Pantera albums ranked is a list most people get wrong before they start, because they only count five. The band made nine studio albums between 1983 and 2000. Four came out on their own label before anybody outside Texas was paying attention, three of those with Terry Glaze singing instead of Phil Anselmo, and the band’s own box set of the complete studio albums starts in 1990 as if the eighties never happened. This ranking includes all nine, worst to best. And the one that debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 doesn’t finish first.
That box set, The Complete Studio Albums 1990–2000, tells you how Pantera wanted to be remembered. I get it. The picture-disc set is five records that changed metal, and nobody puts together a victory lap that starts with the spandex years.
But if you want to understand how four guys from Arlington, Texas ended up writing the rulebook for nineties metal, you have to hear where they started. The distance between the first album and the fifth is the whole story.
Here’s how I judged them: the songs, what each record did to metal when it landed, and what it does to you on a listen today. Chart positions count for less than you’d think.
9. Metal Magic (1983)
Every band starts somewhere. Pantera started here, and it’s rough.
Metal Magic came out on the band’s own label, also called Metal Magic, produced by Jerry Abbott, a country songwriter and producer who also happened to be Vinnie Paul and Dimebag Darrell’s father. It was cut at Pantego Sound in Pantego, Texas, with Terry Glaze on vocals and a teenage guitar player still calling himself Diamond Darrell. By Vinnie’s own count it had sold around 5,000 copies by 1990.
It sounds like what it is: a young Texas hard rock band in love with Kiss and Van Halen, doing a decent impression of both. There’s no groove yet, no menace, nothing that tells you what was coming.
The reason to hear it anyway is Darrell. Even here, surrounded by songs that go nowhere, the kid can play, and you can hear the Van Halen worship that later got twisted into something much nastier. If you want to know how he got there, start with the things most people don’t know about Dimebag Darrell.
It’s last because it’s the only Pantera album that sounds like it could have been made by anyone.
8. Projects in the Jungle (1984)
A year later, the band had clearly been listening to Judas Priest.
Projects in the Jungle is heavier and more confident than the debut, with the glam edges filed down and the riffs pushed forward. Glaze is still singing and still sounds like a hard rock frontman, and the songwriting still leans on what was working for other people. But this is the first record where Pantera sound like a metal band rather than a rock band that turned up the gain.
Eighth because the step forward is real and the album is still mostly a band finding its feet in public.
7. I Am the Night (1985)
The heaviest and best of the three Terry Glaze records, and the end of that version of Pantera.
By I Am the Night the band were playing faster and meaner, and you can start to hear the rhythm section that later became the most feared in metal. Vinnie Paul’s drumming has a weight here that the first two albums don’t, and the riffs have stopped trying to be catchy first.
It still isn’t the Pantera anybody means when they say the name. But play it next to Metal Magic and the jump in two years is startling. Glaze left after this one, and the band went looking for a singer who could match where the music was heading.
6. Power Metal (1988)
This is the hinge the whole story swings on.
Power Metal is the first Pantera album with Phil Anselmo, and he sounds nothing like the guy who’d growl through Vulgar Display four years later. Here he’s hitting high notes in a Rob Halford mould over riffs that are all speed and power metal, which is exactly what the title promises. It’s the last album the band released themselves, and the last one before they burned the whole look down.
It’s the best of the independent four because you can hear the future in it. The aggression is starting to leak through. Anselmo is already the most intense person in the room. Darrell’s riffs are getting shorter, sharper and more rhythmic. All the pieces are there; they just haven’t been bolted together yet.
Two years later, they would be.
5. Reinventing the Steel (2000)
Pantera’s last album, and it knows it’s a victory lap.
Reinventing the Steel went to number four on the Billboard 200 and was certified gold, and it’s a deliberate step back from the darkness of Trendkill toward straight-ahead, fist-in-the-air Pantera. “Revolution Is My Name” is the best thing on it, a proper late-period anthem built on one of Darrell’s most swaggering riffs. “Hellbound” opens the record at a sprint, and the band sound locked in for most of the running time.
