The Ultimate Heavy Metal Playlist
As we celebrate the 50 years of heavy metal, here’s half a century’s worth of pioneering heavy music, from the classics to the contemporary hard-hitters.
As we celebrate the 50 years of heavy metal, here’s half a century’s worth of pioneering heavy music, from the classics to the contemporary hard-hitters.
Black Sabbath
Black saBBath 1970
It began with the dank drubbing of rain and the distant toll of a church bell. Then, with the mood established, the Sabs opened their studio account, Tony Iommi’s funeral-pace riff humming with sin and Ozzy Osbourne’s spooky observations of a ‘figure in black which points at me’ still making you check over your shoulder. Metal was born, right here.
Master Heartache
sir lord Baltimore
1970
Drummer/vocalist John Garner wasn’t messing around; he sounds like a man seriously damaged by affairs of the heart on this rip-roaring, guitar-freaking killer.
Guts
Budgie
1971
The bludgeoning low-end bass of Burke Shelley combined with the slow, Sabbathy groove of Guts makes this song a mustinclusion in the collection of any heavy hairy freak.
The Ripper
judas priest
1976
The future of metal was changing, and this band were going to be at the forefront of it. They may not have realised it at the time, but Rob Halford’s vocals would go on to influence a future generation of screamers. A heavy metal shock of the very best kind.
Ace Of Spades
motörhead
1980
Steppenwolf might have sung about ‘heavy metal thunder’ first, but the song that illustrates it best has got to be Lemmy’s relentless ode to cards, dice and dancing with the Devil. Gambling may be for fools, but with a soundtrack like this, it’s the way we like it, baby…
Back In Black
ac/dc
1980
With a riff that launched a thousand identi-riffs, the title track of AC/DC’s first record with Brian Johnson at the mic was a terrifying statement of intent. The chord stabs can’t be argued with, and Angus wows us with two guitar solos. As a metal anthem it’s oft copied, never bettered.
Last Caress
misfits
1980
‘I got something to say, I killed your baby today…’ A Dave Vanian-style vocal, plus a Ramonesstyle backing track and a handful of very sick lyrics, and horror-punk is born. Future members of Metallica and GN’R vow to cover Misfits songs when they grow up.
Wheels Of Steel
saxon
1980
The Barnsley stormers shook up the NWOBHM with this strident track which harked back to the golden age of Motörhead and AC/DC. It also had a contemporary sound, thanks in part to an in-yer-face production that enhanced its overall power.
Crazy Train
ozzy osBourne
1980
Having been ousted from Black Sabbath, Ozzy went on to release a debut solo single that proved he was still worthy of his Prince Of Darkness title. Teaming up with guitarist Randy Rhoads, Crazy Train fused a bass line reminiscent of Papa Was A Rolling Stone with one of metal’s greatest guitar solos.
Black Metal
venom
1982
Geordie guttersnipes Venom somehow contrived to invent not one but two all-new music genres: death metal and (as heard on this stomach-turning track) black metal. No one had ever heard music like this before. No one ever wanted to again. But, inspired by the antics of Cronos and co, hundreds of like-minded bands would soon spew forth.
Number Of The Beast
iron maiden
1982
The title track of the first Maiden album to feature Bruce Dickinson on vocals set the metal template that the Irons would take to record-breaking levels over the following decades. Adrian Smith and Dave Murray’s interlocking six-strings showed the world that twin-guitar bands didn’t have to sound like Thin Lizzy, while Dickinson’s air-raid siren howl and ’Arry’s thunderous bass sealed the deal.
Am I Evil?
diamond head
1982
Made internationally popular by Metallica, this track is oddly one of the foundations on which the thrash genre was built. Oddly? Yep, because Diamond Head owed more to Led Zep than to Motörhead. However, Am I Evil?, with its pace, power and dark intent, would be the blueprint for much that was to happen in the 80s.
Creatures Of The Night
kiss
1982
Kiss had lost their way somewhat over the previous few years, but this put them right back on track as one of the greatest anthemic bands of all time. Here was a song with a mighty riff and a massive chorus, reinvigorating their appeal to the metal audience both new and old.
Holy Diver
dio
1983
After successful spells with Rainbow and Sabbath, Ronnie James Dio strode out on his own, making a formidable statement with
the title track of the first Dio album. It encapsulated everything that had made his name – articulate lyrics, a mythically inspired melody, a soaring vocal plus a stirring guitar.
