A dozen branches off one trunk, and the trunk is not yet forty years old. Counted from the spring of 1987, when Keeper of the Seven Keys Part I reached the shops on Noise Records and fixed the European template of double kick, major key and a tenor above the stave, the power metal subgenres have split faster than the offshoots of almost any style in heavy music, into symphonic, progressive, neoclassical, epic, pirate, operatic, melodic, flower, extreme, blackened, folk and thrash-bred strains inside one generation of record buyers.
The Hamburg quintet that pressed the trunk into shape was Helloween. What that record did to the heavy metal of its day no manifesto could have done: it drove the sung melody into the music like a cantus firmus nailed through the floorboards of a motet, a held line no later voice could pull loose, and nearly four decades later every branch on the tree still writes its counterpoint over that same line.
The held line is a clean voice in a major key. Everything else is negotiable.
Strip out the sung melody and the chorus that climbs instead of grinding, and no quantity of dragons will keep a band inside the family. Keep them, and a band can bolt on an orchestra, a seven string guitar, a blast beat, a fiddle or a tricorn hat and still be filed on the same shelf as the Hamburg record, which is why the tree has grown so quickly and why the arguments about it never end.
The chronology, the route the style travelled from Hamburg to the world, is a story of decades and scenes. The family tree is a different map. It is drawn by what each branch added to the trunk, and by what each one was prepared to break in order to add it.
The names come from three directions at once. Record labels print them on stickers to tell a shop assistant where to rack the disc, the press coins them to sort a month of promos, and the genre strings on Metal Archives, symphonic power, progressive power, heavy and power, turn them into something close to law. Almost every one of those names describes an addition. Very few describe a subtraction, and that asymmetry explains the shape of the whole tree.
Power metal subgenres of the arrangement
The Italian band that described its own sound as Hollywood metal was Rhapsody, later renamed Rhapsody of Fire, and on Legendary Tales, released by Limb Music in 1997, it laid choirs, harpsichord and sampled strings over the gallop until the arrangement, rather than the riff, was carrying the song.
That is symphonic power metal, the branch with the heaviest traffic and the widest reach, from Blind Guardian in its orchestral years to Kamelot and Orden Ogan. Its border deserves to be named plainly. Where the orchestra stops dressing a power metal song and starts writing the song itself, with the double kick gone and the classical voice at the front, the music has crossed into symphonic metal, a genre with its own shelf and its own history, and the power metal tree ends there.
The distinction is audible within a single bar. In symphonic power metal the strings double the guitar melody and the choir doubles the chorus, so the orchestra swells what the band is already playing; the band could stand on stage without it and every song would still hold together.
Cast rather than merely sung, the metal opera hands the power metal song to a whole company: The Metal Opera, released by AFM Records in 2001 under the name Avantasia, gave Tobias Sammet of Edguy a libretto about a young novice in the year 1602 and a roster of guest voices that ran from Michael Kiske and Kai Hansen to André Matos and Sharon den Adel.
The effect is a prompter's box kicked to splinters and every tenor in the building loosed across the footlights at once, each one handed a character and a key, and the arrangement built so the voices can trade lines the way a real opera company trades scenes. The Dutch multi-instrumentalist who had tried the form first, on The Final Experiment in 1995, was Arjen Lucassen under the name Ayreon, and he called his version a rock opera.
The metal opera turned out to be a format rather than a sound. Sammet's later Avantasia records drifted toward hard rock while keeping the guest cast, and the branch has been measured ever since by its casting sheet rather than by its tempo. The chorus, once again, decided where it was filed.
A prompter's box kicked to splinters and every tenor in the building loosed across the footlights at once.
Scales and bar lines: neoclassical and progressive power
Recorded for Polydor and released in 1984, Rising Force put harmonic minor runs, pedal point arpeggios and the melodic shapes of Paganini's caprices into the hands of the Swedish guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen, played at a speed that put the caprices on a luthier's lathe and let the shavings fly off the fingerboard.
The instrumental Far Beyond the Sun became the record's calling card, and a generation of guitarists learned it note for note before they had learned a single chorus.
Neoclassical metal is not in itself a power metal branch. It is a technique that became a house dialect once Stratovarius, with Timo Tolkki on guitar and Jens Johansson on keyboards, made the baroque duel between the two instruments a regular feature of the Finnish records of the mid nineties, and a whole school of guitarists after them learned to think of Bach as a scale book.
The American quintet that carries the progressive branch on any honest map is Symphony X. On The Divine Wings of Tragedy in 1996, guitarist Michael Romeo and singer Russell Allen took a razor to the bar lines of the power metal score, reset them in odd meters, and let the title song run past twenty minutes without ever surrendering the soaring chorus that keeps the record on this tree.
