Retro-review: ‘Sound of White Noise’ by Anthrax

Back in the early 1990s, Anthrax, a cover band with a few original songs here and there, decided to hire a new singer and release an album of all original songs.

And man, it was a great album. One of the few that I can play in my head from start to end.

That album, Sound of White Noise, was released 25 years ago today and remains the creative high point of the band’s career before they embarked on what seemed to be a constantly uncertain future.

I say “uncertain” because the band would go without an official guitarist, suffer through poor sales and be dropped from their major record label over the course of the next decade of their existence.

Now, my metal friends back in the day, will probably disagree vehemently with me, but up until their 1990 album Persistence of Time, much of Anthrax’s original material sounded pretty much the same. Their songs would open with a really heavy and pounding intro, go into a speedy and crunchy verse and usually go back to the opening riff for the chorus. There’s nothing wrong with being formulaic, it’s what most metal bands do, but there was very little divergence in regards to the way songs sounded. Though, in many (if not most) metalheads’ opinions, that is just fine because they hate change of any sort.