Alex Skolnick, nineteen years old and fresh off the road behind Testament's debut, walked into Pyramid Sound Studios in Ithaca, New York in January 1988 with a head full of new riffs and a deadline that nobody in the band had thought to read properly. When Atlantic Records received the finished tape a few weeks later, they posted it straight back: the album clocked in under forty minutes, and forty minutes was the absolute minimum length spelled out in the band's contract. Testament had delivered a thrash record that was, by the standards of their own label, legally not an album.
What they did next is the reason The New Order sounds the way it does. They went back to Pyramid, recorded an Aerosmith cover, stretched two instrumental sketches into full pieces, extended a couple of song sections, and turned a contractual embarrassment into the album that broke them out of the Bay Area thrash pack and onto MTV. It charted at number 136 on the Billboard 200, sold a quarter of a million copies in the United States, and is now the record most often cited when someone wants to explain why Testament are routinely called the fifth or sixth band of the Big Four.
Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Testament |
| Album | The New Order |
| Release date | 10 May 1988 |
| Label | Atlantic Records (with Megaforce) |
| Producer | Alex Perialas (also engineer and mixer) |
| Studio | Pyramid Sound Studios, Ithaca, New York (January and February 1988) |
| Genre / subgenre | Thrash metal, Bay Area thrash |
| Track count | 10 |
| Total runtime | 39:22 |
| Billboard 200 peak | 136 (thirteen weeks on chart) |
| UK Albums Chart peak | 81 |
| Other notable chart peaks | Netherlands 66, Germany 49, Sweden 49, Finland 12 |
| Certifications | None (no RIAA gold despite 250,000+ US sales by 1990) |
| Estimated sales | 250,000+ US |
| Key singles | "Trial by Fire", "The Preacher" |
Cultural Context: Thrash in 1988
1988 was the year thrash metal stopped being a scene and started being an industry. Metallica spent the summer assembling ...And Justice for All at One on One in Los Angeles, with no Cliff Burton and a bass that wouldn't make it past the mixing desk. Slayer were finishing South of Heaven under Rick Rubin's deliberately slower tempo. Megadeth had already put out So Far, So Good... So What! in January, with a Sex Pistols cover and a band on the brink of collapse. Anthrax were sketching State of Euphoria with Alex Perialas himself in the producer's chair, two studios away from where Testament were tracking.
That clustering matters. By 1988 the "Big Four" framing had calcified in the metal press, and any Bay Area thrash band emerging in Metallica's wake was being measured against the same yardstick: how big was the deal, how high was the chart placing, how many MTV plays. Testament's debut The Legacy, released in April 1987, had drawn instant comparisons to early Metallica and Chuck Billy comparisons to James Hetfield. The follow-up needed to widen the gap, not narrow it.
The wider music landscape was working against them. CDs outsold vinyl in the United States for the first time in 1988. Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction was at number one on the Billboard 200 by August. Acid house was breaking in the UK. The thrash audience was loud, devoted and growing, but it was not the audience that lived on Top 40 radio, and Atlantic Records knew it. Testament had been picked up by the label through their Megaforce partnership as part of a wave of thrash signings, and the commercial pressure on the second album was unsubtle.
The Band's Story Up To This Point
Testament had formed in Berkeley in 1983 under the name Legacy. Founding guitarist Eric Peterson and his cousin Derrick Ramirez wrote the first riffs; drummer Louie Clemente and bassist Greg Christian came soon after. The original frontman was Steve "Zetro" Souza, who left in 1986 to replace Paul Baloff in Exodus and personally recommended his friend Chuck Billy as a replacement. Ramirez departed early, and his guitar seat was taken in 1984 by a teenage Joe Satriani student named Alex Skolnick.
The band signed to Megaforce in 1986 on the strength of a demo. While recording their first album, they were forced to drop the Legacy name because several other bands were already using it. The new name, Testament, was suggested by S.O.D.'s Billy Milano. The debut, The Legacy, came out in April 1987 and pushed Testament into the same conversation as Metallica and Slayer almost overnight. Their first promo video, "Over the Wall", went into rotation on MTV's Headbangers Ball, and they spent the rest of 1987 opening for Anthrax on the Among the Living tour, where they recorded the Live at Eindhoven EP.