The descent here runs back through American records older than the trunk, the long forms of Fates Warning and Queensrÿche in the middle eighties, and forward through Angra, whose Holy Land in 1996 threaded Brazilian percussion through the European template, and Kamelot, whose Karma in 2001 set long, darker song forms under choruses built entirely in the Hamburg manner. Progressive metal proper, the tradition of long instrumental sections and technical display for its own sake, is a separate genre, and the border sits wherever the chorus stops being the point.
| Branch | What it adds to the trunk | A record that fixed it |
|---|---|---|
| Melodic, the trunk | Double kick, major keys, high clean tenor | Helloween, Keeper of the Seven Keys Part I (1987) |
| Symphonic power | Choirs, strings, film score scale | Rhapsody, Legendary Tales (1997) |
| Progressive power | Odd meters, long suites | Symphony X, The Divine Wings of Tragedy (1996) |
| Neoclassical | Harmonic minor, baroque runs | Yngwie Malmsteen, Rising Force (1984) |
| Epic metal | Slower tempos, darker sword and sorcery | Manowar, Hail to England (1984) |
| Pirate metal | Nautical history, tavern choruses | Running Wild, Under Jolly Roger (1987) |
| Metal opera | A cast of guest singers, a libretto | Avantasia, The Metal Opera (2001) |
| Folk power | Folk melodies and instruments | Elvenking, Heathenreel (2001) |
| Power thrash | Thrash riffing under a clean voice | Iced Earth, Night of the Stormrider (1991) |
| Extreme power | Speed at the limit, harsh voices | DragonForce, Valley of the Damned (2003) |
The older branches: epic metal and power thrash
Older than the trunk it is usually hung from, epic metal grew out of American records made before anybody in Hamburg had a contract: Manilla Road, Cirith Ungol and Virgin Steele in the early eighties, Manowar above all, slower and heavier than the European style that followed, dark with sword and sorcery, and joined at the end of the decade by the Viking records of Bathory, beginning with Hammerheart in 1990.
Whether epic metal is a branch or a root is the oldest quarrel on the tree. The pedigree favours the root. The chorus, which climbs and resolves in exactly the manner of the Hamburg school, favours the branch, and most shops have settled the matter by racking both on the same shelf.
The American bands that answered Europe with thrash riffing under a clean, high voice built power thrash, and the American band that fixed its shape was Iced Earth, on Night of the Stormrider for Century Media in 1991. The palm mutes on that record are screwed down under the melody like strings under a luthier's clamp tightened one turn past what the neck will stand, and the whole style lives in that tension between the grip of the right hand and the lift of the chorus.
Behind it stand Metal Church, Jag Panzer, Helstar and Liege Lord, the heavier American school that used the words power metal first, in the middle eighties, for something closer to speed metal than to anything in Hamburg. The schism over the term dates from that double use, and it has never fully healed.
Every branch of this tree has been accused of betraying the trunk, and every accusation names the thing the branch added. Nobody ever accused a band of betraying the genre by keeping the chorus.
Julien Vasseur, KaosMetal
Pirates, fiddles and the costume branches
Sailing under the black flag from 1987, the German band that invented pirate metal was Running Wild, and Under Jolly Roger, released by Noise Records the same year as the Helloween record that fixed the trunk, turned Rolf Kasparek's riffing toward buccaneers, naval battles and the history of the Caribbean, a subject the band kept for decades after the rest of the scene had moved to dragons.
The Scottish band that turned the flag into a tavern singalong was Alestorm, and Drink, the single from Sunset on the Golden Age on Napalm Records in 2014, sets a keyboard squeezebox patch over the double kick and trades the history lesson of the Hamburg generation for a drinking chorus. Two bands, one flag. The seriousness is what changed.
Running Wild's pirates were history read closely enough to name ships and admirals, while Alestorm's are closer to a costume party with an open bar, and the argument inside the pirate branch has always been which of the two is the real thing. Both keep the clean chorus. Both stay on the tree.
Folk power metal works the same way with a different wardrobe: a power metal song, sung clean and built to climb, carrying folk melodies and the violins and pipes that folk metal owns as its craft. Elvenking, from Italy, fixed the shape on Heathenreel in 2001, and Wind Rose later dressed it as dwarves hammering in a mountain hall. Where the folk instruments take over and the chorus stops climbing, the song belongs to folk metal instead.
The Finnish bands on the same border mostly sit on the other side of it. Ensiferum and Turisas, the second of which called its own style battle metal, share the power metal gallop and the heroic subject, but the harsh voice and the folk melody lead, and the family tree lends them the tempo without claiming them.
