You may or may not have heard of a genre of music called heavy metal, for it is heavily outnumbered because mainstream pop music is the dominant genre in the world.
Metal is mostly characterised by heavy drop-tuned distortion guitars, melodic rhythms, hard bass, drum sounds along with brutal or melodic vocals.
Sometimes they represent what is known as “emotional expression through the music itself”. Mostly, metal music is a bit too extreme if you are listening to it for the first time.
Heavy metal came from rock, blues-rock, classic rock, blues, jazz and others of their ilk.
In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s bands called Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin laid the foundation for this genre of music.They were one of the first ones to pick up an electric guitar and down-tune the strings to a heavy state and invent subgenres such as Doom, Black, Metal core, Speed Metal, Power Metal Thrash Metal, Symphonic and the list goes on..
The second generation consists of Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax, Judas Priest, AC/DC, Motorhead, Scorpions and several others.
During this time, metal music was falsely accused of devil worship and Satanism, but soon it was forgotten by the third generation of millennials who were more like emo teenagers making videos on YouTube.
It defined new genres like Metal core, Deathcore, Mathcore, Hardcore and similar types of music.
Today heavy metals is slowly becoming more diverse and complex with more people listening to it.
In conclusion, the Heavy Metal genre is specially underrated in the music industry and definitely needs more attention because it is very complex and interesting
Sathsilu Baddewaththe
Grade 8C
Royal Institute ,
Nugegoda.