CORONER: R.I.P. Vinyl LP

Three guys from Zurich who used to roadie for Celtic Frost went home and made one of the most technically unhinged thrash records of 1987. That's the Coroner origin story and it remains impressive every time you say it out loud.

R.I.P. is the debut, and it arrives fully formed in a way that debut albums almost never do. Tommy T. Baron was playing guitar parts that most thrash players couldn't touch, Ron Royce's bass sits in the mix like a second lead instrument, and the whole thing has this cold, surgical quality that fits the Swiss context better than you'd expect. This is technical thrash metal before the genre had calcified into a competition to see who could play the most notes. There's actual tension here, actual atmosphere, the kind of dark aesthetic that connects it to the gothic and industrial currents running through European underground metal at the time. Coroner were too good and too weird to be as famous as they should be.

Vinyl LP. 2018 reissue on Noise/BMG. Genre: Technical Thrash Metal. Origin: Switzerland. Original release: 1987.

Fans of: Voivod, Watchtower, Destruction, late-era Kreator.