Skip to main content
Heavy Metal Thunder Heavy Metal

Genres Heavy Metal

Heavy Metal

Where all of it starts: blues rock turned up until the riff became the point and the volume became the message.

Active years
1968 – present
Origin
UK / USA
Family
Heavy Metal Origins
Bands here
47

Start here

Four records in order of how easy they are to get into — which is not the same as best first.

  1. Paranoid Black Sabbath, 1970 The landmark

    The record where the whole thing arrives. Four of the most recognisable riffs ever written, taped in four days on a budget of almost nothing, by four Birmingham men in their early twenties who thought they were making a blues album.

    Listen to Paranoid

  2. Machine Head Deep Purple, 1972

    The other founding document. Less doom-laden than Sabbath and far more virtuosic — this is where the organ-and-guitar duel enters the language.

    Listen to Machine Head

  3. British Steel Judas Priest, 1980

    Where metal got its uniform. Priest stripped the prog out, put the leather on, and wrote the choruses everyone else copied.

    Listen to British Steel

  4. Holy Diver Dio, 1983

    The best voice the genre ever had, on the record that proved you could leave Sabbath and Rainbow and still win.

    Listen to Holy Diver

What it sounds like

Everything else here is a reaction to this. A riff played on a distorted electric guitar, loud enough to be the point rather than the accompaniment, over drums that swing rather than blast. The vocals are sung — properly sung, often very high — and the songs are built like rock songs, with verses and choruses you are meant to remember. What separated it from the blues rock it came out of was weight and menace: the tritone at the start of Black Sabbath's first record is a deliberately ugly interval, and once you can hear that, you can hear where all of this is going. Nothing in early heavy metal is fast. It is heavy, which is a different quality altogether and one the genre had to invent.

  • Heaviness 3 out of 5
  • Speed 2 out of 5
  • Aggression 3 out of 5
  • Technicality 3 out of 5
  • Darkness 3 out of 5
  • Melody 3 out of 5

Where the name came from

From Steppenwolf's 1968 lyric 'heavy metal thunder' in Born to Be Wild — where it describes the roar of a motorcycle, not a kind of music. First applied specifically to a band by journalist Lester Bangs in a 1971 Creem magazine review of Sir Lord Baltimore. The phrase itself appears earlier in William S. Burroughs' 1962 novel Naked Lunch.

The bands

Hear these first

  • Black Sabbath UK
  • Judas Priest UK
  • Deep Purple UK
  • Dio USA
  • Rainbow UK

And 42 more

  • Uriah Heep UK
  • Blue Öyster Cult USA
  • Thin Lizzy Ireland
  • Alice Cooper USA
  • GWAR USA
  • Budgie UK
  • Mountain USA
  • Grand Funk Railroad USA
  • King Diamond Denmark
  • Artillery Denmark
  • Invocator Denmark
  • Pretty Maids Denmark
  • Loudness Japan
  • Anthem Japan
  • Bow Wow Japan
  • X Japan Japan
  • EZO Japan
  • Barón Rojo Spain
  • Ángeles del Infierno Spain
  • Sangre Azul Spain
  • Banzai Spain
  • Mezarkabul Turkey
  • Gry Turkey
  • Requiem Turkey
  • Diken Turkey
  • Mourn Turkey
  • Bloodwake Nigeria
  • Lust of a Dying Breed Kenya
  • Kara-Tunga Uganda
  • Moral Collapse Egypt
  • Tang Dynasty China
  • Kryptos India
  • Nemesis Malaysia
  • Kraken Colombia
  • Arkangel Venezuela
  • Paul Gillman Venezuela
  • Zeus Cuba
  • Wolfgang Philippines
  • Razorback Philippines
  • Warlock Germany
  • Luzbel Mexico
  • Doro Germany

Where it happened

Counting this genre and everything descended from it.

What it led to