The problem is that you’ve heard most of it before, done better, on the records ranked above it. This is Pantera doing Pantera, confidently and well, with nothing left to prove and not much left to say.
It gets heavier in hindsight. The band broke up in 2003, and on 8 December 2004 Darrell was shot and killed onstage with Damageplan at the Alrosa Villa in Columbus, Ohio. Vinnie Paul died in 2018. This is the last time the four of them made a record together, and there hasn’t been a Pantera studio album since. The current touring lineup with Zakk Wylde and Charlie Benante hasn’t changed that, and I’ve already said how long I think that should go on.
4. The Great Southern Trendkill (1996)
The scariest record Pantera ever made, and the sound of a band coming apart while it plays.
The Great Southern Trendkill peaked at number four on the Billboard 200 and went platinum. It was made in two different places. Dimebag, Vinnie and Rex recorded the music at Chasin Jason Studios in Texas while Anselmo cut his vocals on his own at Trent Reznor’s Nothing Studios in New Orleans. You can hear the distance. The songs are heavier, uglier and stranger than anything they’d done, and Anselmo sounds like a man screaming from the bottom of a well.
Then there’s “Floods.” It’s the longest song on the album, and the solo near the end is the best thing Dimebag ever put on tape. Guitar World ranked it the 32nd greatest guitar solo of all time, and I’d have it a lot higher than that. Instead of shredding at you, it aches, then swells into something close to beautiful on a record that’s otherwise all fury. If you’re ranking the best metal guitarists, this solo is the exhibit.
It’s fourth because it’s a harder listen than the three above it, and because the darkness came from somewhere real. Anselmo’s heroin addiction was pulling the band apart, and on the tour that followed he suffered a near-fatal overdose that left him legally dead for several minutes before he was revived. It’s a brilliant record made under the worst possible conditions, and it sounds like it..
3. Cowboys from Hell (1990)
This is where the spandex went in the bin.
Cowboys from Hell was Pantera’s major-label debut on Atco, produced by Terry Date, and it’s the moment four guys from Arlington stopped sounding like everybody else. The title track opens with a riff that sounds like a band kicking down a door. “Domination” ends in a half-time breakdown heavy enough to have started a thousand pits. “Cemetery Gates” gave Anselmo a ballad with a scream at the end that singers are still trying to hit.
This is the birth of groove metal. Thrash was about speed. Pantera slowed it down, dug the riffs into the pocket and made heaviness physical, something you felt in your chest before you heard it. There are dozens of bands on our list of the best groove metal albums and every one of them owes something to this record.
It peaked at number 117 on release and went on to sell double platinum, which tells you how long it took the rest of the world to catch up. Third, because the two records above it took this blueprint and made it deadlier.
2. Far Beyond Driven (1994)
The album that proved a record this brutal could top the charts.
Far Beyond Driven debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 in March 1994. Think about that. In the middle of grunge’s commercial peak, the heaviest mainstream band in America put out their most extreme album yet, and it went straight to the top.
It’s the most punishing record in the catalogue. “Strength Beyond Strength” opens with the band going for the throat and never letting go. “Becoming” rides a riff that sounds like machinery chewing through concrete. “5 Minutes Alone” is a threat set to music. And to close it out, a cover of Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan” that sounds like the calm after a hurricane, which makes sense when you’ve heard where that song came from.
This is Pantera at the peak of their power and popularity, and the reason they sit at the top of any list of the most influential metal bands of the nineties.
So why isn’t the number one album number one? Because it’s a slightly less complete record than the one that came before it. Far Beyond Driven is all impact. The next one is impact with nothing wasted.
1. Vulgar Display of Power (1992)
This is the record that ended the argument about what metal was supposed to sound like in the nineties.
