Music family
Metal Music Genres
Explore metal’s evolving scenes, from foundational heavy styles to extreme, progressive, and hybrid forms built around intensity and precision.
22 genre guides
1950Rock
A broad, foundational popular-music genre that began in the early 1950s and expanded into many offshoots while keeping its pulse in the backbeat and electric guitar.
1960Japanese rock
A roomy umbrella term for rock made in Japan, J-Rock stretches from the language-first breakthroughs of the early 1970s to the big, theatrical bands that carried it far beyond Japan. The label is broad, but that breadth is part of its appeal: it can hold tender melodicism, pop polish, and full-volume drama at once.
1964Hard Rock
A loud, riff-first branch of rock that hardened out of mid-1960s blues and psychedelia, then found its classic form in the 1970s through bands like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and AC/DC.
1967Christian Rock
A rock genre born in the Jesus Movement, Christian rock blends familiar guitars-and-drums energy with explicitly Christian lyrics. Its history runs from early pioneers like Larry Norman through bigger crossover acts such as Petra, Skillet, and Switchfoot.
1967Cock rock
A critical label for swagger-heavy hard rock, cock rock sits at the intersection of sound, image, and performance politics. It is less a neat genre box than a way of describing how certain rock acts projected masculine power onstage and in the songs around them.
View guide1967Heavy metal
A broad rock umbrella that began with late-1960s heaviness and quickly spread into many subgenres, metal is less a single formula than a shared appetite for volume, weight, and dramatic force.
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1970Glam Rock
A British early-1970s rock style that pairs catchy, riff-forward songs with theatrical presentation and a deliberately glamorous edge. The best-documented core centers on T. Rex, David Bowie, and Roxy Music, with the scene’s influence stretching outward into punk and later hard-rock revivals.
1974Arena Rock
A polished, crowd-sized strain of hard rock that came into focus in the mid-1970s, arena rock is less about raw grit than about lift, sheen, and the instant communal charge of a giant chorus. Its center of gravity sits with bands that learned how to make FM-ready songs feel stadium-sized.
1977Christian metal
A faith-forward branch of heavy metal that rose in the U.S. Christian rock scene and found one of its first breakout voices in Stryper.
1980Black Metal
A foundational extreme-metal style that began as a rough, shocking UK prototype and was sharpened into its best-known form by the Norwegian second wave.
1980Thrash Metal
A concise, reader-friendly thrash metal entry grounded in official band histories and genre overviews, with the early U.S. scene and the Big Four clearly documented.
1984Death Metal
A concise, evidence-based death metal entry grounded in genre histories and official artist pages. Kept the core definition broad and the origin story specific to the documented 1980s underground.
1984Doom Metal
A slow, crushing metal style that emerged in the mid-1980s from Black Sabbath’s shadow and was sharpened by bands like Saint Vitus, Pentagram, Trouble, and Candlemass.
1984Grindcore
A foundational extreme-music style that fused punk velocity with metal abrasion, grindcore’s early story is most securely anchored in mid-1980s Britain, with Napalm Death at the center and related parallel scenes in the United States helping define its reach.
1987Metalcore
Metalcore sits at the point where hardcore punk bite meets metal weight. The best-known records hit with chugging riffs, breakdowns built for the pit, and vocals that can swing from a raw shout to a cleaner, more melodic hook. It’s a broad label, though, and the sound can lean more hardcore, more metallic, or somewhere tense and scrappy in between.
1987Progressive Metal
A muscular, detail-rich metal style that grew out of the 1980s American scene and found its early shape in bands like Queensrÿche, Fates Warning, and Dream Theater. The music rewards close listening: layered guitars, keyboards, and shifting song forms make it feel both heavy and architectural.
1987Technical Death Metal
A concise, evidence-based entry for a genre that grew out of death metal’s early appetite for complexity. The scene’s history is less about a single birthplace than a cluster of landmark bands and recordings that made technical precision feel central rather than ornamental.
1990Gothic Metal
A dark, melodic metal style that emerged from early-1990s UK doom and death-doom scenes, with Paradise Lost often named among the first defining bands.
1994Math Metal
A flexible metal label for music that twists heavy riffs through strange meters and sharply interlocked patterns. The term is documented, but it is not a single neatly bounded scene, so the best way to understand it is through the bands and recordings that people have used to anchor it.
1997Cybergrind
A compact, evidence-based portrait of cybergrind as a grindcore offshoot shaped by electronics, internet-era production, and underground scene tagging.
1997Stoner Metal
A 1990s heavy-music style built on oversized riffs, druggy atmosphere, and a desert-rock sense of space. The core story is clearest in the Kyuss-to-Sleep-to-Electric Wizard lineage, even if the boundary between stoner metal and stoner rock can blur at the edges.
Doom Blues
A real but lightly documented hybrid tag, best treated as an emergent descriptive label rather than a settled genre with a single origin point.