”

Mind blown doesn’t begin to cover it. When those initial guitar harmonies gave way to King Diamond’s otherworldly wail in the opening track “A Dangerous Meeting,” I nearly fell off my bed. What the hell was this? The voice seemed to defy human physiology—soaring into registers I didn’t even know were possible for a male vocalist, then plunging into theatrical growls and sinister narrative passages. It was operatic, bizarre, completely over-the-top, and absolutely captivating. I must have rewound that section five times before letting the song continue, just trying to process what I was hearing.

This was 1986, two years after the album’s release, and I was a kid who thought he’d already mapped the boundaries of heavy music. I’d graduated from Iron Maiden and Judas Priest to the faster, heavier sounds of early Metallica and Slayer. I’d even dipped my toes into the first wave of death metal with Possessed’s “Seven Churches.” But nothing had prepared me for the theatrical, progressive, occult-drenched experience that was “Don’t Break the Oath.” It wasn’t just heavy—it was bizarre, complex, and completely committed to a theatrical vision that made even Priest’s leather-and-studs aesthetic seem tame by comparison.

The cassette became my secret obsession. I’d listen to it late at night with headphones, partly because the subject matter felt genuinely dangerous in my Catholic household (if Mom had known about lyrics involving literal pacts with Satan, my entire music collection would have ended up in the trash), and partly because the music demanded that kind of focused, immersive attention. This wasn’t background music. It was a dark opera in metal form, with King Diamond as its macabre maestro.

What struck me immediately about “Don’t Break the Oath,” beyond Diamond’s supernatural vocal range, was how musically sophisticated it was. While many metal bands of the era were focusing on speed and aggression, Mercyful Fate was crafting these complex, multi-part compositions with tempo changes, intricate dual guitar harmonies, and atmospheric passages that created genuine suspense. Songs like “The Oath” and “Nightmare” played out like miniature horror films, complete with exposition, climax, and denouement.

The guitar work of Hank Shermann and Michael Denner remains some of the most criminally underrated playing in metal history. These guys weren’t just riffing—they were composing, creating these intricate melodic conversations between their instruments. The solo trade-offs in “Desecration of Souls” still give me goosebumps, combining neoclassical precision with blues-based emotion in a way that few guitarists have matched since. In a just world, Shermann and Denner would be mentioned in the same breath as Smith-Murray or Tipton-Downing when discussing legendary metal guitar duos.

Then there’s the rhythm section—bassist Timi Hansen and drummer Kim Ruzz providing a rock-solid foundation that allowed the songs to venture into progressive territory without losing their heavy impact. Listen to how they navigate the time signature shifts in “Night of the Unborn”—locking together with a precision that keeps the song grounded even as it spirals through its occult narrative.

But of course, it’s impossible to discuss Mercyful Fate without focusing on King Diamond himself—the band’s visual and vocal centerpiece, and the architect of its theatrical approach. The corpse paint, the inverted crosses, the elaborate stage persona—these elements would become genre staples in the Scandinavian black metal scene years later. But in 1984, this level of theatrical commitment was revolutionary, predating even the more extreme visual aesthetics that would emerge in the following decade.

And that voice! I’ve spent more hours than I care to admit trying to analyze exactly how King Diamond achieves his vocal effects. The falsetto is the obvious standout—piercing and powerful, used not just as an occasional flourish but as a primary vocal style. But it’s the way he combines it with narrative passages, growls, and mid-range singing to create distinct characters within the songs that elevates it from mere technique to genuine artistic expression. In songs like “The Oath,” he’s not just singing—he’s playing multiple roles in a mini-theatrical production, using vocal shifts to move between narrator and character voices.

The occult lyrics were shocking for the time, going far beyond the vague Satanic imagery that bands like Venom were deploying for shock value. Diamond wasn’t just throwing around pentagrams and devil references—he was constructing detailed occult narratives that suggested genuine knowledge of esoteric traditions. Whether this stemmed from actual practice or simply extraordinary commitment to his art remains part of the King Diamond mystique. Either way, it created an atmosphere of authentic darkness that few bands have matched.