Vulgar Display of Power peaked at only number 44 when it came out, and it’s gone double platinum anyway, because it never stopped selling. Terry Date produced it, and it’s the sharpest, tightest, most complete thing Pantera ever made. There’s no filler. Every song does a job.
“Mouth for War” opens it like a punch in the jaw. “A New Level” is exactly what it says. And then “Walk,” the riff every guitarist on earth has attempted in a guitar store at some point, is built on a groove so simple and so heavy it shouldn’t work. It’s still the sound of a whole genre deciding to slow down and hit harder. “This Love” does quiet-to-crushing better than anybody before it. The track whose title we can’t print here is under three minutes of pure hostility.
Anselmo found the voice here, half bark and half roar, the one every metalcore vocalist of the next two decades borrowed. Dimebag found the tone. Vinnie and Rex locked into a rhythm section that moved like one machine.
Far Beyond Driven is heavier. Cowboys from Hell came first. Vulgar Display of Power is where everything they were trying to do finally clicked into place, every song at once. If you want to go deeper, here’s every track on Vulgar Display of Power broken down.
We Also Recommend: Think Pantera out-thrashed the legends? Check out our ranking of all 17 Megadeth Albums and see how Dave Mustaine’s body of work compares!
What About The Live Albums And Compilations?
They’re not in the ranking, because this is studio albums only.
Official Live: 101 Proof (1997) went to number 15 and turned gold, and it’s the best way to hear how that rhythm section sounded in a room. Far Beyond Bootleg: Live from Donington ’94 followed in 2014. The Best of Pantera compilation in 2003 went platinum.
None of them add new songs to the story. And with the current lineup on the road, there are now two Pantera eras on stage to argue about, one with the Abbott brothers and one with Zakk Wylde playing their songs. Zakk has spent much of his career as Ozzy’s guitar player, which is a résumé you can’t argue with, but only one of those eras made the records above.
The Full Ranking
- Vulgar Display of Power (1992)
- Far Beyond Driven (1994)
- Cowboys from Hell (1990)
- The Great Southern Trendkill (1996)
- Reinventing the Steel (2000)
- Power Metal (1988)
- I Am the Night (1985)
- Projects in the Jungle (1984)
- Metal Magic (1983)
TL;DR
- Pantera released nine studio albums: four independent records from 1983 to 1988, and five major-label albums from 1990 to 2000.
- The best Pantera album is Vulgar Display of Power (1992), the most complete record they made.
- Far Beyond Driven (1994) is second, despite debuting at number one on the Billboard 200.
- The worst Pantera album is Metal Magic (1983), a glam-era hard rock record with Terry Glaze on vocals.
- Phil Anselmo’s first album with the band was Power Metal (1988), the bridge between the early years and Cowboys from Hell.
FAQ
What is the best Pantera album?
Vulgar Display of Power (1992) is the best Pantera album. It features “Mouth for War,” “Walk” and “This Love,” and it’s the tightest, most complete record the band made.
What is the worst Pantera album?
Metal Magic (1983) is the worst Pantera album. It was the band’s self-released debut, a glam-era hard rock record with Terry Glaze on vocals, and it sounds nothing like the Pantera most people know.
How many studio albums does Pantera have?
Pantera has nine studio albums: Metal Magic, Projects in the Jungle, I Am the Night, Power Metal, Cowboys from Hell, Vulgar Display of Power, Far Beyond Driven, The Great Southern Trendkill and Reinventing the Steel.
Which Pantera album went to number one?
Far Beyond Driven debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 in March 1994. It’s the only Pantera album to top the chart.
Who sang on Pantera’s early albums?
Terry Glaze sang on Pantera’s first three albums, Metal Magic, Projects in the Jungle and I Am the Night. Phil Anselmo joined for Power Metal in 1988.
Did I get the order wrong? Tell me where Trendkill belongs in the comments, and follow Loaded Radio for daily rock and metal news at loadedradio.com.
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