It was on February 13, 1970 that the genre of heavy metal was officially born. While its blueprints had already been laid down by the likes of Zeppelin, Blue Cheer and Coven venturing further into the heavier underbelly of rock'n'roll, Black Sabbath crystallised the sound and feel of metal into something tangible - something terrifying and altogether heavier than anything we'd heard before.
Over five decades later and metal remains as fearless, boundary pushing and feared/revered as ever, its journey taking on all manner of twists and turns with Sabbath's debut, through the NWOBHM, thrash, the extreme outer limits of death and black metal and the nu metal explosion that followed some years later. From metal’s original earthquaking anthems to the modern classics that are pushing things forward, this is the soundtrack to a musical revolution that has lasted 50 years and counting, courtesy of the 100 songs that changed the genre forever.
1. Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath (Black Sabbath, 1970)
This is where it starts: with pouring rain, a clanging funeral bell and a crack of thunder. Six minutes and 20 seconds later, the whole of heavy metal’s future is mapped out before us. Sabbath weren’t the first band to weaponise the blues – Led Zeppelin had released two albums by the time the Sabbs’ debut came out – but they were the ones who fully realised its pure malevolent power.
More than 50 years on, Black Sabbath sounds like a revolution at quarter-speed: that never-matched opening Iommi riff, the boundary-pushing occult imagery, Ozzy’s descent into madness as the song picks up panicked speed (let’s not forget that, like so many Sabbath songs, it’s a cautionary tale)... it all became as important to metal as breathing. People had heard ‘heavy’ before, but they’d never heard it like this. Things truly would never be the same again. DE
2. Led Zeppelin - Immigrant Song (Led Zeppelin III, 1970)
‘Valhalla, I am coming!’ With those four words, Led Zeppelin launched the dragon-prowed longship that would eventually lead to waves of invasion by axe-wielding Viking metal bands. The scything guitars and insistent rhythms recall the threshing oars referenced in the lyrics, but it’s the evocative imagery more than the actual music that really set the scene for every other Norse-obsessed band to follow.
Enslaved are the most prominent such act to have paid tribute, with a cover of the song played live on Norwegian TV, though the classic riff and Robert Plant’s iconic wail also implanted itself into the wider metal consciousness, which is why the song has also been covered by everyone from Dark Angel to Stryper. PT
3. Kiss - Rock And Roll All Nite (Dressed To Kill, 1975)
Rock’n’roll needed nobody’s permission to party, but Kiss gave it anyway with the exuberant final song on their third album. Its simple message – rock’n’roll all night, party every day – became the handbook for a million teenage rebels who dreamed of getting loaded and living like their idols (ironic, given Gene Simmons claims never to have been drunk).
The studio version was a moderate hit in early 1975, but it was the live version from the same year’s career-making Alive! album that rocketed Kiss’s previously stuttering career into the stratosphere – the start of a journey that turned them into one of the biggest bands and certainly the biggest brand in history. Without it, the Kiss empire - and modern merchandising – could have looked very different. DE
4. Rainbow - Stargazer (Rainbow Rising, 1976)
Rock had reached for the epic before, most notably via Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven, but the centrepiece of Rainbow’s second album was something else. Former Deep Purple guitarist-turned-Rainbow leader Ritchie Blackmore approached this towering, eight-and-a-half-minute masterpiece like a classical composer, layering on the drama and grandeur as he constructed his magnificent musical edifice.
But it was singer Ronnie James Dio who breathed life into it with a magisterial performance that made lyrics about wizards and rainbows seem like the most logical thing in the world. Metal’s lifelong love affair with the fantastical began here, and Stargazer remains the benchmark by which all subsequent epics should be judged. DE
5. Van Halen - Eruption (Van Halen, 1978)
There are multiple reasons why this landmark sub-two-minute guitar solo-cum-Eddie Van Halen showcase was so transformative. It bridged the disparate worlds of hard rock and classical. It introduced two-handed fretboard tapping. It’s inarguably one of the greatest and most recognisable guitar solos of all time. It inspired next-level shredding. And before Smells Like Teen Spirit, it made hanging out in music shops on Saturday afternoons the most obnoxious experience since Stairway To Heaven.
