The Accident
In 1965, 17-year-old Tony Iommi was working his last day at a sheet metal factory in Aston, Birmingham, before leaving to pursue music full-time. A guillotine press came down on his right hand and severed the tips of his middle and ring fingers. Doctors told him he would never play guitar again. Instead, he melted down a plastic bottle into thimble-shaped prosthetics, wrapped them in leather cut from an old jacket, and tuned his guitar down three semitones to reduce string tension. The looser strings were easier to bend with his makeshift fingertips. The lower pitch produced a thicker, heavier sound. He compensated for his lost dexterity by building songs around simple, crushing chord shapes. Every design choice that defines metal, the drop tunings, the power chords, the riff-first composition, traces back to a teenager trying to play guitar with two damaged fingers.
Friday the 13th
Iommi had joined a band called Earth with vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, bassist Geezer Butler, and drummer Bill Ward. They renamed themselves Black Sabbath in 1969 after a Boris Karloff horror film. On 16 October 1969, they walked into Regent Sound Studios on Denmark Street in London and recorded their debut album in a single 12-hour session with almost no overdubs. They played their live set straight through. The budget was roughly 600 pounds. Vertigo Records released the album on Friday the 13th of February 1970.
The title track opens with rain, a tolling bell, and a tritone: the interval of a diminished fifth, historically called diabolus in musica. Butler had been trying to play a passage from Gustav Holst’s Mars, the Bringer of War. What came out was something new. That riff, built on the most dissonant interval in Western harmony, became the structural blueprint for heavy metal. Their third album, Master of Reality (1971), tuned everything down to C#. It is now considered the foundation of doom metal, stoner rock, and sludge metal.
The Dress Code
While Black Sabbath invented the sound, Judas Priest codified the image. Formed in Birmingham in 1969, they spent most of the 1970s in hippie-era clothing. For their 1979 tour, vocalist Rob Halford adopted leather, chains, and metal studs drawn from punk fashion and leather subculture. The moment they stepped onstage, the band knew they had found their identity. Every metal band that followed inherited some version of this uniform.
Musically, Priest contributed the twin-guitar attack. Guitarists Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing traded harmonized leads and solos across albums like Sad Wings of Destiny (1976) and Stained Class (1978). Halford’s vocal range, from low growls to operatic screams, set the template for metal singing. Their 1980 album British Steel streamlined everything into a tight, commercially viable package that pointed directly at the decade ahead.
The New Wave
In May 1979, Sounds editor Alan Lewis coined the phrase “New Wave of British Heavy Metal” (NWOBHM) as a subheading on Geoff Barton’s review of a gig at London’s Music Machine featuring Iron Maiden, Samson, and Angel Witch. The movement fused traditional metal with the speed and rawness of punk. It lasted roughly from 1979 to 1981, but its graduates reshaped the genre permanently.
Iron Maiden, with Bruce Dickinson on vocals from 1982, released The Number of the Beast that March. It hit number one on the UK album chart and has sold over 15 million copies. Def Leppard and Saxon found large audiences. Motorhead, technically older than the movement, became its spiritual engine, with Lemmy Kilmister’s wall-of-noise bass and shouted vocals bridging punk and metal more convincingly than any manifesto.
Speed Kills
The NWOBHM detonated in America. In 1981, drummer Lars Ulrich placed an ad in a Los Angeles recycler paper and formed Metallica with vocalist-guitarist James Hetfield. They recorded Kill ‘Em All at Music America Studios in Rochester, New York, in May 1983, on a budget of $15,000 from Megaforce Records owner Jon Zazula. The initial pressing was 15,000 copies. That December, Slayer released Show No Mercy. Dave Mustaine, fired from Metallica in April 1983, formed Megadeth. Anthrax had been active in New York since 1981. These four bands, tagged the “Big Four” of thrash metal, drove the genre through the mid-1980s. Exodus, from the Bay Area, are sometimes counted as a fifth, and their 1982 demo circulated widely through the tape-trading underground that sustained thrash before record labels caught on.
Metallica’s self-titled fifth album (1991), produced by Bob Rock at One on One Recording Studios in Los Angeles over eight months, sold 598,000 copies in its first week and has moved over 30 million worldwide. Rock insisted the band play live in the studio for the first time. The record slowed their tempos, thickened their production, and divided their audience permanently.
Fragmentation
By the late 1980s, metal was splitting into increasingly extreme subgenres. Chuck Schuldiner cofounded Death in Orlando in 1983, and the band became central to the Florida death metal scene that coalesced around Tampa’s Morrisound Recording studio. Producer Scott Burns recorded albums there for Death, Morbid Angel, Obituary, and Deicide between 1987 and the mid-1990s. Death metal pushed tempos, downtuning, and vocal distortion past anything thrash had attempted.
Black metal’s “first wave” traces to Venom’s 1982 album Black Metal, which gave the genre its name. The second wave erupted in early-1990s Norway, centered on Mayhem guitarist Euronymous and his Oslo record shop Helvete. Bands like Darkthrone, Burzum, Emperor, and Immortal recorded with deliberately lo-fi production, tremolo-picked guitars, and shrieked vocals. The scene imploded into arson and violence: over 50 church attacks in Norway by 1996, a murder in 1993. The music survived the chaos and spread worldwide.
Doom metal, meanwhile, circled back to Black Sabbath’s slowest, heaviest passages. Candlemass in Sweden, Saint Vitus and Pentagram in the United States, and Witchfinder General in England all built on those foundations during the early 1980s.
The Gear
Metal’s sonic identity is inseparable from its equipment. Jim Marshall opened his drum shop in London in 1962 and began building amplifiers to satisfy guitarists who wanted more volume than Fender offered. By 1965, the Marshall Super Lead 100 (the “Plexi”) paired with 4x12 speaker cabinets created the full stack. The JCM800, released in the early 1980s, became the default amplifier for NWOBHM and thrash. Its tight, high-gain preamp meant guitarists could achieve saturation without deafening volume. The relationship between metal and Marshall is symbiotic: the genre demanded more distortion, and the amplifiers evolved to provide it.
Essential Listening
- Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath (1970)
- Black Sabbath – Master of Reality (1971)
- Judas Priest – Sad Wings of Destiny (1976)
- Motorhead – Overkill (1979)
- Iron Maiden – The Number of the Beast (1982)
- Metallica – Kill ‘Em All (1983)
- Slayer – Reign in Blood (1986)
- Death – Leprosy (1988)
- Candlemass – Epicus Doomicus Metallicus (1986)
- Megadeth – Rust in Peace (1990)
- Darkthrone – A Blaze in the Northern Sky (1992)
- Pantera – Vulgar Display of Power (1992)