Heavy Metal

Heavy metal’s founding document is Black Sabbath’s debut album (1970): four working-class kids from Birmingham, England, who had played in blues and prog-rock bands and decided to make music that felt like the factories and industrial noise around them. Tony Iommi’s down-tuned, riff-heavy guitar — played with prosthetic fingertips after a factory accident severed the ends of two of his fingers — created the heaviest sustained guitar sound in rock to that point.

“Paranoid” (1970), the album’s two-minute single, distilled the approach: a riff that seems to descend into the earth, Ozzy Osbourne’s blank-eyed vocals, and a lyric about mental collapse that was as stripped of rock-star mythology as the Ramones would be for punk six years later. Black Sabbath added the doom-and-mythology subject matter that would become a metal constant: war, darkness, the occult (provocatively, given Osbourne’s own evangelical upbringing).

Metal’s subsequent branching — from the commercial glam of 1980s hair metal to the technical extremes of thrash, death and black metal — makes it one of the most extensively subdivided genres in popular music. Its core audience remained remarkably stable and loyal through multiple commercial cycles, and its guitar technique vocabulary became the foundation for players across genres.