Pantera: The Great Southern Trendkill (White & Orange Marbled Vinyl)

Anyone looking for the most extreme and abrasive Pantera album should make a beeline to 1996’s The Great Southern Trendkill. Characteristically defiant and contrarian, the band followed up its No. 1 Billboard-charting album Far Beyond Driven with an LP that was far beyond confrontational — musically experimental, sonically bombastic and lyrically scathing.

Trendkill was Pantera at their most pissed-off, stubborn and subversive. At a time when Korn, Marilyn Manson and Tool were pioneering new MTV-friendly styles of metal and even Metallica were skewing alternative, Pantera became less accessible and more fucking hostile, writing riffs that were dissonant and disorientating. Phil Anselmo — drawing on his personal pain, isolation and self-loathing — lashed out with unrelenting disgust at society (“War Nerve,” “The Great Southern Trendkill”), self-indulgent hipsters (“Drag the Waters,” “(Reprise) Sandblasted Skin”) and himself (“10’s,” “Living Through Me (Hell’s Wrath”).

Despite the well-documented tension growing between Anselmo and the Abbott Brothers — guitarist Dimebag Darrell and drummer Vinnie Paul — the band did what they could to keep their personal friction off the album and off the stage. “Even if we were feeling the strain, we didn’t let it show,” Vinnie Paul said. “The fans were there for us. It was probably the most abrasive, obnoxious record we ever made. It was out of control, and it was out of control in more ways than just the music. The people that were a part of it were out of control, the whole thing was out of control, I don’t even know how we finished it.”