I remember trying to explain Mercyful Fate to my metalhead friends who hadn’t heard them yet. “It’s like if Judas Priest and Black Sabbath had a baby, and that baby was raised by a coven of warlocks who sent it to opera school.” Even that ridiculous description doesn’t quite capture the unique alchemy of “Don’t Break the Oath.”

The album’s influence on extreme metal can’t be overstated, though it often goes unacknowledged. Without Mercyful Fate, the entire Scandinavian black metal scene of the early ’90s might have sounded completely different. The theatrical presentation, the occult themes, the corpse paint—all became fundamental elements of black metal as pioneered by bands like Mayhem, Emperor, and Darkthrone. Even if the musical style evolved in a harsher, more primitive direction, the theatrical DNA established on “Don’t Break the Oath” remained.

Beyond black metal, you can hear Mercyful Fate’s influence in virtually every metal band that incorporates theatrical elements or complex song structures. Ghost’s entire career is essentially a more accessible continuation of the template Mercyful Fate established. Elements of King Diamond’s vocal approach can be heard in extreme metal vocalists from Dani Filth to Ihsahn, who use dramatic shifts in vocal register to create atmosphere and character. And the band’s progressive tendencies paved the way for the technical death metal that would emerge in the following decades.

I had the surreal experience of interviewing King Diamond in 2007, over twenty years after that first mind-blowing listening session in my teenage bedroom. We were talking about his solo work, but I couldn’t resist asking about “Don’t Break the Oath” and what he’d been trying to achieve with those groundbreaking vocal techniques.

“I never saw limits,” he told me, with that slight Danish accent that appears when he’s speaking seriously. “Opera singers could do these incredible things with their voices, so why couldn’t that work in heavy metal? The stories I wanted to tell needed different characters, different emotions. The falsetto could express terror or power or the supernatural—whatever the story needed.”

That commitment to storytelling is what makes “Don’t Break the Oath” more than just a collection of songs—it’s a complete work, almost concept-album-like in its thematic cohesion. Each track contributes to an overall atmosphere of occult mystery and supernatural dread. The album doesn’t just present songs about the dark arts; it creates a fully realized world where such forces are omnipresent and active.

I’ve revisited “Don’t Break the Oath” countless times over the decades, and what strikes me now is how fresh it still sounds. Unlike many albums from the mid-80s, it hasn’t dated itself through production trends or genre constraints. There’s a timeless quality to the songwriting and performance that transcends its era. The guitar tones are perfect—heavy enough to carry the music’s dark themes but clean enough to showcase the intricate playing. The drum sound is natural and powerful. And King Diamond’s vocals exist in their own unique space, untethered from trends or contemporaries.

The album’s legacy lives on in unexpected places. I was at a listening party for a new progressive metal album a few years ago, and found myself in conversation with the band’s vocalist—a guy half my age who’d grown up on a diet of technical death metal and djent. When I mentioned my long-standing love for Mercyful Fate, his eyes lit up.

“‘Don’t Break the Oath’ changed everything for me,” he said. “Before that, I thought extreme vocals were just about being as harsh as possible. King Diamond showed me they could be technical, expressive, almost… beautiful, in a twisted way.”

That’s perhaps the most accurate description I’ve heard—”beautiful, in a twisted way.” It captures the strange contradiction at the heart of Mercyful Fate’s masterpiece: music that deals with the darkest themes imaginable, presented with almost baroque elegance and sophistication. The refined serving the profane. The technical elevating the transgressive.

There’s a moment in “The Oath” when King Diamond’s falsetto soars over a particularly intricate guitar harmony, creating this perfect synthesis of the beautiful and the sinister. Whenever I hear it, I’m transported back to that first listen—teenager me sitting wide-eyed in a darkened bedroom, realizing that metal could be more ambitious, more theatrical, more complex than I’d ever imagined. In that moment, Mercyful Fate weren’t just pushing boundaries—they were obliterating them, creating a template for theatrical metal that bands are still drawing from four decades later.

The oath may instruct us not to break it, but Mercyful Fate broke practically everything else—vocal conventions, compositional norms, visual boundaries—and metal has been all the richer for their blasphemy.

Let me set the scene: O’Malley’s Pub in Seattle, 2012. Thursday night metal trivia, which is exactly what it sounds like – a trivia night exclusively about metal, run by a former college radio DJ named Keith who sports a Testament backpatch that I’m pretty sure is older than some of the participants. The place smells like spilled beer and unearned confidence, and the crowd is the usual mix of aging metalheads, hipsters “ironically” getting into thrash, and a few younger folks who were perpetually born in the wrong decade.

I’m three beers deep when Keith announces the final round: “Controversial Opinions.” The task? Stand up, announce your most controversial metal take, and let the crowd’s reaction determine if you get points. Democracy at its finest.

The first few contestants play it safe-ish. “Metallica peaked with ‘Kill ‘Em All’” (scattered applause, a few boos). “Bruce Dickinson is overrated” (nearly starting a bar fight). “St. Anger isn’t that bad” (universal groaning).

Then it’s my turn. Maybe it was the beer, maybe it was my journalist’s compulsion to stir the pot, or maybe I was just tired of pretending. I stood up, grabbed the mic, and declared with full conviction:

“Warrant’s ‘Cherry Pie’ is actually a great album with legitimate musical merit, and most of you haven’t even listened to it all the way through.”

The silence that followed was like I’d just announced I kicked puppies for sport. Then came the boos – oh, the boos. A guy in a Slayer shirt made the universal “wanking” gesture. Someone shouted “POSER!” like it was still 1989. Keith, bless him, was laughing so hard he had to hold onto the bar to stay upright.

“You have two minutes to defend your position,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes. “This should be good.”

And so began the most ridiculous metal debate of my life – me, standing on a wobbly barstool, passionately defending one of hair metal’s most maligned albums to a roomful of people who considered Cannibal Corpse “a bit commercial.”

“First of all,” I began, “how many of you have actually listened to the entire album?” Three hands went up out of about forty people. “Exactly my point. You’re condemning something you haven’t even heard based on ONE song that the label pushed as a single.”

I was on a roll now, gesturing with my beer like a drunk professor. “Beyond the title track, there’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ which is basically a Southern gothic murder ballad with genuinely impressive guitar work from Joey Allen and Erik Turner. There’s the power ballad ‘I Saw Red,’ which Jani Lane wrote about walking in on his girlfriend cheating on

I’ve got this theory I test at metal bars. Walk in, find the oldest guy wearing a battle vest, buy him a beer, and ask: “Last truly great Slayer album?” Nine times outta ten, after some grumbling about how nothing touches “Reign in Blood,” they’ll say “Seasons in the Abyss.” That tenth guy usually picks “South of Heaven,” but he’s probably just being contrarian. I respect that.

Released in October 1990—right as I was starting my sophomore year of college and my first serious attempt at music journalism for the campus paper—”Seasons in the Abyss” landed at a pivotal moment for both Slayer and metal as a whole. Grunge was lurking just around the corner, ready to kneecap the entire scene. Hair metal was already on life support. And thrash was reaching a crossroads: evolve or die.

I bought “Seasons” the day it dropped at Tower Records on Sunset. I remember standing in line behind this guy with a perfectly teased hairdo buying the new Warrant album, and feeling an almost smug satisfaction knowing what was about to hit the metal world. Not that I was psychic about the grunge tsunami coming—I just knew Slayer was about to drop another bomb. I had that same stomach-knotting anticipation I’d had before “Reign in Blood” and “South of Heaven.”

