Anthrax

Anthrax plays thrash with the drive of hardcore punk running underneath it, songs kept short and tight rather than left to sprawl, and Joey Belladonna out front rather than a growl buried in the riffing.

Scott Ian has been there since the beginning and is the one constant through a great many changes around him. What the band was built on is speed and aggression drawn as much from punk as from metal, out of an appetite for anything faster and harder than what it had already heard, plus a preference for songs that make their point and get out again. That combination put Anthrax among the four bands usually named as thrash's founders, and it is still recognisably what the band sounds like.

The appeal is the discipline. These are songs built to be played hard and shouted back, with very little wasted on the way there.