Joel Grind, the headband-wearing headbanger at the center of the band Terrorizer calls “a whirlwind of booze, denim jackets, and riffs” started kicking out corrosive crossover jams under the Toxic Holocaust banner back in 1999.

Toxic Holocaust was the cover story of the same Decibel issue that inducted Venom’s Black Metal into the magazine’s Hall of Fame. They’ve toured the world with contemporaries and genre legends alike, including Danzig, Gwar, Satyricon, and Discharge, unleashing modern classics like “Nuke the Cross” and “Acid Fuzz” across more than a dozen albums, EPs and split records.

When the LA Weekly compiled a list of the Top 10 Crossover Thrash Bands ever (a list that included Suicidal Tendencies and S.O.D.), Toxic Holocaust was hailed as part of an elite few carrying the “music that slam dancing was made for” torch, alongside Municipal Waste, Iron Reagan, and Trash Talk.

Toxic 2.0 detonates like doomsday all over Primal Future: 2019, an ambitious new mission statement from the man whose guiding forces remain Discharge, Megadeth, Venom, English Dogs, Nuclear Assault, D.R.I., and G.B.H., all juiced by the unrelenting, feverish, urgent power of a modern metal trailblazer.

A dystopian technological takeover drives the album thematically, but the passionately delivered music is vintage Toxic Holocaust, taking things all the way back to the band’s early origins, with Grind playing every instrument. Toxic Holocaust going back to its DIY roots blows the doors open on a new chapter for the man who is the band’s nucleus. It’s a sonic re-splitting of the atom, ushering in the next twenty toxic years of crossover thrash devastation.

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