The listening ritual was sacred. Back at my crappy off-campus apartment, I kicked out my roommate (sorry, Derek), turned off the phone, cracked a Coors (look, it was college, don’t judge my beer choices), and ceremonially placed the needle on the record. That opening track “War Ensemble” hit, and I just started laughing—that slightly unhinged laugh you do when something is so perfectly executed it borders on ridiculous. Tom Araya machine-gunning those war lyrics over Dave Lombardo’s inhuman blast beats was exactly what I needed after sitting through a three-hour Victorian literature seminar.

Here’s what made “Seasons” special, and why I still think it’s their last truly classic record: it’s the perfect synthesis of everything Slayer had done before. The relentless speed of “Reign in Blood,” the creeping doom atmosphere of “South of Heaven,” all wrapped up with their most focused songwriting and—I’ll say it—their best production.

The three-album arc of “Reign in Blood” to “Seasons in the Abyss” is one of metal’s perfect trilogies. “Reign” was the speed monster that changed the game. “South of Heaven” was the deliberate attempt to throw a curveball by slowing things down (which initially pissed me off—I distinctly remember throwing a shoe at my stereo first listen—but grew to appreciate as their darkest work). Then “Seasons” came along and said, “Actually, we can do both, sometimes in the same song, and make it work seamlessly.”

Take the title track—probably my favorite Slayer song ever, and that’s not a statement I make lightly. It starts with that eerie, clean guitar intro that builds tension like a horror movie, then morphs into this mid-tempo crusher that’s somehow more menacing than their fastest material. The atmospheric middle section wouldn’t have been out of place on “South of Heaven,” but then they bring it back around to that devastating main riff. It’s a masterclass in dynamics that proved Slayer weren’t just speed merchants—they were legitimate composers who happened to work in the medium of extreme metal.

I actually got to see them on the Clash of the Titans tour in 1991 with Megadeth, Anthrax and opener Alice in Chains (yeah, that lineup was as insane as it sounds). When they played “Dead Skin Mask,” the crowd did this weird thing where instead of moshing, everyone just sort of… swayed menacingly? It was unsettling and perfect, and showed how Slayer had evolved from just causing chaos to controlling the emotional temperature of an entire venue.

The production on “Seasons” strikes this perfect balance that their later work never quite recaptured. Andy Wallace’s mix gives every instrument room to breathe while still maintaining that essential Slayer claustrophobia. Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman’s guitars have this razor precision that lets you hear every diabolical note of their interplay. Lombardo’s drums sound like actual drums instead of the triggered nonsense that would plague metal production later in the ’90s. And Araya’s bass actually cuts through the mix—a minor miracle in thrash.

I’ve had this argument with my old Riff Raider colleague Steve at least a dozen times, but I maintain that Jeff Hanneman did his best songwriting on this album. “War Ensemble,” “Dead Skin Mask,” “Seasons in the Abyss”—all Hanneman compositions, all absolute classics. The way he could shift from blistering speed to ominous mid-tempo passages revealed a sophistication that transcended typical thrash formulas. When he passed in 2013, I put on “Seasons” front to back and may have shed a very non-metal tear into my whiskey.

I had the slightly surreal experience of interviewing Tom Araya for a freelance piece right after this album dropped. I was trying to be Professional Music Journalist Guy, asking serious questions about the lyrical themes of war and serial killers, and he just kept cracking jokes between replies. Totally shattered my image of him as this intense, screaming demon. At one point he did this spot-on impression of James Hetfield that had me laughing so hard I nearly screwed up my recording. Never met a nicer guy who made his living screaming about the apocalypse.

So why was “Seasons” their last truly great album? I’ve thought about this a lot—probably more than is healthy for a middle-aged man with actual responsibilities. I think it comes down to three things: timing, personnel, and the changing landscape of metal itself.

