10 Perfect Albums That Started Heavy Metal

In the early stages of Black Sabbath, much of their material tended to be just a darker version of the blues. The songs that came out of the Mississippi Delta before rock and roll existed were already on the morose side, and Sabbath's first record just seemed like a Halloween-ified version of that, with the title track and NIB making a chill run down your spine whenever you first heard it. It may have been a novelty at the time, but Sabbath were looking to tap into something a lot more potent the second time around.

Released as the '70s were starting to turn a corner, Paranoid was the album where Sabbath stomped out the remainder of the hippy generation, bringing in much more heavy topics and Tony Iommi tapping into something almost demonic on his guitar. As opposed to the other kids talking about love and peace, Sabbath were more interested with what was going on on the street, from the fixation that politicians have on violence with War Pigs or the veterans of Vietnam coming back and having to kick their heroin addiction on Hand of Doom.

There was still a little bit of the blues mixed in there to be sure, but when you heard something like Iron Man, there was a lot more going on underneath the surface. Here was a band that was aiming to become hard rock, but once they tapped into the darkest riffs known to man, they ended up having a whole new genre laying at their feet.