The debut album from Asidhara is a thirty-minute riot of speed, precision and beer-fueled joy, punching you square in the face with guttural roars, pounding drums and tremendous riffs. This is metal that remembers its roots, taking everything that made thrash the biggest genre in the world and hurling it straight back into the pit snorting fire.

You can hear the ghosts of The Big Four all over the record: Metallica’s swagger, Megadeth’s compositional intricacy, Anthrax’s punky pace, and Slayer’s snarl with guitars that hit like a truck without being tuned stupidly low, dripping with pinch harmonics and flair. Existence Eternal may as well be quoting Battery off Master of Puppets directly with its spacious intro collapsing into a breakneck sprint. The production is massive without being sterile, with guitar solos that rip with character and abandon.

Vocalist Chuck Bradford sounds like the demented ghost of a pirate, his voice layered in spectral echo. The album is a lyrical feast of medieval and biblical imagery that revels in the theatre of it all, oozing with unpretentious confidence, five mates in a room playing riffs and loving every second. There are nods to modern metal woven into the mix, but this is a thrash record through and through, fast, ferocious, ambitious, and infectiously fun.

From the very first second of On Death’s Pale Horse you’re flattened by a wall of noise with riffs as sharp as blades and drums that feel like a runaway freight train. It’s an opening so full of confidence and overflowing with energy that it feels like the band are declaring war on boredom itself. It’s fast, fun, and unashamedly over the top, with zero filler, showing off, grinning, and feeding off each other’s playing with pinch harmonics that squeal and chugs that land like hammer blows.

Chuck leads the charge with a voice that’s not a death growl or a black metal rasp, but an echoing battle cry that sits between High On Fire’s Matt Pike and a viking commander bellowing across the field, with no attempt to modernise with angst or introspection. This is fantasy metal reborn, with lines like “baptised in hellfire under iron rain” splitting the sky open. One minute it’s pure d-beat velocity, the next it’s slowing to a sludge-laden stomp, with breakdowns that land close to a modern hardcore pit-commanding two-step somehow perfectly fitting into the record’s revivalist dynamics. Despite the obvious nods to Battery, Welcome Home (Sanitarium) & Disposable Heroes, Asidhara’s sound feels ambitious and muscular rather than derivative, executed with total precision.

Thrash has had plenty of revivalists over the years, but Asidhara aim for the grandeur of the golden age, taking the genre’s original ambition and tightening it with a punch. Pest Control, Grove Street, and many other great bands are proving that the genre has found a new second home in the UK, and Asidhara have arrived with their own battle standard, stepping into the arena as the next contender. While each member is clearly a powerhouse in their own right, they thunder in perfect lockstep with war cry vocals in a collective charge, standing shoulder to shoulder.

Asidhara will rekindle that first-time feeling, the lightning-bolt moment when you first heard Master Of Puppets. It’s not just about the riffs or production, but something in the spirit of the record, and the way passion and precision fuse. You can feel the band’s excitement and it makes you want to move, throw yourself into a pit and root for them. It’s exhausting in the best possible way, making you grin like a great action film.

With no pretence and not a second wasted, just sweat and camaraderie, Asidhara’s debut is the sound of battle, adrenaline and fun. Where so much modern metal hides behind cinematic gloss with whispered verses and production atmospherics, this debut is a vital reminder of what this music was built on, with no smoke and mirrors, just five people in a room chasing riffs. Thrash was always metal’s grandest attempt to hit the highest point, and Asidhara is a reassertion of the danger and discipline that made the genre matter in the first place, played with enough speed and skill to level any festival stage they play on.