Megadeth

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• Top 6 Metal Bands of All Time

  Currently #6 · score 0

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• Black Sabbath

  Black Sabbath formed in 1968 in the industrial English city of Birmingham, and their self-titled 1970 debut album, built around ominous, heavily distorted guitar riffs and dark, occult-influenced lyrical themes, is widely credited by music historians as the foundational album that essentially invented heavy metal as a distinct genre. Guitarist Tony Iommi's distinctive, downtuned guitar sound was partly born of necessity — following a factory accident that severed the tips of two fingers on his fretting hand, Iommi developed a lighter-gauge string and downtuned playing style to reduce finger tension, a technical adaptation that directly shaped metal's signature heavy, low-tuned guitar sound. Frontman Ozzy Osbourne's distinctive vocal style and increasingly public, chaotic personal life, including his eventual firing from the band in 1979 over substance abuse issues, made him one of rock's most recognizable and mythologized frontmen even before his subsequent successful solo career and later reality television fame. Black Sabbath's combination of doom-laden, heavily amplified riffs and dark thematic content established virtually the entire stylistic and lyrical template that subsequent heavy metal bands across every metal subgenre have continued to draw from, cementing the band's status as the genre's essential founding act.

• Metallica

  Metallica formed in Los Angeles in 1981 and became one of the founding bands of thrash metal, a faster, more aggressive metal subgenre that emerged in the early 1980s as a direct reaction against the more commercially polished glam metal dominating mainstream rock radio at the time. The band's 1991 self-titled album, commonly known as "the Black Album," sold more than 16 million copies in the United States alone, becoming one of the best-selling albums of the SoundScan era and marking Metallica's deliberate, successful pivot toward a more accessible, radio-friendly sound without fully abandoning their metal roots. Metallica's 2000 lawsuit against the file-sharing service Napster, in which the band argued the platform was facilitating mass copyright infringement of their music, made them one of the most publicly visible and controversial figures in the broader music industry's early fight against digital piracy, drawing significant backlash from parts of their own fan base. The band's combined album sales, estimated well over 125 million worldwide, make them the best-selling metal act in music history, and Metallica's sustained commercial and critical relevance across more than four decades has made them the genre's most commercially successful ambassadors to mainstream rock audiences.

• Iron Maiden

  Iron Maiden, formed in London in 1975, became one of the defining bands of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal movement that emerged in the late 1970s, and bassist and primary songwriter Steve Harris's intricate, galloping bass lines became one of the band's most technically distinctive musical signatures. The band's mascot, "Eddie," a grotesque zombie-like figure that appears in various forms on nearly every Iron Maiden album cover and stage show, has become one of the most recognizable mascots in rock music history, giving the band a consistent, instantly identifiable visual brand across nearly five decades of album releases. Iron Maiden's elaborate stage productions, including full-scale sets and pyrotechnics built around each album's specific thematic concept, set new standards for metal concert theatricality, and the band's 1985 live album Live After Death, recorded at London's Hammersmith Odeon, is widely regarded as one of the greatest live metal albums ever recorded. Frontman Bruce Dickinson's operatic vocal range and the band's historically and literarily themed lyrics, drawing on subjects ranging from Greek mythology to World War I aviation — reflecting Dickinson's own real-life career as a licensed commercial airline pilot — have given Iron Maiden a level of lyrical and thematic ambition distinct from many of their metal contemporaries.

• Judas Priest

  Judas Priest, formed in Birmingham, England in 1969, helped define heavy metal's visual identity by introducing leather-and-studs stage attire drawn partly from motorcycle and BDSM subculture fashion, a look that became one of the genre's most enduring and widely imitated visual templates. The band's twin-lead-guitar approach, featuring two guitarists trading and harmonizing melodic lead lines simultaneously, became a widely adopted structural template for subsequent metal bands, giving Judas Priest's sound a layered, harmonized guitar texture distinct from the single-lead-guitar approach common in earlier hard rock. Frontman Rob Halford publicly came out as gay in 1998, becoming one of the first prominent metal frontmen to do so, a significant moment given heavy metal's historically hypermasculine public image, and Halford's continued prominence within the genre after coming out helped gradually shift broader conversations about sexuality within metal culture. Judas Priest's 1980 album British Steel, featuring hits like "Breaking the Law" and "Living After Midnight," helped bring heavy metal to a broader mainstream rock audience, and the band's sustained influence on metal's visual style and twin-guitar musical structure has made them one of the genre's most foundational acts.

• Slayer

  Slayer, formed in Huntington Park, California in 1981, became one of the "Big Four" thrash metal bands alongside Metallica, Megadeth, and Anthrax, and their 1986 album Reign in Blood, produced by Rick Rubin, is widely regarded as one of the most aggressive and influential thrash metal albums ever recorded. The band's explicit, often graphically violent lyrical content, including songs directly referencing serial killers and Nazi war crimes, drew sustained controversy and censorship attempts throughout their career, with Slayer's label reportedly requiring the removal of a specific song from Reign in Blood's initial pressing due to its Holocaust-related subject matter. Slayer's extremely fast tempos and technically demanding guitar work, particularly on tracks like "Angel of Death," pushed thrash metal's speed and aggression to a genuinely extreme level that directly influenced the subsequent development of death metal and other more extreme metal subgenres. The band's decision to formally retire in 2019, following a lengthy farewell tour, ended one of thrash metal's most significant and consistently uncompromising careers, and Slayer's influence on extreme metal's subsequent development remains among the most direct and widely acknowledged of any band from the genre's founding thrash era.