Rock You Like A Hurricane
scorpions
1984
Without a doubt this is the defining song of the unsquashable German band’s lengthy history. It’s a bold, powerhouse march, mixing a potent tune with intense musicianship – one of those songs that helped to give big-hair music such a massive chart-busting boost.
Animal (Fuck Like A Beast)
Wasp
1984
There’s no trace of misty-eyed romanticism here as WASP turn the act of making lurve into a base, animalistic affair. Fuck Like A Beast tested the boundaries of metal’s decency and found them wanting. The irony was that when Kerrang! featured Blackie Lawless on its cover, WH Smith banned the issue because the singer was covered in blood – not because he was promoting the use of the F-word.
Eighties killing joke 1984
Killing Joke put the titanic might of Zeppelin and the riff-propelled metal doom of Sabbath through a hyper-cranked punk’n’funk filter to create a roaring apocalyptic holocaust. Latterly, Kurt Cobain translated its signature, grunge-presaging riff into Nirvana’s Come As You Are.
We Care A Lot
faith no more
1985
When Chuck Mosley pseudo-rapped that his generation did indeed care about ‘disasters, fires, floods and killer bees’ and the ‘NASA shuttle falling in the sea’ over the punchiest slap-bass riff we’d ever heard – cannily punctuated by ‘Big’ Jim Martin’s razor-wire guitar – it was the first indication that funk and metal could cheerfully co-exist.
Angel Of Death
slayer
1986
Slayer scared the mainstream to death with Reign In Blood, and the album’s opening track is terrifying. Marrying contentious lyricism (the tale of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele) to the most deafening soundtrack, the LA thrashers redefined what being a metal band meant. It was faster, meaner and more brutal than anything that had gone before.
I Am The Law
anthrax
1987
Anthrax weren’t the first metal band to immortalise a comic-book hero in their lyrics, but this almost funky homage to Judge Dredd was a magnificent evolution from their more straight-ahead thrash origins.
Baptized In Blood
death
1987
‘The first word in death metal,’ ran the band’s tagline. And it was true. Revolving around the fevered muse of the late Chuck Schuldiner, this exemplary track brought in a native, stultifyingly humid atmosphere that spliced throbbing bottom end to thrash’s speed, bringing about new realms of lascivious horror.
Eyes Of A Stranger
Queensrÿche
1988
Queensrÿche’s concept album Operation: Mindcrime is the record that has been the benchmark for prog metal ever since. Stranger combined intelligent lyrics and complex music – including a brilliant twinguitar line – yet still provided the opportunity for a damn good headbang.
Eagle Fly Free
helloWeen
1988
Its lyrics a mix of insightful prediction (‘Nowadays the air’s polluted, that’s what mankind contributed’) and the ludicrous (‘In the sky a mighty eagle doesn’t care ’bout what’s illegal’), Helloween fine-tuned a pre-existing template to make it better still. Sung in impossibly high-pitched tones by Michael Kiske, Eagle Fly Free addressed issues of selfempowerment, individuality and authority’s foolishness before signing off with an uplifting farewell of ‘Together we’ll fly someday’. Brilliant.
Head Like A Hole
nine inch nails 1989
From Nine Inch Nails’ debut album Pretty Hate Machine, Head Like A Hole’s driving yet nasty rhythm put Trent Reznor’s breathtaking ethos of combining electro and industrial sounds within a slamming metal song into perspective. It introduced a new audience to industrial music, and inspired the likes of Marilyn Manson.
Man In The Box
alice in chains
1990
One of the iconic bands who helped to shape the 1990s, Alice In Chains had a unique sound – melancholy yet also uplifting. This first single from their debut saw the Seattle masters at their prime. It was clever, slightly perverse and all-enveloping, its detuned Sabbath-esque sludge tempered by a stunning melody, while Cantrell and Staley’s call-and-response vocal lines on the chorus would set a template they’d utilise throughout their career.
Jesus Built My Hotrod
ministry
1991
The band that began as virtually a disco outfit have come to be lauded as one of the most important industrial-metal names of them all. Jesus Built My Hotrod encapsulates everything that made Ministry so special – the driving, forceful refrain, the heady samples, the slanted vocals from Al Jourgensen – all wrapped up in high-speed humour. This is dance music for those who love Killing Joke and Suicide.
