10 Legendary Rock Bands That Made Metal Albums

No rock band can write the same kind of hook over and over again. Even if you live and breathe every piece of music that you make, there comes a point where even you start to get annoyed with what you sound like. You're bound to start looking for new sounds, and each of these acts found their new sound by tapping into something a lot heavier.

Mind you, not all of these are going to give black metal a run for their money or anything. Every one of these bands approached heaviness from a different angle, and each of them walked away with something that could go toe to toe with traditional metal bands. Then again, metal has a lot of facets as well, and when you go through each of these, you'll find different stripes of metal being used on every one of these songs.

For every act that tries to go down the traditional British heavy metal route, there are those that tap into the world of hair metal or even vague traces of nu metal in the way they de tune their guitars. This isn't just a case of these bands going through a phase or anything. The darkness had always been a part of their soul, and this was just the first time most of us got to see it up close.

Most of the time, the term heavy metal should normally been nowhere near a 5 mile radius of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Aside from maybe a few parts of the album Mother's Milk, this was the kind of band that was supposed to be in the world of funk for the most part, laying down a nice groove for everyone to have a good time with. Things were not happy in the world of the Peppers though, and the loss of John Frusciante made for something a lot more gritty on One Hot Minute.

Drafting in Dave Navarro from Jane's Addiction on guitar, most of this album is made up of a lot more angry and tortured songs than what we're used to, like the opener Warped where everything flies off the hinges for the duration of the track, all while Flea is annihilating his bass strings in the background. While you can definitely still hear the traditional Peppers sound in the background, there's a lot more of a dark haze around these songs, which probably wasn't helped by the fact that most of the band were relapsing on hard drugs around this time.

If it was their goal to go heavy though, Navarro may have been the best guy for the job, coming from the shredding school of guitar and making for some of the most chaotic solos that the band had ever released during the '90s. It may be looked at as the black sheep of the Peppers' catalog after John came back, but the dark version of the Peppers can still throw down when they want to.