10 Albums That Changed Rock History
3. Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath
You can't really get around any sort of rock and roll music without delving into the darker side known as metal. Then again, it's hard to really pinpoint the genre actually starting, with its seeds being planted in genres like hard rock and blues for years now. If you wanted to nail down an exact moment when metal entered the conversation though, it is the first Black Sabbath album.
Which is strange because Sabbath themselves never even considered themselves to be proper metal musicians. Emulating the blues rock that they were turned onto as kids, much of Sabbath's debut is your typical blues songs pushed to their most demented ending, with songs like NIB and The Wizard being the lynchpin for hard rock. Though Ozzy ends up getting a lot of credit for being the king of terror, the real beast is Tony Iommi, with most of these riffs sounding like they're coming from the bowels of Hell.
Tracing it back just a few years later, it seems like everyone who heard the first Sabbath album started a band, with everyone from Rainbow to Motorhead to Metallica taking a piece of what they did and turning it into their own thing. This is far from the greatest rock album ever made, but in terms of pure heavy metal, this is pretty much ground zero.