MetalTalk.com

Thrash metal is also known as speed metal, and since many of the early thrash bands were from San Francisco, it became known as Bay Area Thrash. It started in the early to mid ’80s and was at its peak in the late ’80s. Thrash bands were influenced by New Wave Of British Heavy […]

 
Heavy metal (sometimes referred to simply as metal) is a genre of rock music that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. With roots in blues-rock and psychedelic rock, the bands that created heavy metal developed a thick, heavy, guitar-and-drums-centered sound, characterized by highly amplified distortion and fast guitar solos. The All Music Guide […]

Heavy metal is traditionally characterized by loud distorted guitars, emphatic rhythms, dense bass-and-drum sound, and vigorous vocals. Metal subgenres variously emphasize, alter, or omit one or more of these tropes. The typical band lineup includes a drummer, a bassist, a rhythm guitarist, a lead guitarist, and a singer, who may or may not be an […]

Heavy Metal Themes
Common themes in heavy metal lyrics are sex, violence, fantasy, and the occult. The sexual nature of many heavy metal lyrics, ranging from Led Zeppelin’s to those of latter-day nu metal bands, derives from the genre’s roots in blues music. Heavy metal songs often feature outlandish, fantasy-inspired lyrics, lending them an escapist quality. […]

 The appropriation of “classical” music by heavy metal typically involves musical elements associated with Baroque, Romantic, and Modernist composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Niccolò Paganini, Richard Wagner, Ludwig van Beethoven, Béla Bartók, and Igor Stravinsky. The tritone, for instance, was already exploited for its dark, anguished connotations by Romantics like Franz Liszt and 20th-century […]

In 1968, the sound that would become known as heavy metal began to coalesce. Many scholars and fans point to Blue Cheer’s cover of Eddie Cochran’s classic “Summertime Blues,” released in January 1968, as the first true heavy metal song. That same month, Steppenwolf released its self-titled debut album, including “Born to Be Wild,” with […]

Metalcore, an originally American hybrid of thrash metal, melodic death metal, and hardcore punk, emerged as a commercial force in 2002–3. It is rooted in the crossover thrash style developed by bands such as Suicidal Tendencies, Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, and Stormtroopers of Death in the mid-1980s. Through the 1990s, metalcore was mostly an underground phenomenon, […]

American blues music was a major influence on the early British rockers. Bands like The Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds recorded covers of many classic blues songs, using electric guitar where many of the originals had used acoustic and sometimes speeding up the tempo. As they experimented with the music, the UK blues-based bands—and the […]

The origin of the term heavy metal in a musical context is uncertain. The phrase has been used for centuries in chemistry and metallurgy, as shown by citations in the Oxford English Dictionary. An early use of the term in modern popular culture was by countercultural writer William S. Burroughs. His 1962 novel The Soft […]