February 13, 1970 – Friday the 13th. In the fog-choked streets of Birmingham, Black Sabbath released their self-titled debut on Vertigo Records. Recorded in just two days at Regent Sound Studios, this album didn’t arrive with fanfare or radio play. It cracked open like a thunderclap in the musical earth: doom-laden riffs, occult shadows, rainstorms in the intro, tritones that evoked ancient dread, and a sound so slow, heavy, and ominous that nothing like it had ever reached mainstream ears before. This wasn’t rock anymore. This was the birth cry of heavy metal.
100%. One of the many reasons to hate on any shoehorning of Led Zep or the Beatles or some generic psych band as the first heavy metal band.
Sabbath was the first, because it had everything. heaviness, aesthetics, the tone of the mood.
I mean, I’m still gonna consider The Beatles’ ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ and Iron Butterfly’s ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ precursors to stoner-rock, and to some extent doom. It’s just that someone was inevitably gonna pick up on that sound and run with it.
Ok, but stumbling onto something once by accident and leaving it after is different to intentionally creating an atmosphere that continues to be appreciated to this day. Sabbath did it on purpose and pretty much everything they did has sustained in different metal genres to this day. The beatles’ “number eight *belch*” doesn’t seem to be as important to heavy metal.
Yeah the psych/garage stuff really turned more into punk/post punk than metal
Also, the Beatles sucked limp whale cock.