Thrash was a powerful mutt: it ran at hardcore-punk speeds and wedged hyper-articulate firebomb guitar solos into small spaces.
The Orange novel is the semi-autobiographical Billie Morgan, about "a biker chick, one of the Devil's Own, real hardcore 70s Angels, speed and acid-fuelled road demons", whose youth ends in murder.
With her gaze fixed in the distance and her Dr Marten boots stamping along to the speeding, hardcore rhythms, she effortlessly balances the dissonant chords and pop melodies that fuel Joanna Gruesome's music.
Above a musical backdrop in which a jagged bassline suddenly, thrillingly, shifts into something informed by warp-speed hardcore punk, TIWYG's lyrical hook is a parody of Radiohead's Karma Police, a song about enervated, eye-rolling despair, its defeated "tsk-typical" mood the opposite to the galvanising one Savages clearly want to conjure.
In the seven years since the release of their debut album, they've shifted styles from metalcore – a genre that matches the speed of hardcore with the pummelling aggression of metal – to the sound of their fourth album Sempiternal, on which the tempos are slower and the vocals carry melodies – though it's all relative – and washes of electronics bathe the guitar riffs.
As it evolved it started getting faster and faster, so punk begat hardcore, and hardcore begat speed metal.
A cutthroat mixture of heavy metal's big riffs and hardcore punk's ferocious speed, thrash is metal at its most vital.
J Mascis, Lou Barlow, and Murph formed the band in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1984, united by an interest in slowing down the all-out assault of speed metal and hardcore punk, and then speeding it back up a little bit.
March 24: Los Angeles's DevilDriver marries the rudimentary elements of hardcore and death metal (extreme speed, extreme heaviness) to produce abrasive music.
