Cowboys From Hell

Sound DNA

• Metal
• Thrash Metal

• distorted
• aggressive
• southern

About

Pantera had excised nearly all remnants of their hair-metal days when they signed with a major label and released 1990’s <i>Cowboys from Hell</i>. Only the strutting single “Psycho Holiday”—which boasts banshee-scream vocal outbursts from Phil Anselmo, squealing guitars, and crashing chorus hooks—feels like a link to the Texas band’s glammier past. In all other respects, <i>Cowboys from Hell</i> ripped up metal’s existing rulebook and replaced it with something harder, faster, and heavier. That was made clear from the album-opening title track, a ferocious, confrontational tune that doubled as Pantera’s mission statement: They were swaggering, dangerous hell-raisers ready to steamroll the competition. From there, the band melded several prominent inspirations—especially speedy ’80s thrash, lightning-fast hard rock, and pounding groove metal—into something potent and fresh. The bludgeoning proto-death-metal blast “Primal Concrete Sledge” lived up to its name. So did the album’s final song, “The Art of Shredding,” which segued from vicious, Metallica-like grooves to choppy, whiplash-inducing guitar heroics. Yet the sprawling, seven-minute centerpiece “Cemetery Gates” was perhaps the album’s most influential moment of all, as the song served as a blueprint for modern hard-rock ballads: elegiac acoustic guitars intertwined with mournful, subdued vocals before giving way to anguished harmonies and Dimebag Darrell’s epic, smoldering electric-guitar work. <i>Cowboys from Hell</i> became Pantera’s first album to be certified platinum and grace the U.S. charts—and it kicked off a decade of uncompromising, unrelenting metal domination.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits