Sixty beats a minute at one end of the family, well past two hundred at the other, and one surname stretched across the distance. The types of heavy metal music are not costumes or decades. They are settings, and four of them can be read off any record: how fast the drums count, how far the strings have been let down, what the singer does with his throat, and what the song is about.
Run every type through the same seismograph and the drum of paper records a different earthquake each time, the stylus crawling in long slow swells for doom, jittering in a dense black scribble for speed metal, and for death metal swinging so hard against its stops that it rips through the paper and gouges a groove into the steel drum underneath. Same instrument. Different quakes.
Every one of those quakes started under a single parent, electric blues with the swing torn out, laid out in the beginning of the genre. Where each type broke away belongs to history. How each one differs is a matter of measurement, which settles more arguments than history ever has.
The types of heavy metal music, read on four dials
The four dials are not equal. Tempo and tuning need a metronome and a tuner, the voice an ear, the subject a lyric sheet. A type can move one dial and leave the other three alone. The Florida band whose 1987 debut Scream Bloody Gore smashed three of them at once, tempo, tuning and voice, and left the listener nothing familiar to hold but the riff, went by the plainest name in the family, Death. Most quarrels between fans come from two people reading different dials on the same record.
Tempo, from the dirge to the sprint
Traditional heavy metal counts at the pace of a march or a charge, around 100 to 150 beats a minute, and its fastest regular stride is the gallop, one eighth note and two sixteenths, the figure Iron Maiden made a house signature. The body can follow it.
The West Midlands quintet that let its newly arrived drummer, Scott Travis, open the title track of Painkiller alone on a double bass drum barrage in September 1990, then ran two guitars and a scream over him at a speed it would never have attempted in 1976, was Judas Priest, and the song marks the upper limit of the traditional dial. One notch faster and it becomes something else. It stays heavy metal. Only just.
Speed metal and thrash live above that line, from around 160 beats a minute, and further up death and black metal reach for the blast beat, a drum pattern that fires kick, snare and cymbal on every subdivision at once and, commonly past 200 beats a minute, stops sounding like a rhythm and starts sounding like a hailstorm breaking over a greenhouse, every pane going at once. Its exponents are not playing faster songs. They are playing a different kind of time.
Doom sits at the far end of the dial by choice, counting its best-known songs at around 60 to 70 beats a minute, half the speed of a march, and letting a single chord ring for a full bar. It is not slow by accident. It is slow the way a weight is heavy.
Tuning, and how far the strings are let down
Standard tuning runs E, A, D, G, B, E from the lowest string, and it is the home of traditional, speed and most power metal. Tune every string down a half step, to E flat, and the whole guitar loosens and darkens by a shade, which is where much of glam metal and a good deal of thrash chose to live. The chromatic runs of Slayer's "Raining Blood" sit in that same E flat. The loss in pitch is small. The gain in menace is not.
The deeper the tuning, the heavier the tonnage each riff carries, and a slack string at low pitch lands like a canal lock gate swinging shut, tons of oak and iron slamming together in black water and the whole cut shuddering for a hundred yards in both directions. Doom wanted the chord to hang. Death metal wanted it to hit.
Released by SST in October 1986, with Scott Weinrich, known as Wino, singing on one of their albums for the first time, Born Too Late set its title track at a crawl and let Dave Chandler's guitar smear every chord with feedback, and the Los Angeles quartet that sold doom at walking pace to the audience of the label that had put out Black Flag was Saint Vitus. Two dials, both low.
Death metal went lowest of all, commonly to D, to C and, in the heaviest bands, to B or lower, where a guitar begins to share its range with the bass and a riff is felt through the floor before it is heard. Black metal usually stays at standard pitch or a half step down, its weight coming from speed and treble rather than depth.
| Type | Tempo | Tuning | Voice | Subject |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional heavy metal | March to gallop, around 100 to 150 | Standard E | Clean, high, full power | War, history, myth, the road |
| Speed metal | Fast, about 160 to 220 | Standard E | Clean and high | Battle, the stage, speed itself |
| European power metal | Fast, on double kick drums | Standard E or E flat | Operatic tenor | Fantasy, freedom, heroes |
| US power metal | Mid to fast | Standard E | High, hard, at full stretch | War, science fiction, the apocalypse |
| Epic heavy metal | Slow to mid, songs of six minutes and more | Standard E | Clean, declaimed | Swords, sorcery, lost kingdoms |
| Doom metal | Slowest, about 50 to 80 | Standard or lowered | Clean, mournful, often operatic | Death, despair, faith |
| Dark heavy metal | As traditional | Standard E | Falsetto and theatre | The occult, horror stories |
| Glam metal | Mid, about 110 to 140 | Often E flat | High and raspy | Parties, romance, the Strip |
| Progressive metal | Shifting, odd metres | Varies | Clean tenor | Concepts, science, the mind |
| Thrash metal | Fast, around 160 to 220 | Standard E or E flat | Shouted | War, politics, society |
| Death metal | Very fast, with blast beats | D and lower | Growled | Mortality, the body |
| Black metal | Very fast, with blast beats | Standard E or E flat | Shrieked | Satan, winter, a pagan past |
The voice: clean, falsetto, shout, growl, shriek
The voice is the dial a newcomer hears first. Traditional heavy metal sings, clean and high, the note held at full power above two guitars in the manner of Rob Halford and Bruce Dickinson, and power metal schools that voice into an operatic tenor. Doom, against every expectation, often keeps it too.
The Stockholm band that put a singer in a monk's robe in front of its riffs on Nightfall, released by Axis Records in November 1987, and let him sing doom as if it were grand opera was Candlemass, and Messiah Marcolin's voice on "Bewitched" proves that the slowest tempo in the family and its cleanest voice can share a record without friction. The tempo drags. The voice climbs.
Released by Roadrunner in 1984, Don't Break the Oath carried the most theatrical voice of its decade, a falsetto that drops to a snarl and climbs back to a shriek inside a single line while the riffs underneath stay loyal to the British records of 1980, and the Danish singer who led Mercyful Fate through it billed himself as King Diamond. It reads traditional on every dial but two. The ear notices those two first.
Beyond the clean end, the family abandons melody by degrees. Thrash shouts. Death metal growls from the bottom of the chest, a voice churned out like a cement mixer turning over a load of gravel and broken brick, every syllable ground down to grit before it reaches the microphone. Black metal shrieks from the top of the throat, thin and cold. Three techniques, all harsh, none interchangeable.
The subject, and where the dials disagree
The last dial is the lyric sheet. Traditional heavy metal looks outward, to war and the road; epic metal to lost kingdoms; glam to the party; thrash to the bomb and the evening news; death metal to the body and what happens to it; black metal to Satan and the forest. Most of the family's schisms began here, as heresy on paper, long before a single guitar changed its tuning.
Most of the family's schisms began as heresy on paper, long before a single guitar changed its tuning.
The disagreements between dials are the most useful thing the table shows. Glam metal and traditional heavy metal read almost the same on tempo and tuning and part company on voice and subject, which is why the music alone has never settled whether the Sunset Strip bands belong. Dark heavy metal reads like its parent on three dials out of four, and turned only the subject. Progressive metal breaks the table altogether, because its real difference is a fifth dial, structure, the length of the song and the metre it counts in.
By common consent the types are learned by ear before they are learned by name. Count the beat, check the lowest string, listen to the throat, read the words, and the type names itself. The dials all sat at their first setting on a single release, and the quarrel over when did heavy metal start is really a quarrel about which one.