Fact of the matter is, Eruption had to be strong-armed onto the album by producer Ted Templeman and it’s not even Eddie at his best, at least according to the man himself. “I didn’t even play it right”, he told Guitar World magazine. “There’s a mistake at the top end of it. To this day, whenever I hear it, I always think, ‘Man, I could’ve played it better.’” Good lord. KSP
6. Judas Priest - Exciter (Stained Class, 1978)
“If you ask me what the first thrash metal song was, it’s Exciter by Judas Priest,” Exodus/Slayer guitarist Gary Holt once told us, identifying the track that kickstarted the hyperactive one-upmanship that dominated 80s metal. “We just set out to write the fastest track ever written,” K.K. Downing told author Martin Popoff of Exciter’s modus operandi in 2007.
Opening the Stained Class album, it certainly delivered on that promise. Les Binks’s double bass dexterity and rapid-fire fills propelled the song with such infectious momentum, it changed how drummers drum, while the intensified tempo, along with Glenn Tipton/K.K. Downing’s triumphant mid-song twin-harmony fanfare and Rob Halford’s ascending shrieks, confirm Exciter as the point where Priest truly became the beast we know and love, gears constantly shifting, advancing a new set of standards for metal’s 80s future. CC
7. Motörhead - Overkill (Overkill, 1979)
'Only way to feel the noise is when it’s good and loud...’ Motörhead didn’t just find their sound with their second album, but set a new pace for metal, covered by everyone from The Damned to Metallica.
The song’s now-iconic double bass intro was a result of Philthy Animal Taylor practising in the studio, the drummer explaining in the documentary The Guts And The Glory that he was “just trying to get [his] co-ordination right”. Overkill was also the final song the band ever played, its frantic racket a fitting send-off for the band that were – for a time at least – the loudest noise on the planet. RH
8. Killing Joke - Wardance (Killing Joke, 1980)
Killing Joke’s debut single marked a hither to unexplored area where post-punk bled into tribal metal with a bleak industrial clatter. It was particularly influential on the industrial metal scene to come, with Nine Inch Nails, Ministry and Godflesh among others owing a huge debt to the song. The influence goes deeper though, slicing through every metal band with a penchant for dense, unstoppable grooves.
The likes of Metallica, Soundgarden and Faith No More have acknowledged their debt to Killing Joke, while groove metal pioneers like Helmet and Prong borrowed heavily from Wardance’s apocalyptic drive. “It’s what gave us this reputation of having this bludgeoning assault”, KJ bassist Youth said of the song, neatly summing up its enduring influence and appeal. PT
9. Saxon - Wheels Of Steel (Wheels Of Steel, 1980)
By the end of the 1970s, many of metal’s original gods were old, bloated and out of touch. It took Saxon to usher in the new decade and bring things back to where they belonged: the streets. A bunch of bluff, unpretentious Yorkshiremen, these NWOBHM first wavers made music that sounded like it had simultaneously been forged in the factories of their native Barnsley and acted as a euphoric release from the drudgery of daily life.
Wheels Of Steel was a Barnsley Born To Be Wild – a barnstorming petrolhead’s fantasy of hurtling down the open road at 140mph, flipping the bird to “motorway pigs” and the world in general. “I don’t take no bull... shit!” hollered Biff Byford, like Jeremy Clarkson in silver spandex trousers, as the song screeched into the UK Top 40, leaving smoking tyre marks in its wake. Metal was back in the hands of the working class. DE
10. Bad Brains - Pay To Cum (Pay To Cum single, 1980)
If punk lit a fire under metal, Bad Brains strapped a rocket to it and shot it into the sun. Clocking in at less than two minutes, their 1980 debut single, Pay To Cum, was a blast of hyperactive lightning, pushing the genre to almost absurd speeds. With less cowbell and more speed, it helped plant the roots of hardcore punk, and with it thrash metal.
