10 Perfect Metal Albums With No Bad Songs

There's never an exact way to pinpoint a genre happening in a vacuum. Every band takes their inspirations from somewhere, and even the progenitors of rock and roll like Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry were copying the kind of licks they were seeing out of the blues and Bo Diddley half the time. If there is one album that could be credited with birthing heavy metal in one go though, Black Sabbath's debut checks pretty much every box.

While the band was just looking to write the same kind of bluesy hard rock that they were seeing from their favorite bands like Cream, their decision to take things in a darker direction made the entire genre turn a corner, with songs like the title track making your hairs stand on end with the dreaded tritone riff in the middle of things. Starting from Tony Iommi's devilish guitar licks, this initial blues jam turned into some of the most terrifying rock music ever made, writing songs about Lucifer falling in love on NIB or turning cover songs like Warning into something completely different with its foreboding atmosphere.

Along with the solid backbeat from Geezer Butler and Bill Ward as well as Ozzy's vocals, this record inspired a whole new generation of kids that would start to emerge just a few years later as the beginnings of heavy metal. Sabbath may have just been looking to copy their heroes, but when they found their own sound, they had something much more sinister to tap into.