Bright, brighter, flower
The happy metal tag was first pinned on the Hamburg records and then on everyone who followed them into the brightest keys, from Freedom Call to early Edguy to Sonata Arctica, and it was never meant kindly. Melodic power metal is the neutral name for the same thing. It is the trunk itself, sung without apology.
The Finnish school of the late nineties carried that brightness furthest. Stratovarius on Visions in 1997 and Sonata Arctica on Ecliptica in 1999 pushed the tenor higher, the keyboards brighter and the key changes later in the song, until the last chorus arrived a tone higher, hauled up like a theatre curtain yanked back into the flies for a second round of bows.
Flower metal sits at the far bright end of that scale, a tag coined by listeners half in mockery for the fairy tale wing of the genre, and the Swedish band that wears it with the most conviction is Twilight Force. Flight of the Sapphire Dragon, from Heroes of Mighty Magic on Nuclear Blast in 2016, sounds like a celesta rung with the mallets meant for the tubular bells, every sugared note struck hard enough to crack the steel plates, while a harpsichord runs underneath at double tempo.
A celesta rung with the mallets meant for the tubular bells, every sugared note struck hard enough to crack the steel plates.
The tag is not a genre in any strict sense. It is a measure of how far a band is prepared to go toward the unicorn, and Gloryhammer, with its wizards and its interstellar Scotland, proved that the distance can be travelled deliberately, as comedy, without a single chord changing.
Growls under the chorus: extreme and blackened power
The British band that called its music extreme power metal long before it put the phrase on a record was DragonForce, and Extreme Power Metal finally arrived as an album title on earMUSIC in September 2019, sixteen years after Valley of the Damned had set the tempo at a point where the double kick stops sounding like drumming and starts sounding like weather.
In the DragonForce sense, extreme means speed and density. In the wider sense the tag has come to mean something else, blast beats and harsh vocals laid under a clean, climbing chorus, a hybrid that keeps the trunk's melody and borrows its violence from death and black metal next door.
Blackened power metal is the rarest branch on the tree, catalogued on Metal Archives for a handful of bands such as Satan's Host, whose entry lists its later work as blackened heavy and power metal. The sound is a baroque minuet played on a violin strung with barbed wire: the melody survives, the dance step survives, and every note arrives torn, shrieked rather than sung. The heresy is deliberate. The chorus usually remains.
The scion that took the same materials the other way was melodic death metal, and Children of Bodom were filed as blackened power metal by some listeners in their first years before the growls won and the tag moved on. That border belongs to death metal, and the power metal tree stops at it.
The arguments at the edge of the tree
Five names account for most of the classification fights, and each one is argued from a single element of the music. Manowar are epic heavy metal by tempo and by pedigree, a root of the tree rather than a branch, even though the choruses and the heroism point toward power metal every time.
DragonForce sit at the far speed end of the melodic trunk, whatever the band calls it, because the voice is clean and the harmony is bright. The German band that dresses power metal as a black Mass is Powerwolf, whose organ, Latin and werewolves are costume and whose songs are power metal to the bar line, heavy and mid-tempo in the manner of the anthem school. Strip the church organ out and nothing about the song structure changes, which settles the question.
The Finnish band that began on this tree and left it is Nightwish. Oceanborn in 1998 and Wishmaster, released by Spinefarm in 2000, are power metal by every measure the trunk sets, fast, bright, double kicked, with Tarja Turunen's operatic soprano where the tenor used to be and keyboards leading the melody.
By Once in 2004 the arithmetic had changed. Ghost Love Score, the ten minute centrepiece of that record, is written from the orchestra outward, with the band placed inside the score rather than the score placed behind the band, and that is the moment the Finns crossed the border into symphonic metal. Beyond dispute, the first records stay on the power metal tree.
Sabaton, the fifth name, belongs on the heavy, anthemic branch, lower in voice and slower in step than the trunk and inside the family on every count that matters. The pattern across all five is the same. Every argument turns on the element a band added, and every verdict turns on the element it kept.
That rule cuts both ways. A band that keeps the double kick, the major key and the climbing chorus stays on the tree whatever it wears on stage, and a band that gives up the clean sung chorus leaves it, however many dragons remain on the sleeve. Listeners have always sorted records that way at the merchandise stand, long before any archive gave them a genre string to argue with.
What the branches share, beneath the orchestras, the costumes and the growls, is a grammar: the key changes, the tempos, the voice and the way a chorus is built to lift. That grammar has its own full account in power metal music theory, and every branch on the tree speaks a dialect of it.
