10 Perfect Albums That Started Heavy Metal

For the more seasoned metalheads, David Bowie doesn't really sound like he belongs on a list like this. Once the glam metal revolution started in earnest, most of the proto metal bands were making a point to avoid acts like Bowie, who seemed to be the antithesis of the more sludgy sounds of Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. Before David went full glam though, The Man Who Sold the World could get the job done just as well as any hard rock band could.

Despite the cover art ruffling a few feathers back in the day, the backing tracks behind Bowie this time around have a lot more teeth behind them, especially since it was coming off of his last few projects that delved into space-folk rock half the time. With Mick Ronson now in tow, the guitars absolutely scream on here, with songs like Width of the Circle actually sounding like Mick took a few pages out of Tony Iommi's playbook to come up with his riffs.

While the title track of the record has taken on a bit of a new life because of Nirvana's unplugged version, it was still a fairly heavy song for the time, as Bowie taps into the lonely feeling of someone who feels lost in the world. Glam rock may have looked like the antithesis to metal, but Bowie was always about making music for the misfits of society, and most of the early metalheads fit right in.