10 Hard Rock Albums You Must Hear Before You Die

Hard rock has come a long way from being just an offshoot of the teenage movement in the '60s.

As flower power started to spread out amongst the youth of the world, many bands were starting to take the bluesy songs they loved and turn them up a notch in terms of intensity. Things were getting much more serious, far more adventurous, and A WHOLE LOT LOUDER.

From the end of the hippie era, bands came out of the woodwork brandishing heavily distorted guitars, which would become the unofficial weapon to launch the harsher side of rock into its new age.

Since then, rock has splintered off into many different categories, all while keeping the same common thread of heaviness at the end of the day. Whether it's the harsher side of metal, the beginnings of prog rising to the surface, or the punk wave stripping everything back down again, each of these records have left a definitive stamp on the music world at large.

Almost acting like a timestamp for their respective decades, these albums hold up as a product of their time while also having some of the best riffs anyone could ever ask for. If you consider yourself a connoisseur of anything rock and roll, you owe it to yourself to spin all of these at least once in your lifetime.

The road to metal music was still an uphill battle at the start of the '80s. While there were certainly people willing to fly the flag for metal like Judas Priest, other acts like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple had too many varied influences to categorize them into one specific subgenre of rock. As the decade turned a corner though, Motorhead showed us just how reckless a rock and roll band could really sound.

It's tough to really categorize what Ace of Spades is on the surface. Even though it has the usual trappings you would find in your typical rock affair, there's something much more forceful in the delivery of these tunes, which comes directly from the warped mind of Lemmy Kilmister. Being a disciple of guys like Little Richard, Lemmy found ways to make his tone sound much more nasty than his predecessors, from the rumbling bass guitar to the booze swigging vocals he spewed out of his throat on every single track.

Whether you're blazing through the title track or The Chase is Better Than the Catch, it's like you're listening to these men become almighty rock and roll troubadours, laying waste to any town they come across. Aside from just rock and roll, this kind of delivery left a big impression on the thrash metal scene, with the tempos and rabid dog vocal style finding its way into bands like Metallica and Megadeth.

Motorhead may not have set out to be the toughest metal act around, but when you play rock and roll with this much power, you're tapping into something much larger than rock.