Metal

Heavy metal was born in the steel town of Birmingham, England, on Friday 13 February 1970, when four working-class kids who had been a blues band called Earth released an album named after a horror film. Black Sabbath's guitarist Tony Iommi had lost the tips of two fingers in a sheet-metal press and played with home-made thimbles, tuning down and playing slow so the strings would not hurt. The result was the heaviest sound anyone had recorded: doom, gloom and distortion, a tritone riff in the title track that classical musicians had once called the devil's interval. "Paranoid" that September added speed and a hit single. Metal had a template.

Led Zeppelin, formed in 1968, supercharged the blues in a different way: Jimmy Page's riffs, John Bonham's drums recorded in a stairwell, Robert Plant's wail, and a mythic streak that ran from Tolkien to the Delta. They refused to release singles and sold out stadiums anyway. Deep Purple put a classically trained organist, Jon Lord, next to Ritchie Blackmore's guitar and invented the speed riff; "Machine Head" (1972) and "Smoke on the Water" gave every beginner a first riff to learn. All three bands took their volume to America, where FM radio and arenas were waiting.

The second wave arrived mid-decade. Judas Priest, also from Birmingham, stripped out the blues and added twin lead guitars, leather and Rob Halford's four-octave scream on "Sad Wings of Destiny" (1976) and "Stained Class" (1978), laying the groundwork for everything the 1980s would call metal. Scorpions from Hanover and UFO from London, with a teenage Michael Schenker moving between them, added melody. AC/DC came out of Sydney with no frills, no keyboards and Angus Young in a schoolboy uniform, and "Highway to Hell" (1979) was the last record Bon Scott made before he died. In Pasadena, the second track on Van Halen's 1978 debut was Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption", one minute and forty-two seconds of two-handed tapping that changed how the instrument was played.

Core elements were set by 1979: power chords, soaring vocals, thunderous drums, bluesy roots and darker lyrical themes. What came next, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal with Iron Maiden and Def Leppard, and thrash after that, is the next chapter. But every one of those bands owned "Paranoid".

The New Wave of British Heavy Metal set the terms. Motörhead's "Ace of Spades" (1980) was punk played by a metal band. Judas Priest's "British Steel" (1980) stripped the genre to riffs, leather and studs. Iron Maiden's "The Number of the Beast" (1982), the first with Bruce Dickinson, gave it gallop, narrative and a zombie mascot, and got the band on MTV, the first metal act there. Ozzy Osbourne, sacked from Black Sabbath, hired Randy Rhoads and made "Blizzard of Ozz"; Dio made "Holy Diver" (1983).

In Bay Area garages and Los Angeles rehearsal rooms, kids raised on Maiden and Motörhead and Discharge played it twice as fast. Metallica's "Master of Puppets" (1986) shifted half a million copies while radio and MTV ignored it entirely, and it was the first metal album the Library of Congress preserved. Slayer's "Reign in Blood" (1986), twenty-nine minutes, produced by Rick Rubin, is thrash's hard limit. Megadeth, Anthrax, Exodus and Testament filled out the movement. In Florida, Death pushed past thrash into what would be called death metal, and Possessed were doing the same in the Bay Area.

On the Sunset Strip the other metal wore lipstick. Mötley Crüe, Ratt, Poison, Cinderella and Warrant sold spectacle, hooks and power ballads to MTV, and Bon Jovi and Def Leppard sold the pop version to everyone else. In September 1985 the Parents Music Resource Center took Prince, Twisted Sister, Judas Priest and Mötley Crüe to a Senate hearing; Frank Zappa, Dee Snider and John Denver testified against them. The result, in November, was the "Parental Advisory" label, and a better marketing tool than any of them had imagined.

Metal split in two in the 1990s and both halves won. The first half was Metallica. "Metallica", the black-covered album produced by Bob Rock and released in August 1991, slowed the band down, turned the drums up and sold sixteen million copies in the United States. Every rock radio station played "Enter Sandman". Pantera went the other way: "Vulgar Display of Power" in 1992 was groove metal, Dimebag Darrell's guitar sounding like a chainsaw hitting a bell, and "Far Beyond Driven" entered the Billboard 200 at number one in 1994 without a single note of compromise. Sepultura, from Brazil, put tribal drums under the riffs on "Roots". Type O Negative made goth metal funny and sad at once. Kyuss in the California desert and Sleep in San Jose slowed Black Sabbath to a crawl and invented stoner rock.

The second half was extreme. Death metal peaked with Death's "Human" and "Symbolic", Morbid Angel signing to a major label, Cannibal Corpse getting banned in Germany and Entombed's Stockholm buzzsaw. In Norway a smaller, colder scene went further. Mayhem, Burzum, Emperor and Darkthrone made black metal: treble guitars, blast beats, shrieked vocals, corpse paint, recorded badly on purpose. Between 1992 and 1993 members of that scene burned at least a dozen churches, including the medieval stave church at Fantoft. On 10 August 1993 Varg Vikernes of Burzum stabbed Mayhem's guitarist Euronymous to death in Oslo. The music was real and so was the evil. The book "Lords of Chaos" tells it; treat the scene's own accounts with care.

