10 killer heavy metal album openers that should not be missed

Do you want to play a game? I’ll name five musical artists and you tell me what the common thread is. Metallica – Iggy Pop – Jane’s Addiction – Jethro Tull – AC/DC. I’ll give you a minute. While you’re thinking, I want to let you know that the first sentence of this paragraph – the one about playing a game – is from the Saw movie series, and if you didn’t already know, the eleventh Saw film is due out in less than a year. That bit of trivia may not be as random as it sounds. More on that in a minute. First, let’s answer the music question.

Thirty-five years ago, in February 1989, those were the five artists competing for the first-ever Grammy recognizing heavy metal as a serious genre. If you say, “Wait – not all of those bands are metal acts,” then I should explain that the Academy didn’t devote an entire category to metal. Despite the fact that metal had been a vital part of popular music for more than two decades by this point, the Academy lumped it into a category designed to recognize either metal or “hard rock.”

Since no one ever bothered to define “hard rock,” most fans saw this move as a belated recognition of metal, which was arguably more vital in both artistic and commercial terms than good old-fashioned rock & roll by the late ‘80s. Most of us thought the leading light of the metal movement at the time, Metallica, was a shoo-in for the prize.

10 songs that set the tone for excellent heavy metal albums

That did not happen. Nor did it go to Iggy, the proto-punk pioneer who helped lay the foundation for metal. Nor to NKOTB Jane’s Addiction, whose debut album was helping create a newer alt-metal genre. Or to AC/DC, among the greatest pure hard rockers of all time.

Nope. In a decision that still bewilders, the first Grammy to recognize metal went to Jethro Tull, the one band who had no business even being nominated for the award. It is true that its breakthrough records in the early 1970s were first-rate hard rock – and, as we said, this award was technically open to hard rock bands. It’s just that Aqualung came out almost two decades earlier. Tull had been leaning more heavily into their other impulses – prog rock, pastoral folk predicated on Ian Anderson’s wandering flute – in the intervening years.

If you only bothered to listen to the first minute or so of Tull’s award-winning album, Crest of a Knave, you might be tricked into thinking that it was a hard rock album. The first track, “Steel Monkey,” could be considered hard rock – albeit fairly soft hard rock. Nothing else on the hour-long album, with the possible exception of the penultimate track, “Raising Steam,” is even remotely hard rock. None of it is metal.

When we are looking for great opening tracks from metal albums, I suppose you could argue that “Steel Monkey” should be included because it basically won Jethro Tull an undeserved Grammy. But I won’t be choosing it. A great opening track is like a promise of what is to come. I like the song “Steel Monkey,” but it is certainly not a promise of any kind. It’s just an OK soft hard rock song that happens to open one of the cursed titles in the history of metal music.

Nor will I be selecting Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music, Pt.1,” the 16 minutes of cacophonous noise that accounts for side one of Reed’s notorious Metal Machine Music in 1975. I love Lou Reed, and the title even boasts of being metal. And it’s undeniable that though initially reviled as some sort of sick joke, Reed’s album has undergone something of a rebirth and is now seen as a foundational artifact for industrial music. But it’s not metal.

Of course, defining what exactly metal is has proven tricky. It shares impulses with hard rock, as well as with punk and prog rock. It has morphed into many spinoff genres since its birth in the late 1960s. I’m going to cast a wide net here and discuss ten awesome album openers that have all come from the world of metal. And, in a long-standing tradition that is now more than three days old, I will be adding one extra-super-secret bonus emeritus selection. When I did the punk rock opener list, that emeritus pick was “London Calling,” and I announced it in the intro. Rookie mistake. To find today’s metal emeritus, you will need to read to the end.

Hint: it will not be a Jethro Tull song.

“War Pigs” by Black Sabbath (1970)

Maybe they weren’t the first metal band – but Black Sabbath was the first metal band to genuinely champion the fledgling genre, and they became its great proponents in its earliest days. The first album opened with the song “Black Sabbath,” which inextricably tied metal to the wellspring that gave us horror movies (see, I told you my reference to Saw would make sense).