Timing-wise, they couldn’t have known it, but they were releasing their masterpiece right before alternative rock would reshape the entire music industry. Within a year, Nirvana’s “Nevermind” would drop, and suddenly every major label was scrambling to sign flannel-wearing dudes from Seattle instead of thrash bands. The commercial window for mainstream metal was closing fast.

Personnel-wise, the departure of Dave Lombardo after this album cannot be overstated. Look, Paul Bostaph is a totally capable drummer. I’ve defended him in more bar arguments than I care to count. But Lombardo wasn’t just a drummer—he was the battery that powered Slayer’s most ferocious material. His feel, his fills, that double-bass technique that sounded like the hooves of approaching apocalyptic horsemen—it was irreplaceable. You can hear it all over “Seasons,” especially on tracks like “War Ensemble” and “Hallowed Point.”

And then there’s the changing landscape. Post-“Seasons,” extreme metal splintered into a thousand subgenres. Death metal was getting more technical, black metal was getting more atmospheric, and industrial elements were creeping in everywhere. Slayer’s next album, “Divine Intervention” (1994), wasn’t bad—it had moments of real brutality—but it felt like they were following trends rather than setting them.

My friend Marcus, who runs that record store in Portland with the absolutely insane thrash section in the back, has this theory that “Seasons” was the last album where Slayer weren’t self-conscious about being Slayer. Every album after became increasingly concerned with sounding “Slayer enough,” which paradoxically made them sound less essential. There’s something to that. “Seasons” has this confidence, this effortlessness to its brutality that later albums worked too hard to recapture.

I remember playing the cassette of “Seasons” so much in my ’86 Honda Civic that it actually warped from the heat of being left on the dashboard during a particularly brutal California summer day. The tape stretched just enough that “Born of Fire” played slightly slower than it should, which somehow made it even more menacing. That car eventually died a spectacular death outside a Sepultura show in San Bernardino (timing belt snapped, smoke everywhere, very metal), but I saved that warped cassette because it had gotten me through countless late-night drives and post-breakup rage sessions.

For me, the standout tracks on “Seasons” have always been “War Ensemble,” “Dead Skin Mask,” “Hallowed Point,” and the title track. But the album’s real strength is its consistency—there’s not a weak song in the bunch. Even “Temptation,” which some fans overlook, has that wicked bass intro and chorus that lodges in your brain like shrapnel.

The fact that it still holds up more than three decades later is testament to its staying power. I played “Spirit in Black” for my nephew last year—kid’s 19 and into some kind of electronic metal hybrid stuff that makes me feel approximately 407 years old—and watched his expression shift from polite tolerance to genuine interest when that midsection kicked in. “This is from 1990?” he asked, slightly amazed. When I nodded, he just said, “Damn, Uncle Mike.” Highest praise possible from a teenager.

I think what ultimately makes “Seasons” their last true classic is that it represented the perfect balance point between old Slayer and what would become new Slayer. They were still unmistakably the same band that created “Reign in Blood,” but they’d evolved their songwriting and weren’t afraid to experiment with atmosphere and dynamics. After this, the experimentation would sometimes veer into unfortunate territory (we don’t need to talk about “Diabolus in Musica” and its nu-metal flirtations, do we?).

There’s a bittersweetness to listening to “Seasons” now, knowing it was the last album with the classic lineup before Lombardo’s first departure, and one of the last before the wilderness years began. It’s like watching the final great performance of an athlete before injuries start to take their toll—still at the peak of their powers, but standing at the precipice.

When I do my periodic chronological Slayer listening sessions (usually after a particularly brutal workweek when I need catharsis more than melody), I always find myself lingering on “Seasons” longer than the others. It’s not just nostalgia—though, sure, there’s some of that. It’s recognition of a band at their creative peak, making exactly the album they wanted to make with zero compromise.