By 1994 a band from Bakersfield had a different idea. Korn tuned down to A, put a hip-hop groove under seven-string guitars and let Jonathan Davis scream about abuse. Deftones blended beauty and brutality like no one else. Limp Bizkit added a rapper and a DJ and sold the whole thing at Woodstock 99. Slipknot arrived in masks in 1999. System of a Down brought Armenian folk and politics. Rob Zombie made the horror movie a party. Nu-metal, was metal for the modern age, and the modern age was the "TRL" countdown. It would be the biggest rock sound of the early 2000s and the one the next generation swore it hated.

The decade opened with nu-metal at its commercial summit. Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory, released 24 October 2000, became the biggest-selling debut of the decade in America by fusing rap verses, screamed choruses and turntables into something a suburban fourteen-year-old could sing every word of. Deftones' White Pony proved the style could be beautiful. Slipknot's Iowa and System of a Down's Toxicity, both from late summer 2001, were uglier and stranger: nine masked men from Des Moines, and four Armenian-Americans from Glendale singing about prisons and pilgrims. Tool's Lateralus made prog-metal a number one album. Evanescence's Fallen and Disturbed took the sound to the Grammys and Ozzfest.

Underneath, metalcore was being built out of hardcore breakdowns and Gothenburg melody. Killswitch Engage, As I Lay Dying, Lamb of God, Avenged Sevenfold, Trivium and Bullet for My Valentine filled Ozzfest second stages and then headlined them. Converge's Jane Doe, on 4 September 2001, was the extreme end of that world and is still its high-water mark. Mastodon's Leviathan turned Moby-Dick into a sludge-metal concept album and Crack the Skye finished the thought. Opeth's Blackwater Park, Meshuggah's polyrhythms, Gojira from France, Isis and Sunn O))) in the post-metal and drone corners, and Nightwish's symphonic metal in Finland all found audiences that the internet, not radio, delivered.

The old guard had a hard decade. Metallica's St. Anger and the documentary Some Kind of Monster showed a band in group therapy; Death Magnetic in 2008 was their comeback, and also the record that made the loudness war a public argument, because the Guitar Hero version sounded better than the CD. Iron Maiden, with Bruce Dickinson back, filled arenas again. And on 8 December 2004 Dimebag Darrell of Pantera was shot dead on stage in Columbus, Ohio, the decade's cruelest loss.

Metal spent the decade in two conversations at once: the legends saying goodbye, and a huge underground getting the best distribution it had ever had. Streaming and Bandcamp were extraordinarily good for extreme music, because the audience is devoted and geography stopped mattering.

The farewells came fast. Ronnie James Dio died in May 2010. Slayer's Jeff Hanneman died in 2013 and the band toured its last lap. Lemmy died in December 2015, days after his seventieth birthday. Black Sabbath made 13 in 2013, their first album with Ozzy Osbourne in thirty-five years, and played their final show in Birmingham in February 2017. Chris Cornell died in May 2017 and Chester Bennington of Linkin Park two months later, and the grief in the heavy-music world that summer was enormous and public.

The new class was strange and excellent. Ghost, a Swedish band in Catholic costume playing pop songs about the devil, won a Grammy for Cirice in 2016 and ended the decade headlining arenas. Deafheaven put shoegaze inside black metal on Sunbather in 2013 and started an argument that lasted years. Gojira, Mastodon, Baroness, Pallbearer, Power Trip, Converge, Zeal and Ardor and Blood Incantation all made records that mattered. Sleep released The Sciences on 20 April 2018, a date chosen for the joke, and it was their best.

And then Tool, who had not released an album since 2006, put Fear Inoculum out in August 2019 with a title track over ten minutes long. It went to number one. The same month, their catalogue finally appeared on streaming services, and a generation who had only heard about them got to find out what the fuss was.

Metal in the 2020s got weirder and bigger at the same time. Sleep Token, an anonymous British band in masks who mix djent riffs with R&B ballads and refuse to give interviews, went from a cult to arena headliners on "Take Me Back to Eden", and their next record topped the American album chart. Spiritbox and Lorna Shore turned metalcore and deathcore into something ambient and enormous. Ghost dressed heavy metal up as theatre and won.

The underground got ambitious. Blood Incantation made a death metal record with a Tangerine Dream side. Deafheaven kept blurring black metal and shoegaze. Gojira, from France, played the French Revolution as a metal song from the windows of a Paris palace at the Olympic opening ceremony in July 2024, the first metal band ever to perform at one.

And the decade said goodbye to the man who started it. On 5 July 2025, Ozzy Osbourne sat on a black throne at Villa Park in Birmingham and sang with the original Black Sabbath line-up for the last time, in front of a bill of bands who existed because of them, none of whom took a fee. He died seventeen days later, aged 76.