‘Anthrax Sucks, Dude’

My friends and I set our musical foundation in the 1990s. Post grunge, post groove metal, we looked back at the decade before us and wondered what everyone saw in the metal bands of the ’80s.

New Wave of British Heavy Metal, power metal, hair metal – these were dirty words to kids who rocked out to Pantera, Alice In Chains, and Rage Against the Machine. Sure, we dug the stuff from the ’70s, and it was easy to make the connection from grunge to classic rock. But “metal,” as we knew it, was so passé.

We made exceptions, of course. Dio, some Iron Maiden, Metallica was still doing interesting things. Everyone else could go to hell.

It’s only recently that I’ve started to dig up good material that we may have missed. We picked on bands like Anthrax, but maybe we were missing something. This is especially evident as these classic bands have kept going and releasing new material.

Turns out? For All Kings is pretty damned great.