By the time they came home in late 1987 they had a problem: Megaforce and Atlantic wanted a second album, fast. They had no songs.
Pre-Production and Demos: Writing Under the Gun
Skolnick described the situation bluntly in a 2013 interview with Metal Injection's Louder Education series:
"We barely got done with our first couple of tours on that first album cycle when we were informed we have to have another album, soon. We got spooked in a way, because we never had to come up with music on the fly."
Alex Skolnick, Metal Injection, 2013
Most of the writing happened in soundchecks, hotel rooms and the band's Bay Area rehearsal space in the back half of 1987. Eric Peterson was the riff engine, the same role he occupies on every Testament record. Skolnick brought the melodic top end. Chuck Billy worked on lyrics for what eventually became "Disciples of the Watch", "A Day of Reckoning" and "Trial by Fire" while the rhythm parts were still being roughed in. Greg Christian and Louie Clemente locked the rhythm section into the tighter, more controlled feel that distinguishes The New Order from the looser Legacy.
One song dating back to the band's Legacy era, "Reign of Terror", was tracked during the sessions but left off the album. It surfaced later as a B-side to the "Trial by Fire" single and on the 1993 EP Return to the Apocalyptic City, and was finally given its proper studio treatment on 2001's re-recorded First Strike Still Deadly.
The two instrumentals on the record, "Hypnosis" and "Musical Death (A Dirge)", started life as Skolnick warm-up sketches and short cinematic ideas the band were not initially planning to put on the album. They would matter more than anyone expected.
Creating the Album: Pyramid Sound and the Contract Problem
Sessions ran through January and February 1988 at Pyramid Sound Studios in Ithaca, New York, the room owned and operated by their producer Alex Perialas. Pyramid was, by then, the unofficial East Coast home of thrash. Perialas had already worked there on Metallica's Kill 'Em All (mastering, 1983), Anthrax's Fistful of Metal, Spreading the Disease and the imminent State of Euphoria, S.O.D.'s Speak English or Die, Overkill's Feel the Fire and Taking Over, and Nuclear Assault's Game Over. He also produced Testament's own debut. If a young American thrash band wanted clarity, separation and a snare that actually cut through, they flew to Ithaca and worked with Perialas.
The recording itself was straightforward. Drums and bass first, rhythm guitars stacked next, leads on top, vocals last. Tape was the medium; digital was years away from being a serious option for a band on a budget like Testament's. Robert Hunter is credited as assistant engineer. Tom Coyne, later one of the most respected mastering engineers in popular music, mastered the album. Jon and Marsha Zazula, the husband-and-wife founders of Megaforce who had given Metallica their first deal, took executive production credit.
The known gear list across the sessions:
- Eric Peterson on rhythm: Mesa Boogie Mark II and Mark III heads, Marshall 4x12 cabinets, an overdrive pedal in front of the amps for tightness.
- Alex Skolnick on lead: an ADA MP-1 preamp running into a Marshall power stage, with Charvel-style superstrats as his main guitars at that point.
- Greg Christian: bass tracked direct alongside an Ampeg SVT cabinet.
- Louie Clemente: drums miked with the standard late-eighties Pyramid setup of Shure SM57s on snare and toms, AKG D112 on kick, Sennheiser MD421s on toms, condensers overhead.
- Chuck Billy: vocals tracked on a large-diaphragm condenser, almost certainly a Neumann from Pyramid's stock.
Then the rejection. Skolnick again, picking up the story:
"By the time we finally recorded the album, we neglected to look at our recording contract. We actually had it in our contract that there's a minimum of forty minutes of music, and we clocked in under that. Our album was promptly sent back. We added the Aerosmith tune, we added those little instrumentals, we extended a couple of sections. That was all done so we wouldn't be in breach of contract."
Alex Skolnick, Metal Injection, 2013
This is the single most important fact about The New Order, and one almost nobody outside the band's hardcore audience knows. The Aerosmith cover, the instrumentals, the unusually patient build of "Eerie Inhabitants", and the slightly extended outro of "Disciples of the Watch" are all there because Atlantic counted the minutes and posted the tape back. The thing that gives The New Order its distinct, slightly unbalanced personality, the way it lurches from straight-ahead thrash into Skolnick's classical-tinged interludes and out the other side into a Steven Tyler riff, is the sound of a band fixing a problem in real time.
