Heavy Metal

Heavy metal builds songs around the guitar riff: two electric guitars chugging power chords (root + fifth) under double-kick drumming that runs from a brisk 120 BPM up to 180 BPM and beyond. Vocals span clean baritone, soaring tenor wails, and low-end growls; lyrics chase mythology, war, dystopia, religion, and inward rage. Production is deliberately compressed and loud, with the rhythm guitars panned hard left and right to form a wall. Lead guitar trades blocky riffs for fast, scalar solos, and the bass usually shadows the riff at the root.

The form coalesced in 1968-70 in the industrial English Midlands, with Birmingham's Black Sabbath converting factory-town gloom into detuned, slow-grinding riffs. Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple completed the early triumvirate. The late-1970s New Wave of British Heavy Metal (Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Saxon) tightened the songwriting and added gallop rhythms, and by the early 1980s the Bay Area thrash bands (Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax) had taken it global. Since then the genre has fractured continuously — death, black, doom, power, metalcore, djent — without losing any of its scenes.

The riff is the song; everything else negotiates with it. Listen for how the kick-drum pattern locks (or doesn't) with the guitar's palm-muted chugs, and for how a guitar solo enters — usually after the second chorus, often over a key change. Vocal range-shifts (clean to scream within one phrase) signal the singer's school: Halford's siren, Dickinson's operatic vibrato, Anselmo's bark. Live, the riff that gets the crowd headbanging in unison is, by definition, the strong one.

Start with Black Sabbath's 'Paranoid' (1970) — three minutes that contain the whole template. For an album, Metallica's 'Master of Puppets' (1986) shows what thrash-era songcraft can build at eight-minute length.

The phrase 'heavy metal thunder' in Steppenwolf's 'Born to Be Wild' (1968) is widely credited as the term's leap into music writing. Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi famously detuned his strings and used lighter gauges to ease the pain of two fingertips he lost in a sheet-metal factory accident — the accident that arguably gave the genre its sound.