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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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Judas Priest
Judas Priest, formed in Birmingham, England in 1969, helped define heavy metal's visual identity by introducing leather-and-studs stage attire drawn partly from motorcycle and BDSM subculture fashion, a look that became one of the genre's most enduring and widely imitated visual templates. The band's twin-lead-guitar approach, featuring two guitarists trading and harmonizing melodic lead lines simultaneously, became a widely adopted structural template for subsequent metal bands, giving Judas Priest's sound a layered, harmonized guitar texture distinct from the single-lead-guitar approach common in earlier hard rock. Frontman Rob Halford publicly came out as gay in 1998, becoming one of the first prominent metal frontmen to do so, a significant moment given heavy metal's historically hypermasculine public image, and Halford's continued prominence within the genre after coming out helped gradually shift broader conversations about sexuality within metal culture. Judas Priest's 1980 album British Steel, featuring hits like "Breaking the Law" and "Living After Midnight," helped bring heavy metal to a broader mainstream rock audience, and the band's sustained influence on metal's visual style and twin-guitar musical structure has made them one of the genre's most foundational acts.
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