On their second album, Paranoid, “War Pigs” looks outward and finds the same nightmares that the inward-looking debut had explored. Tommy Iommi’s guitar was no less thrashing. Geezer Butler and Bill Ward’s throbbing rhythms were no less insistent. And Ozzy Osbourne continued to wail out his tortured tales. To be fair, you could probably take your picks from about a half dozen album openers from the Sabbath discography. They always hit the ground running. And hit it hard. “War Pigs” does it as well as any of their other lead tracks.

“Mr. Walking Drugstore Man” by Speed, Glue & Shinki (1971)

Black Sabbath was a band for about 40 years, producing 19 original albums and 13 box set collections. Speed, Glue & Shinki didn’t quite make it that far. They lasted three years and two albums. The first of those albums, Eve, began with this bluesy, grungy piece of early metal that can stand up to any classic band’s best work. Masayoshi Kabe’s grinding bass plows relentlessly forward while Shinki Chen’s guitar swoops in with blues riffs to liven the song up.

If those names are unfamiliar, it could be because they are Japanese, a country not typically associated with metal. They had an American drummer, Joey Smith, who sang a little like Stevie Winwood if Stevie Winwood was being recorded several rooms away with the doors closed, and the trio generally blended blues, prog and hard rock that kind of sounds like the 13th Floor Elevators. But that grinding bass keeps at least one foot in early metal, and all these years later, they remain well worth a listen.

“Ace of Spades” by Motorhead (1980)

Can I just leave it at this – Motorhead is my favorite metal band, and “Ace of Spades,” both the song and album, is/are among the best that metal has to offer. All right – just a few more words to keep Google Analytics happy. Lemmy Kilmister had left (i.e., been kicked out of) Hawkwind in the late 1970s, so he formed Motorhead. They released four albums between 1977 and 1979 before Ace of Spades dropped right around Halloween 1980.

Fast Eddie Clarke blisters away on guitar without being quite as riff-heavy as some of his contemporaries, while Lemmy and Philthy Animal Phil Taylor propel bass and rums without mercy. Lemmy was already one of the best metal songwriters in the metal universe. On “Ace of Spades,” he got even better.

“Painkiller” by Judas Priest (1990)

Ah, what to do about Judas Priest? To some, they are metal in its purest form, cranking out consistent creepy juggernauts just after Sabbath and the other founders of it all. They clearly have the skills. Rob Halford can shriek with the best of them. The twin guitar attack of K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton never lets up. However, they have not always impressed. Some find them derivative. And throughout the 1980s, though they never abandoned their metal roots, they flirted with contemporary sounds – synths (gasp!) – and did seem for a while like they had lost something off their fastball.

Painkiller helped put that fear to rest. Its first track, also called “Painkiller,” roars out of the gate on the wings of Scott Travis’ machine gun drums. Then, in true Priest fashion, Halford and those guitars begin shrieking back and forth, at times indistinguishable from each other. It signals an explosive return to form.

“Stinkfist” by TOOL (1996)

The ‘90s saw massive changes in the pop music world. Hip-hop and grunge were taking old-school rock in radical new directions. “Alt” anything had become a viable commercial path. TOOL showed that metal could explore new directions without losing any of its heft. There is a grungy sound to “Stinkfist,” which opened the L.A. quartet’s second album Aenima, which makes it sound modern. But the music still honors those heavy roots.

A great many TOOL songs rely on Danny Carey, among the greatest of all rock drummers, but ”Stinkfist” showcases Adam Jones’ thrilling guitar work. Maynard James Keenan writes suggestive songs that he delivers with a bristling passion. “Knuckle deep inside the borderline” contains such glorious visceral ambiguity, which kind of sums up the entire song – and indeed the entire album.

“The Wicker Man” by Iron Maiden (2000)

Did you really think I’d forget Steve Harris, Bruce Dickinson, and the boys from Leyton? I just waited until their 12th album, Brave New World, to slide them in. Vocalist Dickinson and guitar player Adrian Smith had left the band in the early ‘90s as Maiden began trying on some more progressive sounds. They returned for Brave New World. Smith was primarily responsible for the anthemic “Wicker Man,” which became a fan favorite in concert. It has a visceral power from its multiple guitars and Dickson’s soaring vocals.

