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Black Sabbath
Black Sabbath formed in 1968 in the industrial English city of Birmingham, and their self-titled 1970 debut album, built around ominous, heavily distorted guitar riffs and dark, occult-influenced lyrical themes, is widely credited by music historians as the foundational album that essentially invented heavy metal as a distinct genre. Guitarist Tony Iommi's distinctive, downtuned guitar sound was partly born of necessity — following a factory accident that severed the tips of two fingers on his fretting hand, Iommi developed a lighter-gauge string and downtuned playing style to reduce finger tension, a technical adaptation that directly shaped metal's signature heavy, low-tuned guitar sound. Frontman Ozzy Osbourne's distinctive vocal style and increasingly public, chaotic personal life, including his eventual firing from the band in 1979 over substance abuse issues, made him one of rock's most recognizable and mythologized frontmen even before his subsequent successful solo career and later reality television fame. Black Sabbath's combination of doom-laden, heavily amplified riffs and dark thematic content established virtually the entire stylistic and lyrical template that subsequent heavy metal bands across every metal subgenre have continued to draw from, cementing the band's status as the genre's essential founding act.
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Iron Maiden
Iron Maiden, formed in London in 1975, became one of the defining bands of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal movement that emerged in the late 1970s, and bassist and primary songwriter Steve Harris's intricate, galloping bass lines became one of the band's most technically distinctive musical signatures. The band's mascot, "Eddie," a grotesque zombie-like figure that appears in various forms on nearly every Iron Maiden album cover and stage show, has become one of the most recognizable mascots in rock music history, giving the band a consistent, instantly identifiable visual brand across nearly five decades of album releases. Iron Maiden's elaborate stage productions, including full-scale sets and pyrotechnics built around each album's specific thematic concept, set new standards for metal concert theatricality, and the band's 1985 live album Live After Death, recorded at London's Hammersmith Odeon, is widely regarded as one of the greatest live metal albums ever recorded. Frontman Bruce Dickinson's operatic vocal range and the band's historically and literarily themed lyrics, drawing on subjects ranging from Greek mythology to World War I aviation — reflecting Dickinson's own real-life career as a licensed commercial airline pilot — have given Iron Maiden a level of lyrical and thematic ambition distinct from many of their metal contemporaries.
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