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Slayer
Slayer, formed in Huntington Park, California in 1981, became one of the "Big Four" thrash metal bands alongside Metallica, Megadeth, and Anthrax, and their 1986 album Reign in Blood, produced by Rick Rubin, is widely regarded as one of the most aggressive and influential thrash metal albums ever recorded. The band's explicit, often graphically violent lyrical content, including songs directly referencing serial killers and Nazi war crimes, drew sustained controversy and censorship attempts throughout their career, with Slayer's label reportedly requiring the removal of a specific song from Reign in Blood's initial pressing due to its Holocaust-related subject matter. Slayer's extremely fast tempos and technically demanding guitar work, particularly on tracks like "Angel of Death," pushed thrash metal's speed and aggression to a genuinely extreme level that directly influenced the subsequent development of death metal and other more extreme metal subgenres. The band's decision to formally retire in 2019, following a lengthy farewell tour, ended one of thrash metal's most significant and consistently uncompromising careers, and Slayer's influence on extreme metal's subsequent development remains among the most direct and widely acknowledged of any band from the genre's founding thrash era.
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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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