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Metallica
Metallica formed in Los Angeles in 1981 and became one of the founding bands of thrash metal, a faster, more aggressive metal subgenre that emerged in the early 1980s as a direct reaction against the more commercially polished glam metal dominating mainstream rock radio at the time. The band's 1991 self-titled album, commonly known as "the Black Album," sold more than 16 million copies in the United States alone, becoming one of the best-selling albums of the SoundScan era and marking Metallica's deliberate, successful pivot toward a more accessible, radio-friendly sound without fully abandoning their metal roots. Metallica's 2000 lawsuit against the file-sharing service Napster, in which the band argued the platform was facilitating mass copyright infringement of their music, made them one of the most publicly visible and controversial figures in the broader music industry's early fight against digital piracy, drawing significant backlash from parts of their own fan base. The band's combined album sales, estimated well over 125 million worldwide, make them the best-selling metal act in music history, and Metallica's sustained commercial and critical relevance across more than four decades has made them the genre's most commercially successful ambassadors to mainstream rock audiences.
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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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