RBOTD #201: Exit Smashed
The forgotten member of the Round Table, the Old Spice Crypt-O-Knight
https://www.metal-archives.com/band/view/id/3540376278
Country: Germany
Location: Hamburg
Genre: thrash metal
Formed in: 2012
Status: active
By the Numbers
Exit Smashed is the:
56th band formed in the 2010s
11th band from Germany
107th band that is active at the time of querying
Its genre tags have been seen:
Thrash: 39 times
Member Connections
Quite a few. Narrowing these down to:
Dragonbreed, a melodeath band from Germany and Italy
Suidakra, a melodic death/black/folk metal band from Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia
Thrashing Pumpguns, a thrash/punk band from Hamburg
Bleedfort, a thrash band from Henstedt-Ulzburg, Schleswig-Holstein
Warpath, a thrash band from Hamburg
Know 'Em?
Nope. I am now 10/201.
Sketch Check
Pass.
RateYourMusic Scores
Exit Smashed has not been rated.
Adjusted scores are calculated similarly to the Trad Belt scoring system. Please read that column for more information.
Trifecta Tracker
Exit Smashed has not achieved the trifecta.
A band can achieve the trifecta by titling a song after itself on a self-titled release. Iron Maiden's "Iron Maiden" on 1980's Iron Maiden is an example of the trifecta.
Exit Smashed is a thrash quintet from Hamburg that refreshes the Bay Area sound of the '80s with a modern Euro sensibility. Fabulous Disaster-era Exodus modified by some Dark Angel chuggeration is probably the comparison as far as its roots are concerned. On the modern side of the divide, I think Nuclear Omnicide fits as a similar artist since both bands' goals are the same. Exit Smashed is almost that successful, too. That is to say, musically, it's way more competent than most nowadays thrash of this ilk tends to be. "Shredhead," for instance, has a nice needle-y run that offsets the chugga-dugga parts nicely. Good thrash songwriting. Exit Smashed has been paying attention. Lyrically? Thematically? Well, it's pretty pizza. Between Death And Death is a concept album, a sort of thrash opera or "thrashpera" in the spirit of Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds, about a "Incest-Nazi-Redneck-Invasion." What's the invasion named? "The Runs." "The runs has us by the balls," Rotten Rolf sneers on "The Runs." "The runs could be mankind's final downfall." Yeeep.
While it pleases me that Exit Smashed is staunchly anti-incest-nazi-rednecks, does detailing the exploits of the Old Spice Crypt-O-Knight make for a good RBOTD? "I, the Old Spice Crypt-O-Knight," quoth the Old Spice Crypt-O-Knight, "sense the inner need to tear some redneck-nazi-hillbilly-beavercult-scumbag-asses apart. Uhhh yeeeaahhh!" Uh. Yeah. I want to like this…and I think I would if it was performed by…I don't know, Ben Folds or a third-wave ska band like Bite Me Bambi1 or something. I generally don't want musical theater in my metal, so pizza thrash rarely works its charms on me.2 So what else we got?
Exit Smashed was previously a melo-inflected metalcore band that went by Only Death Decides. We got this promo picture out of that:
A former Exit Smashed drummer was also in Bleedfort, a band that had a demo titled, drumroll please, Thrash Til Your Asshole Bleed.
Ken, Exit Smashed's current drummer, is also slapping the skins in Dragonbreed, a heftier melodeath band with a new album, Necrohedon, that has generated a bit of buzz.
There you go. That's...some stuff. Is any of that an RBOTD? No? You're going to unsubscribe? Really? Do I have to transfer you to the Old Spice Crypt-O-Knight to stop disconnecting your service? All right, let's run some numbers.