Personnel and Credits
Two corrections to the historical record are worth flagging up front. The first: the cover art has been widely misattributed online (including on this site's own previous version of this article) to the graphic novelist Dave McKean. It is not by McKean. The credited artwork is by William Benson, working from a concept by Eric Peterson, with photography by Andy Meyn. The second: Eric Peterson takes the second guitar solo on "Musical Death (A Dirge)", every other lead on the album is Skolnick.
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Lead vocals | Chuck Billy | Second studio album as Testament frontman |
| Lead guitar | Alex Skolnick | 19 years old at the sessions |
| Rhythm guitar | Eric Peterson | Also takes the second solo on "Musical Death (A Dirge)" |
| Bass | Greg Christian | Founding member |
| Drums | Louie Clemente | Founding member |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producer, engineer, mixer | Alex Perialas | Owner of Pyramid Sound; also producing Anthrax's State of Euphoria the same year |
| Assistant engineer | Robert Hunter | Pyramid Sound staff |
| Mastering | Tom Coyne | Later mastered Adele, Beyonce, Taylor Swift |
| Executive production | Jon Zazula and Marsha Zazula | Megaforce founders |
| Artwork and photography | ||
| Artwork | William Benson | |
| Cover concept | Eric Peterson | |
| Photography | Andy Meyn | |
The Songs
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Eerie Inhabitants | Skolnick, Billy, Peterson (lyrics); Skolnick, Peterson (music) | 5:06 | Patient three-section opener with an extended clean intro | |
| 2 | The New Order | Skolnick, Peterson | 4:25 | Title track; Skolnick wrote the lyric, unusual for him | |
| 3 | Trial by Fire | Billy, Skolnick, Peterson (lyrics); Skolnick, Peterson (music) | 4:14 | Yes | The album's lead single and the band's first MTV video for the record |
| 4 | Into the Pit | Billy, Skolnick, Peterson (lyrics); Skolnick, Peterson (music) | 2:46 | Testament's most-played live song, ever | |
| 5 | Hypnosis | Skolnick, Peterson | 2:04 | Instrumental; written to bridge into "Disciples" | |
| 6 | Disciples of the Watch | Billy (lyrics); Skolnick, Peterson (music) | 5:05 | Foundational late-eighties thrash riff | |
| 7 | The Preacher | Billy, Skolnick (lyrics); Skolnick, Peterson (music) | 3:37 | Yes | Released as second single, did not chart |
| 8 | Nobody's Fault | Steven Tyler (lyrics); Tyler, Brad Whitford (music) | 3:57 | Aerosmith cover (from Rocks, 1976); not on the original LP pressing | |
| 9 | A Day of Reckoning | Billy (lyrics); Skolnick, Peterson (music) | 4:00 | ||
| 10 | Musical Death (A Dirge) | Skolnick, Peterson | 4:05 | Instrumental closer; Peterson takes the second solo |
The opener, "Eerie Inhabitants", is the song that telegraphs the whole album's approach: a long, almost patient clean introduction with Skolnick over a Peterson arpeggio, then a kick into a galloping thrash riff that runs for the rest of the track. It would be a confident opening for a debut. As the second album from a band that had been on the road for nine months, it sounds like a band who have figured out exactly what they want to be.
The title track is one of the few Testament songs whose lyric Skolnick wrote, and is built around a riff that Peterson has cited as one of the moments where he felt the second album moved beyond the first. "Trial by Fire" came next as the obvious single, with an anthemic chorus, a gladiatorial lyric about a kangaroo-court society sentencing the innocent to endless trial, and the kind of mid-tempo pulse that radio could just about handle.
"Into the Pit" is the shortest song on the album and the most important one in the live arsenal. According to setlist.fm tracking, it is the song Testament have played more often than any other in their entire career, with well over six hundred documented performances. The title is so on-the-nose that it has become a kind of shorthand for the entire late-eighties thrash audience experience.
"Hypnosis" and "Disciples of the Watch" function as a pair: the instrumental sets up a tension that "Disciples" releases with one of the era's defining thrash riffs. The chant of "We are disciples, disciples of the watch" became a live ritual that the band still uses to close encores.
