10 Most Influential Hard Rock Albums

The arrival of metal marked a real change of scenery in the British rock scene. After the likes of Black Sabbath and Deep Purple made the rounds across England, the race was on to get louder, faster, and more aggressive than the band next to you. Though there were plenty of acts pushing metal into a heavier direction, no other band showcased this new music better than Number of the Beast.

Being one of the forerunners of the NWOBHM scene, Maiden's first step up to the plate with vocalist Bruce Dickinson struck gold right out of the gate. Containing some of the greatest singles from the metal scene like Run to the Hills and the title track, almost every one of these songs is liable to give you an adrenaline rush. This is also where we see heavy lyrics interspersed with the heavier sounds, like the slow embrace of death on Hallowed Be Thy Name and the plea for innocence on the Prisoner.

And let's not forget the man behind this, Steve Harris, whose songwriting talents and machine gun precision on the bass gave the music that needed drive, which would soon pop up in everything from thrash metal to even the complicated rhythms of Djent at the dawn of the 2010's. While metal as a genre tends to have an expiration date in terms of shock value, the Number of the Beast is one of the few records whose riffs are still as sharp as ever.