Kreator

Arguably the most influential and successful European thrash metal band ever, Germany's Kreator are also by far the most enduring. Like many of their European speed metal brethren, Kreator fused Metallica's thrash innovations with Venom's proto-black metal imagery, sparked it with Mot+¦rhead's balls-out velocity, and capped it off with the nihilistic outlook typical of heavy metal since the seminal days of Black Sabbath. Kreator's career also mirrored speed metal's rising and waning fortunes: building from strength to strength throughout the 1980s, only to fall on hard times i...