Enter Sandman
metallica
1991
The Black Album began the transformation of Metallica from being a big fish in a sizeable pond to being one of the biggest bands on the planet, helped hugely by this monster. With its lengthy, thumping, guitar-stabbing intro bringing it to the boil, melodic but dark verses and sudden-stop chorus, Sandman single-handedly expanded their audience
to take in millions who thought they didn’t like metal, and kept them on board.
THUMB KYUSS 1992
While there was a stoner sound before Kyuss – and others such as Queens Of The Stone Age would subsequently take this further – there’s little doubt that this was the band that defined what ‘stoner metal’ was all about. And they were never better than on Thumb. It’s the embodiment of stoner rock – a heavyweight blues base topped with a real psychedelic distortion.
KILLING IN THE NAME RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE 1992
Although the seeds were sown in the previous decade by Aerosmith and RunDMC, the concept of rap-metal came into its own later in the 90s. But never was it so virulently and powerfully pursued as here. Rage Against The Machine were a band who were prepared to expose the ills and hypocrisy of the era, while matching this with some of the most intense music of the decade – and Killing In The Name illustrates it perfectly. They gave metal back its voice of conscience, and budding guitarists a new hero in Tom Morello.
PULL ME UNDER DREAM THEATER 1992
The whole idea of progressive rock was in the doldrums by the time Dream Theater came on the scene, yet the New York quintet actually succeeded in giving the genre some much-needed credibility. Pull Me Under proved it was possible for music to be complex and progressive musically while having a powerful melody at its heart. This was prog-metal for the masses.
WALK PANTERA 1992
At a time when something fresh was needed to boost the heaviest end of the musical spectrum, along comes metal’s brightest new guitar star: Dimebag Darrell, a man who virtually reinvented the riff with this strutting, heavy-as-lead groove. The band managed to grab the classic metal approach of Sabbath and Metallica, shake it up and give it a renewed sense of purpose in the grunge-dominated jungle.
RIDE CATHEDRAL 1993
With the band having evolved from the harrowingly bleak plod of their early releases, Cathedral’s second album saw them move into psychedelic, drug-induced realms whose groove-laden bounce and mad-sage blurting of surreal lyrics proved seminal for both doom and stoner rock. Ride has proved to be one of the most memorable tracks they’ve recorded, with a Doctor Who theme-style riff to ring throughout the ages.
DAVIDIAN MACHINE HEAD 1994
At the time Machine Head released their debut album, thrash was lost in its own myth. But this track, more than any other, gave the genre a fresh taste for blood. While part of the metal world turned to the sounds of nu metal, Davidian proved that sticking to the traditional values gave a pointer to an energetic future. It was the most important thrash hymn for many years.
FORTY SIX & 2 TOOL 1996
With its 7/8 time signature, ghostly processed bass line and a verse vocal that whispered in your ear like a twisted lullaby, the Californian prog-metallers’ 1996 single was deeply unsettling – even before frontman Maynard James Keenan explained that the title was about the “horrible mutation” that would result from an irregular number of chromosomes.
THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE MARILYN MANSON 1996
While Manson had already made a mark as a protégé of Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and someone who colourfully courted controversy, if he was to be anything other than just a passing frightmare then he needed a song to showcase both his musical and artistic ideologies. This was it. The Beautiful People launched his legend, and still defines his philosophy better than anything else.
DU HAST RAMMSTEIN 1997
Perhaps it was inevitable that a German band would take the industrial groove, shake it about and give it a major overhaul. Rammstein did just that with their second album, Sehnsucht, and Du Hast typified their approach. It’s a gloriously ludicrous militaristic march, blessed with a firm beat and also a quirky sense of humour. A stage show packed full of drama and pyrotechnics would ensure that the band and their sound would appeal to the masses and not to just a cult metal following.
FREAK ON A LEASH KORN 1998
Conceived by frontman Jonathan Davis as a pop at his paymasters (“It was about how I was being pimped off by the record industry”), this early single found nu-metallers Korn brimming with musical confidence, and sufficiently adept to segue from the intro’s spidery guitar lines into a guttural rap section punctuated by what sounded like the honk of a clown car.
WAIT AND BLEED SLIPKNOT 1999
The disintegration of society at the end of the last century was brought to a crescendo by a nine-man masked demolition machine from Iowa. Nihilism and dystopia were their pillars. Wait And Bleed became their rally call. It also proved to the world that there was
talent beyond the boiler suits, propelling Slipknot and metal into a new decade.
