10 Perfect Albums That Started Heavy Metal
3. In Rock - Deep Purple
As much as rock dominated the music landscape around the '60s, Deep Purple were never really snobs about what they liked. For all of the Led Zeppelin influence that you could hear in their music, you had traces of the blues, classical music, and even jazz in some of the ways they improvised when they took to the stage. When they got Ian Gillan and Roger Glover in tow though, things started to get a lot more interesting really fast.
Moving on from their jam band roots, this was the first straight up hard rock album Purple had to offer, with every single song hitting the ground running from the moment it starts. With Ritchie Blackmore pumping out the riffs and Jon Lord running his Hammond organ into a Marshall stack, the entire band just hits you in the face from the moment the song starts, transforming old time rock and roll sounding tunes like Speed King into a sonic force to be reckoned with.
The real taste of what metal would become came with Child In Time, with a brooding chord progression behind it that ends with Gillan screaming at the top of his lungs like a banshee released from the bowels of Hell. It may have been a little bit off putting at the time, but you can also draw a clear line between the screaming on this album and what was to come out of acts like Iron Maiden less than a decade later.