"The Preacher" is the album's anti-televangelist track, written at a moment when Jim Bakker had just resigned from PTL and Jimmy Swaggart was unravelling on national TV. Released as the second single, it earned Skolnick particular notice for the solo, a melodic, almost neoclassical passage that was widely cited at the time as evidence the kid was the most musically curious lead player in American thrash.
"Nobody's Fault", the contract-rescuing Aerosmith cover, is the swerve. It is a 1976 deep cut from Rocks, never a hit, and a bold choice when the band's peers were covering Motorhead or Misfits. Testament play it almost completely straight, just heavier and faster, with Billy doing a credible Steven Tyler. It is so distinctive a moment on the record that it stayed in the band's live set for years and earned them respectful nods from Aerosmith themselves. It did not appear on the original LP pressing, only on the CD and cassette, partly because the LP couldn't fit it and partly because it was a last-minute addition.
"A Day of Reckoning" and "Musical Death (A Dirge)" close the album. "A Day of Reckoning" is the deepest cut on the record, rarely played live, but a favourite among guitarists for Skolnick's lead break. "Musical Death" is the second instrumental and the only track on the album to feature Eric Peterson on lead guitar; he takes the second solo, with Skolnick taking the first.
B-sides, Outtakes and Lost Songs
The most significant outtake is "Reign of Terror", a song with deep roots in the band's pre-Testament Legacy demos. It was tracked at Pyramid during the New Order sessions, didn't make the final cut, surfaced as the B-side of the "Trial by Fire" single and again on the 1993 EP Return to the Apocalyptic City, and was given its definitive treatment on 2001's First Strike Still Deadly with the classic lineup reunited.
Beyond that, the well runs surprisingly dry, partly a function of how quickly the album was written and recorded, and partly because of the Atlantic rejection. When you are scrambling to add thirty seconds here and a full song there to clear a contractual minimum, you are not also sitting on a stack of unreleased material.
Album Artwork and Packaging
The cover is one of the most-imitated thrash sleeves of its decade: a stark monochrome graphic with the band's gothic logo above the title. The credited artwork is by William Benson, the concept by Eric Peterson, photography by Andy Meyn. As above, this is the section where the original version of this article repeated the long-circulating myth that the cover is by Dave McKean. McKean, best known for his work with Neil Gaiman on The Sandman and Black Orchid, never worked with Testament. The misattribution appears to have spread from a single mistaken AllMusic-era credit and has been hard to kill.
The gatefold and inner sleeve carry the full lyrics for every song bar the instrumentals, plus the famous band photo of the classic lineup that has been reused on retrospective compilations for decades.
Release and Reception
The New Order came out on 10 May 1988 (the date long cited as 5 May in some online sources is incorrect; the Hard Report trade weekly entered the album on 15 April with an official street date the following month). It entered the Billboard 200 about three months later, peaking at number 136 and staying on the chart for thirteen weeks, the longest run any Testament album had managed up to that point. The UK Albums Chart put it at 81. It hit 12 in Finland, 49 in Germany and Sweden, and 66 in the Netherlands, better European numbers than the band had had on the debut.
AllMusic's Alex Henderson gave the album four and a half stars out of five, calling it "every bit as brutally forceful as The Legacy" and Testament's "best offering ever." Germany's Rock Hard magazine awarded it 8.5 out of 10. Retrospective reviews have been kinder still. Decibel magazine inducted The New Order into its Hall of Fame in October 2018, with Vince Bellino's induction essay arguing that this is the album where Testament stopped sounding like a band auditioning for the Big Four and started sounding like themselves.
"Even though there had less than a year between The Legacy and The New Order, Testament already showed significant progress as songwriters as they crafted excellent thrash metal that got the listeners to get up off their arse and get into the pit."
Adam McCann, Metal Digest, 2022
It has appeared in essentially every credible "essential thrash" list since: Revolver's 20 Essential Eighties Thrash Albums (2007), Revolver's 14 Thrash Albums You Need to Own (2014), Loudwire's 50 Best Thrash Metal Albums of All Time (number 18, 2017), Loudwire's 10 Best Metal Albums of 1988 (2018), Revolver's 25 Essential Thrash Albums (2026).
The album was never certified gold by the RIAA, despite the 250,000+ US sales reported by 1990. That is a quirk of how RIAA certifications work; you have to apply for them, the label pays a fee, and Atlantic plainly did not bother. The album has comfortably crossed gold thresholds in real-world units multiple times over.
