ANTHRAX guitarist Scott Ian has named the EXODUS album “Bonded By Blood” as the “best debut album” to have been released by any of the “Big Five” thrash metal bands.
EXODUS rarely get included in the top thrash bands alongside the so-called “Big Four” of 1980s thrash metal — METALLICA, MEGADETH, SLAYER and ANTHRAX — however it was 1985’s “Bonded By Blood” that would go on to inspire bands such as TESTAMENT, DEATH ANGEL, VIO-LENCE and numerous others to pursue their careers in the genre.
Scott Ian took to his Instagram over the weekend to share the “Bonded By Blood” cover along with the following message: “This beast came out 36 years ago. Best debut album of the Big 5? I think so. @exodusbandofficial @garyholt_official #ExodusAttack #RIFFS”.
Back in 2014, METALLICA guitarist Kirk Hammett was asked by U.K.’s Metal Hammer magazine if it’s strange to him how much METALLICA has eclipsed the other “Big Four” bands in terms of commercial popularity, to which he responded: “I try not to spend too much time thinking about stuff like that because whatever I think of is still not going to be a satisfying enough explanation. It’s just the way things are and how the chips fell.
“EXODUS in the ’80s had some bona fide problems, but I think their first album [‘Bonded By Blood’] is just as good as [METALLICA’s debut] ‘Kill ‘Em All’. We were just playing the music we wanted to hear because no one else was playing it and it wasn’t being played on the radio. It was only a small group of people who knew about it and it was almost elitist in that ‘No posers allowed!’ thing.”
View this post on Instagram