Bad Brains bridged those worlds, inspiring everyone from Minor Threat to Metallica, Killswitch Engage and Dave Grohl among countless others, occasionally popping up on bills with the likes of Slayer to remind everyone who did it first. “All the metal dudes could play and had pretty girlfriends”, bassist Darryl Jenifer concedes. “But they started coming to our shows and saw how energised little bald punk kids were, and realised they had to get up and get on it!” RH
11. Iron Maiden - Running Free (Iron Maiden, 1980)
The term New Wave Of British Heavy Metal was coined by Sounds magazine in April 1979, but it took almost a year before this blossoming movement got its first great anthem. Kicking off with a sped-up glam rock drumbeat, Iron Maiden’s exhilarating debut single fused the energy of punk to metal’s outlaw spirit. ‘I’m running wild, I’m running free’, howled 21-year-old Paul Di’Anno, offering a glorious escape from the dole queue hell of turn-of-the-80s Britain.
The single bovver-booted its way into the UK Top 40 on its release in early 1980, though its influence spread much further – a Danish teenager named Lars Ulrich was just one of countless young rock fans paying attention. DE
12. Girlschool - Emergency (Demolition, 1980)
Seventies metal was, frankly, a bit of a sausage fest. But with their 1980 debut, Demolition, South London’s Girlschool helped level the playing field. Metal’s first all-female group, Girlschool emerged from the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal with a punk-inflected, pacy metal sound, their debut single Take It All Away impressing their contemporaries enough to land them tours with Motörhead and Budgie.
While it wasn’t the highest-charting single from Demolition – that was their cover
of 60s rockers The Gun’s Race With The Devil, which reached No.49 – Emergency was the wider public’s introduction to Girlschool, and a statement that metal wasn’t exclusively a boys’ club anymore. “There were a lot of boys in bands, but they never made us uncomfortable,” guitarist and vocalist Kim McAuliffe told Hammer in 2021. “We’d have kicked their arses if they did.” RH
13. Ozzy Osbourne - Crazy Train (Blizzard Of Ozz, 1980)
When Ozzy Osbourne was booted from Black Sabbath on April 27 1979, by his own reckoning he was “unemployed and unemployable”. But in August the following year, the singer was bouncing back with an all-new band, wunderkind guitarist Randy Rhoads helping cement Ozzy as a star in his own right.
It was a miraculous comeback, not least because the singer had spent three months on a coke-and-booze binge. Rescued from self-destruction by future manager and wife Sharon Osbourne, Crazy Train didn’t just bring Ozzy back, it reinvented him. Ozzy’s maniacal laugh in the track’s intro highlighted a playfulness that stood in stark contrast to Sabbath’s doom-and- gloom, and Randy’s exuberant riffs helped shift heavy metal from arenas to something fit for stadiums. RH
14. Black Flag - Rise Above (Damaged, 1981)
It’s open to question who the very first hardcore punk band was, but there’s no debate as to who defined the sound in its purest form and solidified the independent ethos on which the scene was built: Black Flag. And nothing encapsulated them like Rise Above, a pummelling blast of noise, attitude and barked lyrics, the latter courtesy of frontman Henry Rollins.
The Los Angeles band had paid their dues for several years by that point, battling the authorities and sometimes even their own fans, and the message that ran through Rise Above was hard-earned: it’s not that punk rock can flourish outside the mainstream, it’s that it should. It galvanised the underground, laying the foundations of a hardcore scene – and a lifestyle – that endures to this day. SH
15. Discharge - Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing (Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing, 1982)
Discharge were the UK punks who changed extreme metal at an atomic level. While the parallel New Wave Of British Heavy Metal was booming, the spike-haired Stoke-On-Trent four- piece were pushing music beyond its established boundaries with Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing’s cataclysmic assault.
This was barely recognisable as the kind of punk that had emerged midway through the 70s – melody was replaced by screaming, atonal guitars, tuneless hollered warnings about how people were willingly being led to their doom by the powers-that-be, and the immortal ‘d-beat’ rhythm that would become Discharge’s signature. From Napalm Death in Birmingham to Metallica in the Bay Area to Sepultura in Belo Horizonte, a generation of musicians would rally to its ragged flag. SH
16. Venom - Black Metal (Black Metal, 1982)
From the ridiculous opening din of a chainsaw cutting through a studio door, sweeping away the listener with delirious momentum, Venom launched their second LP with a rallying cry for growing legions of morbid noise freaks.