His chorus promise of “Your time will come” is fulfilled by the rest of the album. It was the best album Iron Maiden had released in more than a decade and perhaps the only one of their more recent efforts that can stand up to their ‘80s work.

“Blood and Thunder” by Mastodon (2004)

Mastodon hailed from Atlanta, which I think is why they had the “alt” attached to their brand of metal. I have no objection to that. I just think that at a certain point, it becomes meaningless. Mastodon has been cranking out first-rate metal – alt or otherwise – for more than twenty years.

Their second album, Leviathan, was built around the themes in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and its opening lines – “I think someone is trying to kill me – Infecting my blood and destroying my mind” – clearly spell out the madness that is to come. All four of the musicians are on point as the album kicks off – Bill Kelliher's fuzzy rhythmic guitar chords invite you in just before Brann Dailor’s drums begin galloping forward. They get a vocal assist from Clutch’s Neil Fallon (who I have been told but have confirmed lives a few miles from me). It is a thrilling start to an album of epic scope.

“Gone Sovereign” by Stone Sour (2012)

Stone Sour occupied a rare niche for a relatively brief time. They seemed to encompass much of what metal was and was to become. They could be melodious. They sing, or they could screech. They could rely on drums, or they could allow their guitarists room to shred.

“Gone Sovereign” opens their fourth album (though personnel changes meant that it was not exactly the same band it had been a decade earlier.) The song spills seamlessly into “Absolute Zero,” an anthem built for radio airplay. “Gone Sovereign” is equally strong, if not quite as melodic, and it establishes the tone for one of the best metal albums of the last twenty years.

It begins with an assault of rhythm guitar, but Corey Taylor’s opening vocals are restrained – almost pretty. That gives the song – and the entire album – a platform from which to launch. As the opening verse comes to an end, Roy Mayorga’s drums double the speed. When the second verse concludes, the blistering guitar solo that forms a bridge doubles the speed yet again. When we reach the end of “Gone Sovereign,” we are flying. And we will not stop.

“Outlander” by Jinjer (2014)

A Ukrainian metal band with a woman singing lead. Can’t miss combo, right? It helps that Tati Shmayluk, like most prog metal lead singers, can both sing and howl equally well. “Outlander” is Jinjer at its rawest. It kicks off the first album and wasn’t released widely until the band hit bigger toward the end of the 2010s.

They hit the ground running with a jagged, lightning-fast riff and rapid-fire, syncopated bass and drum attack that tees up Shmayluk. She sings for a while – then she screams – and the pattern is established. All the while, those drums never let up. Jinjer’s latest single, “Kafka,” from the soon-to-be-released Duel album, reveals a far more mature and ambitious band, but there is something fundamental about “Outlander” that scratches an itch.

“Diabolical Edict” by Brodequin (2024)

I sometimes like to watch old clips of the elders from earlier generations lamenting the way Elvis Presley and the Beatles were destroying the moral fabric of a nation. Then I think that the kids who were screaming along to “Love Me Do” in the 1960s would live to see death metal. Death metal is prone to excess, and I get that its appeal is limited. But there’s no denying the visceral excitement that its best purveyors can provide.

Brodequin, named for a medieval torture device, was at the forefront of death metal back around 2000. They disappeared for a long stretch but came with an EP a few years back. Then they released Harbinger of Woe, and it’s as if they never left.

They have cycled through a bunch of drummers through their career, and when you listen to what Brennan Shackleford does on “Diabolical Edict,” you can understand how no human could play that long and that fast and that big for very long without arriving at some sort of Spinal Tap-like spontaneous combustion. If you are bothered by the fact that you can barely distinguish the demon-like vocals buried six feet under in the mix, don’t worry. You’re probably better off not knowing.

OK – I promised you a bonus emeritus selection, didn’t I? I am sorely tempted to choose “Blackened,” the lead track from the Metallica album that should have won that first Grammy for metal back in 1989. It’s a great introduction to the Jason Newsted era. But the album that came before it, Master of Puppets, is as good metal got back in the day, and its opener, “Battery,” is just this side of perfect.

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