Singles and Music Videos
"Trial by Fire" was the only true single in the Wikipedia infobox sense, released ahead of the album in spring 1988 with a music video shot in a gladiatorial-arena concept that became one of the more recognisable thrash promos of the year. It got daytime MTV airplay, which in 1988 was a meaningful thing for a thrash band, and steady rotation on Headbangers Ball. It did not chart on the Billboard Hot 100.
"The Preacher" was released as the second single later in the year and also failed to chart, though it picked up substantial airplay on metal-friendly stations like Long Beach's KNAC. A video for "Nobody's Fault" was also produced and aired on Headbangers Ball, though the song was not formally released as a commercial single in most territories.
B-sides on the various single formats include "Reign of Terror" (the Legacy-era outtake described above), live tracks pulled from the Live at Eindhoven EP sessions, and on some European 12-inch releases a previously unreleased instrumental snippet.
Touring and Live
Testament toured almost continuously for nine months behind The New Order. The European leg ran through the early summer of 1988 supporting Megadeth on the So Far, So Good... So What! tour, alongside Sanctuary, Flotsam and Jetsam and Nuclear Assault. They then came home for a US summer with Vio-Lence, Forbidden, Voivod, Sanctuary, Destruction and Overkill on various legs. The undisputed highlight was replacing Megadeth on dates of the European Monsters of Rock package that summer, putting Testament on bills with Iron Maiden, Kiss, David Lee Roth, Great White and Anthrax in front of audiences ten times the size of anything they'd played as a headliner.
By the time the New Order tour wound up at the Country Club in Reseda, California in January 1989, a one-off with Heathen in support before they went straight back into Pyramid to start Practice What You Preach, the band had played somewhere in the region of seventy shows in twelve months and were a markedly tighter live unit than they had been in 1987.
The album has had two notable full-length live revisitations. On 25 March 2009, at the O2 Islington Academy in London, Testament played The Legacy and The New Order back to back in their entirety, with British thrash band Sylosis in support, a show that fans regard as one of the great late-period Testament gigs. The 2024 remaster cycle (more on which below) was supported by a co-headline North American tour with Kreator and Possessed, where chunks of The New Order were rotated into the setlist nightly.
In TV, Film and Media
For all its standing inside the thrash canon, The New Order has had a surprisingly quiet life outside metal-specific contexts. No songs from the album have become significant sync placements in mainstream film or television. Later Testament tracks have shown up in video games, most notably "More Than Meets the Eye" from The Formation of Damnation, but the New Order catalogue has remained primarily a fan and live-show body of work.
"Into the Pit" has had the most cultural reach, appearing on numerous "thrash essentials" Spotify and Apple Music editorial playlists and routinely showing up on metal-history retrospectives broadcast on Sirius XM's Liquid Metal channel.
Covers, Samples and Tributes
The Aerosmith link goes in both directions. Testament's reading of "Nobody's Fault" is one of the more durable covers any thrash band has done of a classic-rock song, and Steven Tyler and Brad Whitford have both spoken positively about it over the years.
In the other direction, songs from The New Order have been covered by a steady trickle of bands. "Into the Pit" was covered by The Absence on their 2007 album Riders of the Plague. "The Preacher" was covered by Hell's Thrash Horsemen on their 2009 EP ...Till Violence. Live tribute performances of the title track and "Disciples of the Watch" have been a fixture of Bay Area thrash-revival shows and Bay Area "Strikes Back" tour bills for years.
Bands who have explicitly cited the album as an influence include Lamb of God (whose Chris Adler made a guest appearance on Testament's Dark Roots of Earth), Trivium, Machine Head, Sepultura, Gojira and a swathe of younger thrash-revival acts like Havok and Evile.
Reissues, Remasters and Anniversaries
For most of its life, The New Order was treated with relatively little ceremony by Atlantic. There was no major anniversary box set for the 20th or 25th, and the most widely available CD remained the original 1988 master. That changed in 2023 when Nuclear Blast acquired the rights to Testament's first six studio albums as part of a wider label deal.
On 12 July 2024, Nuclear Blast released remastered editions of both The Legacy and The New Order as the first fruit of that catalogue acquisition. The remaster opened up the low end significantly, gave Clemente's kick drum a noticeably more present sound, and added a small amount of high-end air to Skolnick's leads. Reaction among long-time fans was, as always with thrash remasters, divided: there is a faction that maintains the slightly toppy, dry 1988 mix is part of the record's identity and should not be tampered with.