Live, these songs took on an even more monstrous quality. I saw them play much of this material at the Palladium in Hollywood in early ’91, and the precision with which they executed these complex arrangements while maintaining that essential Slayer chaos was mind-blowing. During “Seasons in the Abyss,” the crowd went from violent moshing to this weird collective trance, thousands of metalheads swaying in unison like some kind of demented religious congregation. Which, I suppose, is exactly what we were.

I had to explain to my second wife (the one who actually tolerated my record collection taking over an entire room) why I needed to take a day off work when Jeff Hanneman died. I played her “Dead Skin Mask” and “Seasons in the Abyss” back to back, pointing out the architectural brilliance of his riff construction, the way he used dissonance like a painter uses shadow. She listened patiently, nodded, and said, “I don’t get it, but I get why you get it.” That’s about as good as it gets in a metal/non-metal relationship.

A friend recently asked me if I thought Slayer would ever be “cool” again the way they were in the late ’80s and early ’90s. I had to laugh. Slayer was never “cool” in any conventional sense—they were necessary. They said musical things that needed to be said, created extremity that needed to exist. “Seasons in the Abyss” was the final, perfect statement of that necessity before the band began chasing their own shadow.

For those who were there when it dropped, it remains an untouchable monument to what metal could be—technically astounding yet emotionally resonant, brutally aggressive yet hauntingly atmospheric. And for those discovering it now, it’s a masterclass in how to balance extremity with genuine songcraft. Either way, it stands as Slayer’s last truly perfect statement before the wilderness years began—the final classic from thrash metal’s most uncompromising outfit.

The first time I heard Tool’s “Undertow,” I was sitting in the cramped back office of a college radio station in Seattle, spring of 1993. The program director—a perpetually wired guy named Keith with black-rimmed glasses and opinions stronger than the terrible coffee he constantly consumed—tossed the CD at me with unusual solemnity. “This,” he said, “is not like the other stuff coming out right now.” Keith wasn’t prone to understatement, but in this case, he was guilty of it.

1993 was peak grunge. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains were inescapable. Seattle had become the reluctant center of the rock universe, and every major label was desperately signing anyone who owned flannel and looked like they hadn’t showered recently. I was in my early twenties, writing album reviews for local papers and trying to make sense of how quickly metal had been shoved aside for this new sound.

Don’t get me wrong—I loved a lot of the grunge bands. But there was this weird moment where it felt like every rock release had to fit into this specific template: vaguely psychedelic verses, big distorted choruses, lyrics about depression and alienation, all wrapped in a deliberately unpolished production style. If you weren’t doing that in 1993, you weren’t getting airplay.

And then came Tool’s “Undertow,” crashing into this homogenized landscape like some bizarre alien artifact that nobody quite knew how to categorize. Was it metal? Was it alternative? Was it prog? It had elements of all three but refused to be limited by any single genre’s boundaries. The album sounded like it had been created by people who weren’t paying any attention to current trends—which, in 1993, was both commercial suicide and artistically revolutionary.

The first track, “Intolerance,” made it immediately clear that this wasn’t going to be another grunge record. Adam Jones’ guitar work was precise and mathematical where grunge was loose and impressionistic. Danny Carey’s drumming was technically complex in a way that made most rock drummers sound like they were banging on pots and pans. And then there was Maynard James Keenan’s voice—this strange, elastic instrument that could shift from a whisper to a scream within the same phrase, delivering lyrics that read more like cryptic philosophy than the direct emotional expressions most of Seattle’s bands favored.

I’d been assigned to review the album for The Stranger, one of Seattle’s alternative weeklies. I remember sitting in my shabby apartment, trying to figure out how to describe this sound to readers who were mostly interested in whether a band sounded like Nirvana or Pearl Jam. I ended up calling it “thinking man’s metal for the post-grunge apocalypse,” which my editor thought was pretentious but left in anyway. In retrospect, I stand by it.

