10 Greatest Headbanging Metal Songs

Metal as a genre is a very primal form of music. While there's a lot of dexterity needed to actually play the music, the effect it has on the listener feels like a raw release of anger and emotion that is unlike anything else in the world. However, if you could condense the force of metal into a movement, it would have to be the headbang.

As opposed to just flashing the devil horns or singing along to your favorite metal song, there's something about banging your head that speaks to the inner angsty form of yourself that made you fall in love with the music in the first place. Though many acts have had headbanging tunes in their catalog, only a few stand out as the real cream of the crop. Whenever you're trying to capture a song like this, the pressure is really on the drummer to deliver a grooving performance, but when you have a groove that sticks out this much, there's nothing else like it when you actually sit down to play it.

Even though metalheads put their heart and soul into their craft, if it doesn't make you headbang, it doesn't mean a damn thing. Hang on to your hat (or head...as it were), it's going to get a bit bumpy.

We start things off here with the one that started it all. When you talk about the history of heavy metal music, it all comes back to Black Sabbath at the end of the day. Though the masters of doom and gloom riffs set the rock world on fire with their first album, it wasn't until the title track off of Paranoid that we all got accustomed to the heavy metal banger for the first time.

While the first Sabbath album has the colossal title track, the tempo of the song was far too slow to really move you. Not pulling any punches, this song almost erupts out of the gate, with Tony Iommi's riff sending you into the deepest bowels of Hell as Ozzy Osbourne shrieks his lungs out over just a few minutes.

For as much punch as this song provides, it's made all the more impressive when you realize this was done as a time-waster. In order to fill out the runtime for the album, Sabbath actually made Paranoid as a sort of segue track between the meatier cuts like Iron Man and War Pigs. Though there were sure to be many headbanging riffs that would follow, this is the first real song that got listeners acquainted to what headbanging was all about.