After spending a good portion of the last week listening to Testament's Dark Roots of Earth, I can already tell it will make my top 10 of the year list. It's just so fucking great… catchy, memorable, great riffs. Any time Testament is mentioned in a thrash debate, they are usually thrown in with the Big 4, and the unofficial "Big Fifth" or "Sixth", so I thought it would be fun to compare their first week sales with the sales of the most recent albums from all the Big Four bands, Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax.
Metallica Death Magnetic – 490,000
Slayer World Painted Blood – 41,000
Megadeth Th1rt3en – 45,000
Anthrax Worship Music – 28,000
Testament Dark Roots of Earth – 20,000
Now obviously it's completely unfair to compare the band to Metallica, who are in a league of their own. It's interesting to see that Megadeth actually outsold Slayer's most recent offering, first week, even though Megadeth would open for the band. The story here is that Testament, with no national tour around their album release, almost sold as much as Anthrax in their first week, when Anthrax had a huge promo blitz, including releasing the album a few days before the Yankee Stadium Big 4 show.
Testament should be really proud of that number, which is the highest charting/selling first week sales in the history of Nuclear Blast USA. It's a great record and definitely worth picking up!
[tv]https://metalinjection.net/tv/view/9592/testament-native-blood-video[/tv]
