Three records, bought in the right order, will teach a newcomer more about the different types of heavy metal than a year of staring at genre charts, and the wrong first purchase can shut the door for a decade. The Birmingham quartet that set the whole family going in 1970 was Black Sabbath, and for all that it is the obvious first door, it opens straight into the slowest room of the house, where a newcomer expecting a gallop hears a funeral. Start in the middle of the family. Its edges can wait.
The types hang along the family wall like the bags along the back wall of a boxing gym, the speed bag rattling on its swivel with the clatter of a snare roll, the teardrop bag cut for the uppercut, and at the end of the row the long hundredweight bag packed with sand and rags that splits the knuckles of any novice who throws a first punch at it. Every bag trains a different muscle. The trainer's only job is to say which one to hit first.
Where each branch broke away from the trunk, and along which line, is the business of the heavy metal subgenres. A newcomer needs something plainer than a lineage: one record per type to start on, one to go to next, and no family tree to memorise before the needle drops.
| Type | Start with | Then |
|---|---|---|
| Traditional heavy metal | Saxon, Power and the Glory (1983) | Iron Maiden, Piece of Mind (1983) |
| Speed metal | Agent Steel, Skeptics Apocalypse (1985) | Running Wild, Under Jolly Roger (1987) |
| European power metal | Helloween, Keeper of the Seven Keys Part II (1988) | Blind Guardian, Somewhere Far Beyond (1992) |
| US power metal | Riot, Thundersteel (1988) | Jag Panzer, Ample Destruction (1984) |
| Epic heavy metal | Manowar, Hail to England (1984) | Manilla Road, Crystal Logic (1983) |
| Doom metal | Candlemass, Epicus Doomicus Metallicus (1986) | Saint Vitus, Born Too Late (1986) |
| Dark heavy metal | Mercyful Fate, Don't Break the Oath (1984) | King Diamond, Abigail (1987) |
| Progressive metal | Dream Theater, Images and Words (1992) | Fates Warning, Parallels (1991) |
| New wave of traditional heavy metal | Visigoth, The Revenant King (2015) | Eternal Champion, The Armor of Ire (2016) |
Different types of heavy metal start at the traditional bag
Traditional heavy metal comes first for the plainest of reasons: every other type on the wall was cut from it, so a listener who learns this one hears the rest as variations and not as noise. Two guitars, a clean singer at full stretch, a riff that marches and a chorus built for a hall to shout back. Nothing else is required.
Recorded at Axis Sound Studio in Atlanta with the American producer Jeff Glixman in the autumn of 1982 and released by Carrere in March 1983, Power and the Glory is the plainest entry ticket the type ever printed, and the Yorkshire quintet whose two guitars hammer its title track flat like a steam hammer on a double shift went by the name Saxon. The title song opens the record at a march and never breaks step: a riff, a chorus built for a hall, a solo that knows its place. It is the whole type inside six minutes. After it, Iron Maiden's Piece of Mind teaches the gallop.
The speed bag hangs next along, because it is the same machine run hotter. The Los Angeles quintet that fronted a singer calling himself John Cyriis and put the clean high voice of the British wave over drums at double pace was Agent Steel, and Skeptics Apocalypse, issued by Combat in June 1985, keeps every chorus intact while the riffs go through the verses like a sewing machine needle through sailcloth. Speed metal is heavy metal with the governor pulled off the engine. It is not thrash.
Power metal, from Hamburg and from New York
The next bag trains the lungs. Power metal takes the traditional chorus, raises it a key, sets it over double kick drums and asks the whole room to sing, and it divides cleanly into two traditions that share a name and very little else.
Issued by Noise in August 1988, Keeper of the Seven Keys Part II is the better first record of the pair, shorter in its songs and brighter in its hooks, and the Hanseatic band that made it, with Michael Kiske's tenor out front and double kick drums under every verse, was Helloween.
The single "I Want Out" carries a chorus that climbs the melody like a siege ladder thrown against a town wall, rung over rung, until the whole vanguard is over the top and singing. It is the anthem of the type. After it, Blind Guardian adds the choirs.
The American tradition is harder in the jaw. Recorded with the singer Tony Moore at full stretch and released in 1988, Thundersteel finds the New York band Riot, a decade into a career that had begun in hard rock, firing speed metal riffs under a voice that climbs higher than any of them, and the title track is where most listeners hear the difference from Hamburg at once. The European chorus invites. The American one commands.
The European chorus invites. The American one commands.
Swords, dirges and the occult
The long bags are for patience. Epic heavy metal slows the gallop, stretches the song past six minutes and loads it with kings, battles and lost kingdoms, and the upstate New York quartet whose bassist played a piccolo bass like a lead guitar was Manowar, which cut Hail to England in about six days, reportedly, and released it in February 1984 with "Blood of My Enemies" and the nine minutes of "Bridge of Death". It is absurd, it knows it, and it does not blink.
Doom is the hundredweight bag at the end of the row, and the Stockholm band that hired a singer for one album and printed a genre's name across the front of it was Candlemass, whose Epicus Doomicus Metallicus came out on the Paris label Black Dragon on 10 June 1986. Start there, not with funeral doom. Saint Vitus comes next.
The record opens on "Solitude", a riff lowered into the mix a foot at a time like a coffin let down into a wet grave on creaking ropes, with Johan Längqvist singing over it as if the church had already emptied. It does not hurry once.
Dark heavy metal keeps the tempo and the tuning of 1980 and changes only what the song is about. On Don't Break the Oath, released by Roadrunner in 1984, Mercyful Fate run "A Dangerous Meeting" and "Come to the Sabbath" on riffs any British band of the day would have signed for, and King Diamond tells his stories over them in a voice that swaps registers mid-line. The heresy is on the lyric sheet. The guitars stay orthodox.
Long songs, fast fingers and the young guard
Progressive metal is the bag for the listener who counts. Recorded by the band three Berklee students had founded in the mid eighties, with a new Canadian singer, James LaBrie, Images and Words came out on ATCO in July 1992, and "Pull Me Under" carried it onto MTV and American rock radio in the very year Seattle was clearing long hair off the screen. The band on the sleeve was Dream Theater. Time signatures change mid-riff. Nobody gets lost for long.
Shred is the narrowest bag of all, one guitarist and a metronome, and it is best entered through the records of Yngwie Malmsteen once another type has already taken hold. As a first record it teaches admiration rather than love.
The last bag on the wall was hung after 2000. The Salt Lake City quintet that took the march, the clean voice and the swords of 1983 and played them with no irony at all is Visigoth, and The Revenant King, released by Metal Blade on 27 January 2015, is proof that the traditional type is a living trade rather than a museum. Young ears often trust young bands first.
Thrash, death and black metal belong to the family too, each with a first record of its own, and none of them makes a sensible first purchase for somebody who has never heard Saxon. Anyone wanting every type on one page, cousins included, will find it in the heavy metal genre chart, mapped, drawn with every line of descent in place.
The order matters more than the choice. A listener who comes up through traditional heavy metal and then turns left into speed, or right into doom, arrives at each type already knowing the grammar it breaks, and every record after the third lands with its full weight. How the music got to fifty names in the first place is set out in the chapter list, one era at a time. Three records, then. The rest follows on its own.
