Metal
Here you'll find album histories, birthdays, and anniversaries connected to the artists who built metal and its branches, along with vinyl reissue news as titles reappear. Metal has a particularly active underground pressing culture: independent labels regularly issue small runs in colored or splatter vinyl, and older catalog titles get reworked into box sets and remasters aimed at longtime fans rather than casual listeners. The stories here follow how specific records came together — band lineups, studio choices, the scenes around them — and note when a reissue gives an older album a reason to be discussed again.
202 STORIES
Why did Ozzy Osbourne's Blizzard of Ozz shock 1980?
Ozzy Osbourne's Blizzard of Ozz, released in 1980, became the biggest-selling album of his career after his firing from Black Sabbath.
· 3 min read
Jimi Hendrix: The Guitar That Learned to Breathe Fire
Jimi Hendrix turned the electric guitar into something closer to weather than an instrument before dying in London on 18 September 1970 at 27.
· 3 min read
Paranoid: The Album Black Sabbath Recorded in Two Days
Black Sabbath recorded Paranoid in two days at Regent Sound Studios in June 1970, and the album went on to top the UK chart and reshape heavy metal.
· 5 min read
Why did Lita Ford trade Black Sabbath for a Les Paul?
Lita Ford, born in London in 1958, went from a Black Sabbath concert at thirteen to a top-ten duet with Ozzy Osbourne in 1989. She spent years with The Runaways first.
· 3 min read
Guns N' Roses: The Day Two Albums Hit at Once
Guns N' Roses released both Use Your Illusion albums on September 17, 1991. The second volume outsold the first, moving 770,000 copies in its opening week.
· 4 min read
How Ozzy Osbourne Made No More Tears His Last Great Stand
Ozzy Osbourne's 1991 album No More Tears became a quadruple-platinum consolidation of heavy metal. It marked the final album for his core rhythm section.
· 4 min read
How Lordi's Monstereophonic Split One Band Into Two
In 2016, Lordi released the split-personality album Monstereophonic. The Theaterror and Demonarchy halves stretched the Finnish band's formula into two distinct identities.
· 3 min read
Crazy Nights by Kiss: The 1987 Album That Vanished
Kiss's fourteenth studio album sold a million copies by February 18, 1988. Yet within a few years, most of its songs vanished from the band's live sets.
· 4 min read
Why Did Queen Record an Album Without Freddie Mercury?
Queen + Paul Rodgers released their lone studio album The Cosmos Rocks in September 2008. Roger Taylor floated the idea to Brian May in 2006.
· 4 min read
Lordi Rebuilt Themselves in Nashville and Lost Two Members
Sixteen years after the Nashville sessions, Lordi's Babez for Breakfast remains the record that closed the chapter on Kita and Awa.
· 5 min read
Motörhead's No Remorse Was a Contractual Time Bomb
Motörhead's No Remorse landed in September 1984 as a contractual greatest-hits package. It also introduced a radically different lineup with four new songs.
· 3 min read
Dream Theater: The Audition That Redefined a Band
Seven drummers auditioned to replace Mike Portnoy in Dream Theater. Mike Mangini won the seat, and the band released A Dramatic Turn of Events.
· 4 min read
How Thin Lizzy Built Their Breakthrough on Fighting
In 1975, Thin Lizzy's Fighting became their first UK chart entry, locking in the twin-guitar sound of Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson.
· 3 min read
The Sepultura Compilation the Band Never Wanted
Roadrunner released The Best of Sepultura on September 12, 2006, without the band's consent. The compilation of Max-era singles arrived while Sepultura had already moved to SPV Records.
· 5 min read
How did Mastodon's Blood Mountain rewrite metal rules?
In 2006 Mastodon released Blood Mountain, a major-label concept record about a man lost on a mountain that fused melody with extremity.
· 5 min read
Why Did Jethro Tull Beat Metallica at the 1989 Grammys?
In 1989, Jethro Tull's Crest of a Knave won the Grammy for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance, beating Metallica's ...And Justice for All in one of the decade's most talked-about upsets.
· 4 min read
P.O.D.'s Satellite Sold 133,000 Copies in Its First Week
P.O.D.'s Satellite debuted at number six on the Billboard 200 on September 11, 2001, selling over 133,000 copies in its first week and becoming the best-selling album of the band's career.
· 4 min read
Slayer Lowered the Tuning and Met the Morning of 9/11
Slayer's ninth album, God Hates Us All, was released on American Recordings on September 11, 2001. The title collided with the morning's news in a coincidence the band never planned.
· 3 min read
Catfish Rising Brought Three Keyboardists Into Jethro Tull
The session sheet for Catfish Rising reads like a game of musical chairs, with three keyboardists rotating across a single album.
· 4 min read
How Kiss Turned a Failing Studio Career Into Alive!
Twelve thousand people packed a Detroit arena on a raw March night in 1975, and the band on stage knew something the record executives didn't. Kiss had been ble…
· 4 min read
18 Years Since Metallica Played Guitar Solos Again
After the polarizing St. Anger, Metallica brought back guitar solos, standard tuning, and Rick Rubin for Death Magnetic — their ninth studio album, released on September 12, 2008.
· 4 min read
How a Jazz Drum Lesson Quietly Ended the Rush We Knew
A stone man stands frozen on the cover, pointing somewhere into the tundra. The music inside is all motion — distorted bass growls, snare rolls that crack like …
· 5 min read
Roxy & Elsewhere: The Stitched-Together Live Album
A live album recorded in a Hollywood club, then surgically altered in the studio — except for the tracks that weren't. Frank Zappa's Roxy & Elsewhere landed on …
· 5 min read
How Deep Purple Lost a Founder and Made Their Most Eccentric Album
An album called Bananas, with a cover photo shot by the band's own manager, opens with a hard rock riff and closes with a wordless requiem for seven fallen astr…
· 5 min read