No anniversary super-deluxe box has yet appeared. There has been no Atmos or spatial audio release. The most likely candidate for a serious anniversary expansion is now the 40th anniversary in 2028, which would line up neatly with Testament's stated intention to keep their reissue programme moving through the Nuclear Blast deal.
Legacy and Influence
Practically every meaningful "non-Big Four thrash" conversation begins with Testament, and almost every Testament conversation begins with The New Order. In a 2021 Revolver magazine fan poll asking readers to name the top non-Big Four thrash band, Testament took the number one spot. The 2018 Decibel Hall of Fame induction is, more than any chart placing, the official ratification of the album's standing.
Inside the band itself, the album is a hinge moment. Three of its songs, "Into the Pit", "The New Order" and "Disciples of the Watch", have each been played live more than six hundred times, making them collectively the most-performed group of songs in Testament's catalogue. The follow-up, Practice What You Preach (1989), would outsell The New Order almost two-to-one and break the band into the Billboard top 100 for the first time, but it was The New Order that built the audience for that breakthrough.
"More than any other band, Testament can be seen as the missing link between heavy and speed metal. Their use of gothic imagery, minor keys and copious guitar heroics can easily be traced to the Dio/Ozzy/Iron Maiden/Sabbath school of rock apocalypse."
Brad Tolinski, Guitar World, October 1989
Skolnick, who left Testament in 1992 and rejoined permanently in 2005, has consistently named The New Order as the record where he stopped sounding like a competition-winning teenage shredder and started sounding like a recognisable musical voice. Eric Peterson, the only member to have appeared on every Testament album, has said in numerous interviews that the riff template he is still working with today was set in stone during the Pyramid sessions in early 1988.
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The contract rejection | Atlantic posted the album back to Pyramid Sound for being under the 40-minute contractual minimum; the band added "Nobody's Fault" and the two instrumentals to make weight. |
| Skolnick's age | Alex Skolnick was 19 years old during the January and February 1988 recording sessions, having joined the band at 15 when they were still called Legacy. |
| Not Dave McKean | The cover art is widely misattributed online to graphic novelist Dave McKean. It is actually by William Benson from a concept by Eric Peterson; McKean has never worked with Testament. |
| Peterson's only lead | Eric Peterson takes the second guitar solo on "Musical Death (A Dirge)", his only lead on the album; every other solo on the record is Skolnick. |
| "Into the Pit" record | It is the most-played song in Testament's entire career, with more than six hundred documented live performances according to setlist.fm. |
| Not on the LP | "Nobody's Fault" was on the CD and cassette pressings but omitted from the original vinyl LP for space reasons, a factor that made the LP a fan oddity for years. |
| The Megadeth swap | Testament filled in for Megadeth on European Monsters of Rock dates in summer 1988, sharing stages with Iron Maiden, Kiss, David Lee Roth, Great White and Anthrax. |
| The lost song | "Reign of Terror", a track dating back to the band's Legacy-era demos, was tracked at Pyramid for the album, cut from the final running order, and finally officially released in re-recorded form in 2001. |
| Tom Coyne mastered it | Mastering engineer Tom Coyne, then early in his career, would later master Adele's 25, Beyonce's Lemonade and Taylor Swift's 1989. |
| Decibel Hall of Fame | The album was inducted into the Decibel Hall of Fame in October 2018, the second Testament album to receive the honour after The Legacy. |
| No gold cert | Despite sales of more than 250,000 in the US by 1990, the album has never been RIAA-certified gold because Atlantic never applied for the certification. |
| The 2009 full-album show | On 25 March 2009 at the O2 Islington Academy in London, Testament played The Legacy and The New Order back to back in their entirety in a one-off show with Sylosis in support. |
Listen to the Podcast
Riffology's full episode on The New Order, RIFF010, goes deeper into the Pyramid Sound sessions, the contract-rejection saga, the Aerosmith cover, and the strange path that took Testament from being "almost the fifth Big Four band" to being the most consistently revered non-Big Four thrash band of all. You can listen above, or find Riffology on every major podcast platform: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast, Amazon Music and the rest.
