Artillery: Denmark's Thrash Survivors

There is a category of band that every metal scene produces and every metal scene undervalues: the one that was clearly good enough to be huge, wrote at least one record that belongs in the canon, and somehow never got the break. In Danish thrash that band is Artillery, and the fact that they are still going more than forty years after they formed — through breakups, deaths and a rotating cast of singers — is either a triumph of stubbornness or a small miracle, depending on how you feel about a genre that was supposed to be a youth movement.

They formed in 1982 in Taastrup, a suburb on the western edge of Copenhagen, around the two Stützer brothers, Michael and Morten, on guitars. That twin-guitar core is the whole identity of the band. Where a lot of thrash was built on one riff machine and a lot of shouting, Artillery were always a two-guitar act in the truest sense — harmonised leads, interlocking rhythm parts, a melodic sensibility that set them apart from the rougher end of the genre. They were technical before technical thrash was a marketing category.

By Inheritance and the great lost record

The Artillery album you need to know is By Inheritance, released in 1990. It is, by a wide margin, one of the best thrash records to come out of Europe, and it is routinely left off the lists dominated by the German and American names. It has everything the genre does well — speed, precision, aggression — plus a few things most of its peers never attempted. The riffs carry an unmistakable Middle-Eastern melodic flavour in places, exotic scales woven through the thrash without ever tipping into gimmick, and the songwriting has a compositional ambition that rewards repeated listens.

The problem was timing, and it was cruel. By Inheritance arrived in 1990, exactly as thrash was about to fall off a commercial cliff. Within a couple of years the whole genre would be swept aside by grunge and by the arrival of death and black metal, and a technical thrash record from Denmark released at that precise moment had almost no chance of getting its due. Bands who had broken a few years earlier rode out the change on accumulated fame. Artillery, still building, got caught by the tide with their best work barely heard. It is the central injustice of their career, and it is why the devoted speak about the album with the particular fervour reserved for things the world got wrong.

Before the classic

By Inheritance did not arrive out of nowhere, and the two records before it deserve their own hearing. Fear of Tomorrow in 1985 was the debut, a raw, fast, distinctly European take on a form that was still being invented on the other side of the Atlantic — remarkable for how early it landed, given that thrash as a named genre was barely a couple of years old at that point. A band from a Copenhagen suburb was keeping pace with the movement in close to real time, which tells you how plugged in the Danish underground already was via the tape-trading networks that carried this music across borders before any label cared.

Terror Squad in 1987 sharpened everything. The playing got tighter, the songwriting more adventurous, the twin-guitar interplay more confident. It is the sound of a band closing in on its peak, and in hindsight it reads as the necessary step between the promise of the debut and the full realisation of By Inheritance three years later. Taken together, the three eighties albums form one of the strongest opening runs in European thrash, and the fact that this is a genuinely contested claim only because so few people heard them at the time is the whole tragedy of the band in miniature.

The breakups and the returns

What happened next is the part that defines them. Artillery did the thing thrash bands did in the early nineties: they fell apart. But they never stayed apart for long, and the story of the band since is a cycle of dissolution and reformation that would exhaust a lesser outfit. They came back at the end of the nineties with the pointedly titled B.A.C.K., folded again, and then from the mid-2000s onward settled into their most sustained run yet, releasing a steady stream of albums — When Death Comes, My Blood, Legions, Penalty by Perception, The Face of Fear, and the aptly numbered X — through a decade and more.

The singer’s chair has been the most turbulent seat in the house. Flemming Rönsdorf sang on the classic eighties records, his slightly wild, high-strung delivery part of their early character. Over the reunion years the microphone passed through Søren Adamsen and then to Michael Bastholm Dahl, whose cleaner, more powerful voice has fronted the modern era. Some purists will always prefer the original snarl, and that is fair comment on a matter of taste. What is remarkable is that the band’s identity survived the turnover intact, because the identity was never really the singer — it was the Stützer brothers’ guitars, and as long as those were locked together the band still sounded like Artillery.

Losing Morten

Then in 2019 came the loss that could have ended it for good. Morten Stützer died, and with him went one half of the twin-guitar partnership that had been the band’s beating heart since 1982. There is no polishing that over. To lose a founding member and a brother is the kind of blow that legitimately closes a band’s story, and nobody would have blamed Michael Stützer for stopping.

He did not stop. Artillery carried on, and while I will not pretend the loss did not change the band, the decision to continue fits the entire arc of their career. This is an outfit whose defining trait is refusal — refusal to split for good, refusal to be forgotten, refusal to let the injustice of 1990 be the last word. Carrying on after Morten’s death is the most Artillery thing they could possibly have done, and it reads less as denial than as a promise kept to four decades of work.

Where they sit in the Danish story

Artillery are a load-bearing part of the story this desk keeps telling — the improbable and enduring tradition of loud music coming out of a small country. They belong to the same early-eighties Danish moment that produced the black metal theatre of King Diamond and Mercyful Fate, two very different acts proving at the same time that Denmark could generate world-class heavy music. Where King Diamond exported the drama, Artillery exported the craft, and both got there before almost anyone expected a Scandinavian country to be a serious metal producer.

Their influence runs forward, too. The technical, melodic, twin-guitar approach they pioneered fed into the DNA of the Danish scene that followed, and you can trace a line from their precision to the death metal that came after — the melodic sensibility that runs through even a young, brutal band like Baest owes something to the groundwork Artillery laid decades earlier. They are elders now, in the proper sense: a band the younger acts know to respect, whether or not they play anything that sounds remotely similar.

The live band and the festival circuit

For all the studio turbulence, Artillery on a stage have always been a serious proposition, and the reunion years turned them into a reliable draw across the European festival and club circuit. Thrash is a genre that lives or dies on tightness, and a band built on interlocking twin guitars has nowhere to hide when the tempos climb — a sloppy Artillery show would expose itself instantly. That they can still deliver the material at speed, decades on, is a quiet vindication of how well drilled they always were.

The festival slots suit them. A band with a deep back catalogue and a genuine classic to draw from can build a set that satisfies both the greybeards who bought By Inheritance on release and the younger crowd discovering them through the modern records, and the loud Danish festivals have kept a place for them as elder statesmen of the domestic scene. They are the sort of act that rewards the punter who turns up early — first band you catch on a festival afternoon, and suddenly you understand why the older heads in the crowd have been telling you to for years. Longevity gave them a role most of their peers never lived to play: the living link between the birth of Danish thrash and everything that came after it.

Why they matter

Artillery matter because they are the proof that quality and success are different things, and that a band can be one without the other and still, in the end, win. They wrote a genre classic that the world was too distracted to notice, they lost members and momentum and one of their founders, and they are still here, still touring, still making records, forty-plus years on. The commercial breakthrough never came. The respect did, slowly, and it is deeper for having been earned rather than sold.

For anyone working through the history of European thrash, Artillery are the essential detour off the main road, the band the initiated press on the uninitiated with the words “you have to hear By Inheritance.” And for the Danish scene specifically they are a point of origin and a point of pride — an outfit that was doing this properly, at a world-class level, from a Copenhagen suburb in 1982, and never had the good grace to give up. Survival is its own kind of victory, and few bands in any genre have earned it as thoroughly as this one.