On first listen it’s tempting to glibly write off Dead Head‘s new offering, Slave Driver, as another on the ever growing list of eighties-inspired thrash releases; then you remember these grumpy Dutchmen have been doing this for almost as long as thrash metal has been a thing… and then you remember they’ve as much right to sound like an utterly vicious mashup of Slayer and Kreator‘s greatest bits and just just get down to the job in hand, which in this case is thrashing like a maniac…

All joking aside, there are enough moments on Slave Driver, moments like second track Grim Side Valley, to absolutely neutralise the listener’s attempts to make any sort of sense of what’s going on at all beyond the primal urge to become one with the music. The skill to produce such moments is a skill most ‘retro-thrash’ artists wouldn’t recognise even if it snuck up on them and nicked their hitops and freshly-laundered ‘battle vests’, but it’s a skill that Dead Head repeatedly whip out and hit the listener over the head with, much to the grim-faced delight of all involved.

The Slayer/Kreator tag is lazy, of course – neither of those bands could have come up with the pure ripping majesty of Frequency Illusion after about 2005, but it does at least serve to point Dead Head newbies in the right direction viz a vis the colours, sounds and shapes being generated here. Ralph de Boer is an absolute beast behind the mic – Erwin Hermsen‘s superior recording job delivers his bullhorn delivery in brutal, living technicolor to such a degree you’ll swear you can smell the beer fumes coming off of his voice and out of your stereo speakers – but for every titanic ullulation he makes drummer Hans Spijker ups the ante every time, in the process presenting a performance of such Lombardoesque splendour you’d be happy just to spend three quarters of an hour listening to his drum tracks with no other accompaniment. He’s that good.

I’ll leave it at that, because quite frankly I want to head back and have another listen to Slave Driver without having to take the time to convince you to do the same – you love proper thrash, right? Well, that’s all the convincing you should need. Get involved in this banging album as soon as you can…

Slave Driver releases on April 29th.