What really struck me about “Undertow” was its intensity. Grunge could be heavy, certainly, but it was usually a sludgy, fuzzy kind of heaviness. Tool’s heaviness was sharp, precise, almost surgical. “Sober” was the perfect example—that descending bass line created this sense of inexorable movement, like being slowly pulled underwater. When the chorus hit, it wasn’t just loud; it was focused, like all the band’s energy was being channeled through a laser beam rather than dispersed through distortion.

I interviewed Maynard years later, around the time “Lateralus” came out. I asked him about those early days and how Tool fit into the alternative music landscape of the early ’90s. He got this amused look and said, “We didn’t. That was the point.” He explained that while they respected many of the grunge acts, they were drawing from completely different influences—prog rock, avant-garde metal, art music, and philosophy rather than punk and classic rock.

“Undertow” had this remarkable quality of feeling both accessible and completely alien. Songs like “Prison Sex” and “Sober” had enough of a traditional verse-chorus structure that you could grasp them on first listen, but they were surrounded by these strange, atmospheric pieces like “4°” and “Flood” that revealed themselves more slowly. The album demanded repeated listening in a way that was becoming increasingly rare in the MTV age of immediate hooks and instant gratification.

I still remember the first time I saw the video for “Sober” on MTV’s “Headbanger’s Ball.” This was when the show was already on its last legs, being gradually phased out in favor of more grunge and alternative content. The stop-motion animation was so disturbingly beautiful that I actually called a friend at 1 AM to make sure he recorded it off the TV. “There’s finally something interesting happening in mainstream rock again,” I told him, probably sounding like a deranged person.

What’s fascinating about “Undertow” is how it created this third path at a time when rock music seemed to be splitting into two distinct camps: grunge/alternative on one side and traditional metal on the other. Tool rejected both templates. They were too technically proficient and structurally complex to fit with the deliberately rough-around-the-edges alternative scene, but they were too experimental and intellectual for the mainstream metal audience that was still focusing on speed and aggression above all else.

In a way, “Undertow” predicted where a significant segment of heavy music would go in the years that followed. The math metal, progressive metal, and even certain strains of post-metal that would emerge later in the ’90s and early 2000s all owe something to what Tool was doing on this album. They showed that you could be heavy without being dumb, complex without being pretentious, and artistically ambitious without disappearing up your own ass (well, mostly—let’s acknowledge that Tool definitely had their moments of self-indulgence).

The rhythm section on this album deserves special attention. Danny Carey and Paul D’Amour created these hypnotic, almost tribal grooves that made Tool instantly recognizable. Listen to “Crawl Away”—the way Carey’s drums dance around the main beat while still keeping everything anchored, or how D’Amour’s bass provides both melodic and rhythmic counterpoint to Jones’ guitar work. These weren’t musicians who were just playing the root notes louder; they were creating this intricate musical dialogue.

I had a chance to talk to Adam Jones around 2001 for a piece on influential modern guitarists. When I brought up “Undertow,” he said something interesting: “We were trying to create music that felt like it was revealing something hidden, like each time you listened, you’d notice something new.” That approach was so different from what was happening in popular rock at the time, where immediacy was prized above all else. Tool was purposely creating music that withheld some of its pleasures, that required work from the listener.

The production on “Undertow” holds up remarkably well compared to many other albums from that era. Producer Sylvia Massey captured this dry, unadorned sound that gave every instrument room to breathe without sacrificing the overall heaviness. There’s no dating production trickery—no gated reverb on the drums, no excessive effects on the vocals, none of the sonic gimmicks that instantly time-stamp so many early ’90s records.

I caught Tool on the “Undertow” tour when they played Seattle in the fall of 1993. It was at the RKCNDY, this mid-sized venue that hosted a lot of up-and-coming bands at the time. I remember being struck by how different the crowd was from a typical Seattle rock show. Instead of the standard-issue flannel shirts and Doc Martens that dominated most concerts, there was this weird mix of metal heads, art students, and what we’d now probably call “psychonauts”—people who looked like they approached music as some kind of consciousness-expanding experience.

