The songwriting was crucial of course, but what Xentrix managed to do, and what so many of their peers had for a variety of reasons )often budget-related) failed to do, was to make an album that could stand next to …And Justice for All or The New Order without sounding cheap or amateurish. Thirty years on the album remains, if not the greatest of ‘80s UK thrash albums (that would be Sabbat’s Dreamweaver, at least one of the most convincing. Many of the most prominent bands like Acid Reign and Virus adopted a musical path, image and vocabulary from Anthrax, but when Shattered Existence was released in 1989, Xentrix, from Preston in Lancashire, became the first and arguably only British thrash band of the period to successfully emulate the style of Metallica and Testament. When the first real UK thrash bands began to emerge from the mid-‘80s, they were, with a few prominent exceptions like Sabbat and Onslaught, mostly very derivative of their US peers. While genres like grindcore and death metal had their pioneers on this side of the Atlantic, British thrash remained something of an oddity. UK thrash in the ‘80s was a funny thing although the first generation of thrash metal bands both in the USA and elsewhere had been hugely inspired by the New Wave of British Heavy Metal of the late ‘70s and early ’80s, the UK was slow to catch up.
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