Speed Metal / NWOBHM / Proto-Metal
Located in 1 route
This is the white-knuckle hinge between heavy rock and full-blown metal: galloping eighth-note bass, twin lead guitars trading harmonized melodies, and a tempo that keeps climbing toward the redline. The rhythm sections lean forward, snare backbeats sharpen into a sprint, and the riffs trade blues swagger for a tighter, more vertical chug. Vocals run from working-class bark to operatic air-raid wail. Production is often raw and self-made, all treble bite and room noise, with the proto-metal corner sitting fuzzier, sludgier, and bluesier than the lean speed-metal end. The mood is escapist and combative: leather, motorcycles, fantasy, horror, and pure velocity. At its earliest it still smells of psychedelic acid-rock overdrive; at its fastest it anticipates thrash and extreme metal without quite arriving. What unites the whole family is forward motion, melody held under pressure, and the sense of a genre discovering exactly how fast and heavy it could go.
History
The story starts in the late 1960s, when bands like Blue Cheer cranked psychedelic blues into a roar often called the first heavy metal, and US acts such as Sir Lord Baltimore earned the era's first printed "heavy metal" reviews. Those proto-metal pioneers handed the volume and riff to a heavier 1970s underground. The decisive surge came in late-1970s Britain: as punk receded, journalist Geoff Barton and editor Alan Lewis christened a new movement in Sounds in 1979, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Largely young, working-class men, these bands toned down the blues, sped everything up, and embraced a DIY ethic of self-pressed singles and tiny labels (Neat, Heavy Metal Records). Iron Maiden and Def Leppard became stars; Saxon and Motorhead hit hard; Diamond Head, Venom, and Raven stayed cult but proved hugely influential. Motorhead's filthy overdrive effectively coined speed metal, and Venom's 1982 album literally named black metal. By the early-to-mid 1980s the energy crossed oceans: Canada's Exciter and Germany's Helloween pushed tempos higher, and a young Metallica covered Diamond Head. The family fed directly into thrash, power metal, and extreme metal, and its galloping DNA still runs through traditional metal today.
The sub-genre landscape
The family's center of gravity sits on three core lanes that the site develops fully. NWOBHM is the engine room: the late-1970s British movement that gave the whole family its melody, twin-guitar attack, and DIY spirit, with Iron Maiden, Saxon, and Diamond Head as anchors. Speed Metal is the accelerant, taking NWOBHM's gallop and Motorhead's overdrive and pushing tempo and precision toward the genre's outer edge. Proto-Metal is the foundation beneath both, the late-1960s and early-1970s heavy-blues overdrive of Blue Cheer and Sir Lord Baltimore where the riff and the volume were first invented. Together these three trace the family's arc from invention to acceleration.
The other developed lanes are sharpened spin-offs of that core. First-Wave Black Metal grows straight out of speed metal's nastiest fringe, where Venom, Bathory, and Hellhammer took the velocity and made it sinister. Speed Power Metal and Speed Thrash mark the two roads out of the family: one melodic and triumphant (Helloween), the other faster and more abrasive on the way to thrash.
The unwritten lanes are finer subdivisions and regional offshoots, more useful as map detail than as headline acts: First-Wave Heavy Metal, Biker Metal, Early Epic Metal, Traditional Speed Metal, Melodic Speed Metal, Proto-Thrash, Proto-Doom, Proto-Glam Metal, and Christian Speed Metal. Each isolates one trait, the doom, the glam, the gallop, that the core lanes already carry in their blood.
Sub-genres in this family
15 sub-genres · 6 written up
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Wikipedia: New wave of British heavy metal
- Wikipedia: Speed metal
- Wikipedia: First-wave black metal
- AllMusic genre overviews (speed metal, NWOBHM)
- Louder/Loudersound proto-metal and Diamond Head retrospectives
- Encyclopaedia Metallum (Metal Archives) release data