The show itself was revelatory. The band played with this locked-in precision that was almost frightening. There was very little stage banter—Maynard spent most of the show lurking in the shadows at the back of the stage, his silhouette visible only during the most intense vocal parts. It wasn’t a “show” in the traditional sense; it was more like a controlled detonation of sound and energy. I left feeling both exhilarated and slightly disturbed, which I suspect was exactly the reaction they were aiming for.

What’s remarkable about “Undertow” is how it manages to be both of its time and completely separate from it. It could only have emerged in that early ’90s moment when the boundaries between alternative rock and metal were becoming blurred, but it also exists in its own particular universe, following its own internal logic rather than responding to external trends.

The album’s lyrics deserve special mention. While grunge was very direct in its exploration of pain, addiction, and alienation, Tool approached these same themes through metaphor, symbolism, and allusion. Songs like “Sober” dealt with addiction not through confession but through a more abstract, almost mythological perspective. Maynard’s lyrics read like dark poetry rather than diary entries, which gave them a timelessness that many of their contemporaries lacked.

I had a somewhat embarrassing but formative experience with this album during my early years as a music journalist. I wrote this pretentious, overwrought review where I tried to deconstruct all the symbolism and hidden meanings in “Undertow.” A couple months later, I actually got to interview Maynard briefly at a festival, and I eagerly asked him about some specific lyrical interpretation I’d developed. He just stared at me for an uncomfortable few seconds and then said, “Maybe. Or maybe it’s just a song about being pissed off.” Lesson learned—sometimes in trying to prove how smart we are as listeners, we miss the visceral, emotional core of the music.

That’s the beauty of “Undertow,” though. It works on multiple levels simultaneously. You can analyze the complex time signatures, the carefully structured dynamics, the literary references in the lyrics—or you can just bang your head to “Bottom” because it has one of the most punishing riffs of the 1990s. The album invites both approaches without privileging either one.

I’ve gone back to “Undertow” regularly over the past three decades, and it hasn’t lost an ounce of its power. If anything, it seems more prescient now than it did in 1993. Tool was creating music that rejected easy categorization at a time when the music industry was becoming increasingly obsessed with neat marketing categories. They were making lengthy, complex compositions when radio demanded three-minute singles. They were taking art seriously when rock was often expected to be simple and direct.

In that sense, “Undertow” wasn’t just an alternative to grunge; it was an alternative to the entire approach of mainstream rock music. It suggested that heaviness could be intellectual as well as physical, that complexity could enhance rather than detract from emotional impact, and that mystery was a virtue in an age of over-explanation. The album didn’t just sound different from its contemporaries—it operated according to a completely different set of values.

I sometimes wonder how I would have responded to “Undertow” if I’d encountered it today rather than in 1993. Would it still have felt as revolutionary? Probably. Because even now, when progressive metal has become an established genre and bands regularly incorporate complex structures and unconventional time signatures, there’s something uniquely powerful about Tool’s approach on this album. They weren’t being complex to show off; they were using every element of their sound—the unusual rhythms, the extended song structures, the cryptic lyrics—in service of creating a specific emotional and psychological impact.

In 2023, thirty years after its release, “Undertow” still feels like a challenge. It demands your full attention in a way that fewer and fewer cultural artifacts do. It refuses to be background music. It asks questions rather than providing answers. In an era of endless distraction and instant gratification, there’s something almost radical about an album that asks you to sit with it, to work for your rewards, to engage with it as an active participant rather than a passive consumer.

That depth, that commitment to artistic vision over commercial considerations, that willingness to trust the listener—these are what made “Undertow” such a vital alternative to the prevailing sounds of 1993, and what keep it feeling vital today. In a musical landscape that was increasingly being flattened into easily digestible, radio-friendly units, Tool created something with genuine depth and dimension. They gave us an album that wasn’t just a collection of songs but a world unto itself—mysterious, challenging, and impossible to fully exhaust, no matter how many times you enter it.