What is thrash's position in metal in 2022? While thrash is one of metal's most popular and recognizable genres, to the point that I think a non-metalhead could ID "Master of Puppets" as a metal song faster than anything else, I feel like the genre has been leapfrogged in relevancy by death metal and black metal, at least in the realm of underground metal. Of the 173 releases on my "Best Metal: 2021" shortlist, three were straight-up thrash…and I thought it was a pretty good year for thrash. For the longest time, it seems like I'll find one or two rippers that scratch the thrash itch, and that's kind of it. The golden age of the '80s might as well be getting drilled for oil it was so long ago. So, is that just me or is that a thing? Let's find the thrash.
First, I went to Encyclopaedia Metallum and pulled the number of full-lengths released and bands formed for each of the last four decades. To qualify, entries in either category needed a tag of "thrash" in the genre field. This greatly expanded the results because thrash variants, such as death/thrash, blackened thrash, etc., were included.3 Regardless, the results are about what I expected.
Again, you can see the paradox I've highlighted before. Although releases are on an incline, the number of bands formed took a dive in the 2010s. It's weird. I still don't know what to make of it. Whatever, for our purposes, check out the difference between 1980s, thrash's golden age, and the 2010s, what I consider to be a fallow period. Even on a sharp decline, 80 percent more thrash bands were formed in the 2010s than in the 1980s. Full-lengths went up by 1,620 percent. Thrash, there is a lot of it.
OK, so I've established that there's way more thrash now. But, here's the second part of my conundrum: Is nowadays thrash being appraised by fans at the same level as golden age material? For that, I went to RateYourMusic.4 To start, I searched for the top thrash album for every year since 1983. I then pulled those albums' respective average rating and number of ratings. Let's take a look at average rating first:
The high is Metallica's 1984 masterpiece Ride the Lightning, rated 4.06 out of a possible 5. The low is Marty Friedman's 2014 album that I've never heard before, Inferno, rated 3.45. Indeed, thrash topped out at a 3.45 in the year 2014 per RYM users. Please send any questions to them. Thrash last achieved a rating above 3.8 in 1992 (Demolition Hammer's Epidemic of Violence) and has never returned to that rarified air.
What does that mean on a year-to-year basis? Not a lot. Metal scores within substyles tend to experience a lot of flux, especially as critically successful bands take longer to release highly anticipated successive albums. So let's approach this by decade instead. Here's the average of the highest rating per decade:
Thrash tanks in the 2010s. However, early returns suggest that thrash is rebounding slightly in the 2020s. Here's one more detailing number of ratings:
Woof. The number of RYM users interested in rating thrash released outside of the 1980s has cratered, falling steadily decade after decade.
So, yeah. My takeaway is that there's more thrash than ever before, but people are less interested in engaging with it, preferring the safety of known quantities released in the golden age. Of course, that may be true of metal on the whole. But it does suggest that what I'm feeling about thrash is half right. Here's my extremely charitable read: Modern thrash classics, if there are any, aren't making it to me because fewer people care to dedicate the time to finding and exposing the gems. And, when a thrash gem is released, it might get pushed into a more "respected" form of modern metal, like death or black metal.
Or, you know, RYM's users just suck at rating metal. The Old Spice Crypt-O-Knight should pay them a visit.
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I admitted on Twitter that I like ska punk that sounds like Dance Hall Crashers and I think I got shadowbanned.
I don't like Ghoul, either. Power to you if you do. Not my thing.
Even a more discrete search for "thrash metal" yielded stuff like "Melodic Death Metal (early); Alternative/Progressive Death/Thrash Metal (later)." There’s no good way to do this without sorting it out manually later.
Without worthwhile metrics being captured at the time, it's impossible to measure what fans were thinking in the 1980s besides, ugh, trying to accumulate, like, letters to zines and assigning all of that stuff a value a la Rotten Tomatoes. Sounds like a nightmare. No thanks. While empiricism weeps, we have to use a hindsight tool like RYM. Will albums from the '80s, which are typically considered gateway albums and have been around forever, receive more ratings than something released in 2021? Yes. Will albums that are accepted and codified as classics get a more generous score from the hivemind? Of course. That said, I have what I have and I'll try to account for this where I can.