ONE STEP CLOSER LINKIN PARK 2000
Against all the odds, Linkin Park made the concept of pop-metal contemporary and fashionable again. Why? Because they knew how to write a clever tune which was hummable while also carrying an edge. In fact it’s this very track that propelled Linkin Park to stadium-eating megaband status, and proved the timeless quality of great songs – whatever the passing fad might be.
ONLY FOR THE WEAK IN FLAMES 2000
These days it’s easy to take the Swedish metal sound for granted. But here is really where it got a focus. Only For The Weak is the best example of In Fames’ pioneering approach: duelling guitars in a power-metal setting, with death-metal overtures and just a touch of gothic darkness, all assembled under the watchful gaze of an intense melody.
THE DRAPERY FALLS OPETH 2001
When Opeth decided to work with Steven Wilson as their producer for the Blackwater Park album, who could have predicted that they’d reinvent the progressive metal genre? But that’s precisely what they did with The Drapery Falls. The mix of brutal metal and more esoteric rhythms didn’t seem so much like a marriage of styles, more like the birth of a new musical life force.
CHOP SUEY SYSTEM OF A DOWN 2001
Everyone now assumes the System style has been with us for eons. Yet it was only in 2001, with the Toxicity album, that the Armenian-Americans got into their stride. What they created was an angular attack on nu metal, with overt political lyrical edginess. It was both confrontational, yet also considered. What’s more, their vocal harmonies gave the band an extra dimension.
WISH I HAD AN ANGEL NIGHTWISH 2004
This is the best example of the way that Nightwish combined their goth-metal music with the soaring operatic vocals of Tarja Turunen, all encapsulated in what is essentially a finely tuned pop song. There’s a charismatic sensibility here, overcoming any uneasiness in the increasingly fractured relationship between singer and band.
THE CZAR MASTODON 2009
The band who’ve been hailed by many as the new metal messiahs, Mastodon reached a crescendo on this epic from the breathtaking Crack The Skye. This is how you develop a 10-minute piece. It has all the ingredients which have helped to establish Mastodon’s pre-eminence. It leaves you elated, breathless, yet feeling like it could have been even longer.
GIMME CHOCOLATE! BABYMETAL 2014
The perfect encapsulation of this Japanese schoolgirl trio’s so-called ‘kawaii metal’ (literally translated as ‘cute metal’), pummelling four-minute thrasher Gimme Chocolate came with a chorus so sweet it stripped the enamel from your teeth, not to mention a video that has chalked up a whopping 106 million views to date. Five years later, it still sounds like Hello Kitty going on a killing spree.
CIRICE GHOST 2015
Frontman Papa Emeritus’s daughter chose this doomy rocker as the lead single from the Meliora album, demonstrating excellent (if macabre) taste for an eight-year-old. The song scored a Grammy for Best Metal Performance, but check out the video – styled as a retro-horror and set at a primary school talent show – for the priceless moment when a pint-sized Papa and his Nameless Ghouls hijack the stage.
STRANDED GOJIRA 2016
Drummer Mario Duplantier deemed Stranded an “easier” song than the Frenchmen’s trademark highly complex brand of death metal, but that didn’t make it any less potent. Built on an industrialcrunking riff with a pitch-shifted squeal, Stranded wasn’t quite right in the head – an impression underlined by a video in which the band perform while surrounded by fitting mental patients and dog-masked nurses.
SILFUR-REFUR SÓLSTAFIR 2017
The fact that it’s shrieked in the postmetallers’ Icelandic tongue only makes Silfur-Refur seem more unknowable and unsettling. “The song revolves around having a sick ghost version of yourself taking control of your life,” explains frontman Aðalbjörn ‘Addi’ Tryggvason. “You resist with all you have, but you simply don’t stand a chance. It travels with you all the time, asleep or awake.”
THE SIN AND THE SENTENCE TRIVIUM 2017
Matt Heafy’s brutal guitar anthemics marked this out as the highlight from Trivium’s eighth album, but the seed was planted by a song title dreamed up by bassist Paolo Gregoletto on a plane ride: “I was really interested in the culture online of people piling on people, but using the metaphor of the witch hunts. That phrase – The Sentence And The Sin – fit perfectly.”
SONS OF SALEM ORANGE GOBLIN 2018
Leading out last year’s The Wolf Bites Back album, the Goblin’s finest hour to date was a vintage hard-rock swagger whose ‘rise up!’ refrain had a flesh-creeping inspiration. “The lyrics are about the sons of the Salem witches returning from the grave,” says frontman Ben Ward, “to seek vengeance on the religious fools that murdered their mothers during the witch trials.”