Do you consider yourself a heavy metal fan? Have you listened to Black Sabbath? No? THEN STOP FUCKING LYING. Anyone who hasn't listened to these guys cannot consider themselves a metal fan. This was the band that started it all. Formed in Birmingham in the late 60s, they started as a heavy blues-rock band but became something more. The world's first "heavy metal" band.

Owing their newer, heavier sound to guitarist Tony Iommi's change in technique following a hand injury and also a change in publicity tactics (To quote Ozzy Osbourne: "We saw people coming out of the movie theatres after watching horror movies and we thought 'Why don't we do that, scare people?'") they released their first album, Black Sabbath in February, 1970, on Friday the 13th. Paranoid was released in October of the same year.

It's pretty laughable to think of Black Sabbath as a demon-summoning, blood-drinking bunch of incredibly evil necromancers when we now have Portal, Suffocation and the like, but just imagine what this must have sounded like back then. The down-tuned guitars and violent, creepy lyrical content combined with crushing riffs would have been awesome to behold. This was THE FIRST heavy metal band. I wish I'd been there.

Black Sabbath

Paranoid