The roll call of acolytes queuing up to cover this seminal work over the years - including Mayhem (formed when guitarist Euronymous and bassist Necrobutcher discovered a mutual love of the Black Metal LP), Cradle Of Filth, Dimmu Borgir, Vader, Voivod, Destruction, Sigh and Hypocrisy - makes plain the debt that metal owes to the visionary self-belief and chutzpah of Cronos, Mantas and Abaddon, cast in stone on this song that launched a movement. CC
17. Suicidal Tendencies - Institutionalized (Suicidal Tendences, 1983)
How different would things have been if Mike Muir’s mom had given him a Pepsi? Institutionalized (‘mom just give me a Pepsi, please’) was an innovative vanguard of a track. Not only did these Venice Beach street rats re-jig conventional songwriting structure by having original guitarist Grant Estes wail away on a perpetual motion machine of lead guitar – despite being written by bassist Louiche Mayorga – and spark the introduction of vocalist Mike’s ranting preacher-man persona, it signalled the moment when hardcore punk moved beyond one- dimensionality to inject a breadth of emotion, mood, tempo and skill.
It emerged as a progressive oasis from a sound/scene already cannibalising itself, elbowing its way onto a nascent MTV in the process. Institutionalized moved hardcore out of the underground, even if hardcore wasn’t keen to follow. KSP
18. Mötley Crüe - Shout At The Devil (Shout At The Devil, 1983)
Any ankle-biter headbanger who came up during the triangulation of the Satanic Panic, Mötley Crüe’s second album, and the carving out of their pre-teen identity probably remembers screaming matches and the defence of “But mom/dad/ schoolteacher, they’re saying, ‘Shout at the Devil!’”
While said album teemed with bangers like Looks That Kill, Too Young To Fall In Love and Red Hot, it was the title track that showed there was depth to these hooligan ruffians. They could wrap anthemic metal around rocking riffs, stop-on-a-dime staccato and doomy tempos. The song wasn’t the serenade to Satan most thought it was; it was a demonstrative rallying cry for all of metaldom, from sun-kissed beach babes and feather-haired dudes in Camaros to nefarious thrashers and black metal futurists, and planted the seed for the glam metal explosion that would dominate the rest of the decade, for good and for ill. KSP
19. Mercyful Fate - Evil (Melissa, 1983)
Originally broadcast to the masses via the BBC’s pivotal Friday Rock Show before appearing on Mercyful Fate’s beloved debut album, Evil allied King Diamond’s blasphemous braggadocio to an elegant compositional approach, devising a blueprint for Ghost’s entire career, as well as countless underground acolytes (Attic, Portrait, Wolf, In Solitude).
The moody time changes, melodic embellishments and turnover of infectious riffs advanced black metal beyond Venom’s feral racket, inspiring Metallica and Slayer on their journey to musical fruition. By keeping one foot in the 70s rock of Uriah Heep and UFO, Evil presented a far more accessible proposition than other pioneering transgressors like Bathory or Possessed. Their prog leanings made a palpable impact on extreme metal’s creative ambition, while the flamboyantly ghoulish lyrics gave 90s Norwegian BM a model of bad behaviour to aspire to. CC
20. Metallica - Hit The Lights (Kill Em All, 1983)
Metallica have bigger songs. They have better songs. But no Metallica song has had the same impact as the one that opened their game-changing debut. Four minutes and 17 seconds of suburban fury, Hit The Lights fired the starting pistol on the
the career of the most successful metal band in history and, by extension, invented modern metal as we know it.
