Black Sabbath

Four working-class kids from Birmingham who set out to be a blues band and accidentally invented a genre. The origin story is industrial in the most literal sense: a sheet-metal press took Tony Iommi’s fingertips, the workaround took the guitar down in pitch, and the sound that came out had no name yet. By the time the debut album landed in 1970, it did.

Black Sabbath is the trunk of more family trees than any other band we cover — doom, stoner, thrash, basically every heavy branch traces back through them. Which is exactly why they keep showing up in the lab: pull almost any metal thread hard enough and you end up in Birmingham, 1968.