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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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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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