But just as Metallica themselves had planted the seeds for thrash with Hit The Lights, so they were the first to outgrow it. Within 10 years, they’d gone from scrappy underdogs to the biggest metal band on the planet, and one of the most successful bands in any genre. And once again, where Metallica led, so many other bands followed. DE
21. Saint Vitus - Burial At Sea (Saint Vitus, 1984)
Bringing the LA doom instigators’ debut LP to a crushing close, Burial At Sea boasted the slowest, darkest, creepiest riffs yet devised by man or beast. The blasting punk-metal mid-section rampaged like a proto-Autopsy, yet this heaving behemoth was present on pre-Vitus band Tyrant’s first demo as early as 1978. Pushing back the frontiers of doom metal even while effectively scouting them out, Burial At Sea roughened, toughened and distressed the original Sabbath blueprint with stoner caveman energy and sinister atmospheres, reflected in the Weird Tales narrative about a pirate ghost ship.
Dave Chandler’s guitar crawled with spectral unease, siring the 90s/00s Electric Wizard school of occult psych doom, while the singular shuddering pipes of Scott Reagers bewitched the microphone with theatrical fervour and possessed abandon. CC
22. Hellhammer - Triumph Of Death (Apocalyptic Raids, 1984)
Venom opened the door to metal’s dark new future, inspiring a wave of bands
to take what they did and push it even further. Hellhammer quickly assumed the mantle of the heaviest (and most reviled) band in the world. Triumph Of Death was the most unpalatable noise unleashed by any band to that point. The Swiss trio – fronted by future Celtic Frost visionary Tom G Warrior – recorded the track three times in total, each version getting slower, longer and more nightmarish.
By the time it made its official, non-demo debut on 1984’s Apocalyptic Raids EP, it had mutated into nine minutes of droning, tortuous agony, turning metal from music for slamming beers to into a hallucinatory expression of a tormented soul. There had never been a metal band this audibly DIY before – it soon became clear that if Hellhammer could do it, so could anyone. PH
23. W.A.S.P. - Animal (Fuck Like A Beast) (Animal..., 1984)
You’ve gotta love any tune that’s so over-the-top that the guy who wrote it denied its existence for 15 years. As a song, Animal is heavy metal brutalism at its
finest, based on rudimentary quarter-note chugs and simplistic power chord movement – albeit with a razor-sharp hook for a chorus. You would have to be living under a bridge of denial to think the song, and bloody saw-blade codpiece cover, was never going to stir controversy.
It may have been dropped as the opener to the band’s debut album, but sensation sells – its presence on US censorship group’s the PMRC’s ‘Filthy Fifteen’ list of records that no kid should ever be subjected to only turbocharged its infamy. By the mid-00s, born-again Christian Blackie refused to ever play the song again. But it seems he knows where his bread is buttered, as it ended up being dusted off for the band’s 40th anniversary tour. KSP
24. Celtic Frost - Circle Of The Tyrants (Emperor's Return/To Mega Therion, 1985)
The video for this early Celtic Frost signature tune was filmed in 1985 at the World War III festival in Montreal, North America’s first extreme music festival. The earthmoving chaos put on display by the crowd’s reaction to this track’s sinister and measured plod (and operatic vocal variations), combined with bassist Martin Ain decked out in aristocratic, frilly stage gear, showed a band in transition.
Circle Of The Tyrants is Celtic Frost’s crowning jewel, not just because it’s home to the band’s most recognisable riff and best song of their catalogue, but because it was a bridge between Tom G Warrior’s raw and unkempt Hellhammer-y past and all the avant-garde experiments to come, for Frost and all the countless bands they inspired. KSP
Possessed - Death Metal (Seven Churches, 1985)
Originally the opening title track on the 1984 demo by the Bay Area’s most divisively extreme band, Death Metal ended up as the final killer blow on the teenage foursome’s incendiary debut, Seven Churches, the following year. Although audibly in thrall to recent innovations by Venom and Slayer, the bulldozing relentlessness of the sheet-metal riffing and Jeff Becerra’s sick, tormented rasp ratcheted the intensity way beyond workaday thrash tropes.
This was a far darker, grislier mode of expression, judiciously signified by its far-sighted title. Essentially, Possessed were revisiting Black Sabbath’s foundational concept: the musical equivalent of a scary movie. But instead of Sabbath’s English Gothic folk-horror devilry, we’ve got an army of bloodthirsty Satanic zombies annihilating California to ‘rule by Death Metal’ and ‘bringing you nothing but strife’. CC
