The great innovators of Metal

dream death were probly the first death/doom band, probably the best for that matter. stuff like asphyx and autopsy is part of that conversation too, and obviously winter and cathedral. and the godfather of all of this stuff is hellhammer of course.

agreed on fates warning, queensryche and watchtower for prog. but i'd happily also agree that fates warning weren't really prog - that'd explain why i love fates warning so much.

i hate calling 'depressive black metal' a genre, but if you're gonna start talking about strid then bethlehem have gotta be in there too.

definite agreement on sir lord baltimore for proto-metal! also stuff like cream, blue cheer, wishbone ash, iron butterfly.

let's face it though, the absolute most innovative bands tend to be those which people still struggle to define today. remember that argument about what the fuck celtic frost were?
 
Dream Death were good but definitely not the best death/doom band, I'd reserve that for something like Winter or Divine Eve tbh.

Also, just because you dislike prog and like FW doesn't mean FW aren't prog :p

Re: Celtic Frost...I still don't fucking know. I'll admit that Hellhammer are probably the band most apt to be called "extreme metal" from that era though.
 
definite agreement on sir lord baltimore for proto-metal! also stuff like cream, blue cheer, wishbone ash, iron butterfly.

Ahhh, Blue Cheer! When I made that post about Sir Lord Baltimore I was thinking "there's another band I want to mention, who were really heavy, but why the fuck can't I think of their name? Blue something..."

Blue fucking Cheer, most definitely, as progenitors of metal.
 
dream death were probly the first death/doom band, probably the best for that matter. stuff like asphyx and autopsy is part of that conversation too, and obviously winter and cathedral. and the godfather of all of this stuff is hellhammer of course.
I agree that Dream Death were the first, but how much death metal are they really? It was quite some time ago listened to them but iirc they are more of thrash/doom or something? :p Very "proto"-sounding atleast. IMO Paradise Lost and Winter defined the sound. And Katatonia are obv the best. ;)

All bands you mentioned are ofcourse noteworthy though.
 
Dunno if they've been mentioned, but I'd say Arcturus and Meshuggah had big impacts on their respective genres.

Fun fact- they were both founded in 1987.
 
Yeah, but Meshuggah was Metallica/Testament worship until 1991 (and even there, it was simply very technical Metallica worship). I don't know much about Arcturus' pre-debut career, but even the debut was significantly different from what came after.
 
Ved Buens Ende, didn't really innovate anything from scratch, but took progressive metal to a whole new level. It wasn't like Watchtower, Atheist or Cynic, it had a completely different approach

^^together with In The Woods...
 
Dream Theater
* Created a unique, classic rock influenced style of progressive metal which set a new standard for the genre and evolved it beyond the power and thrash dominated styles of previous bands. (When Dream and Day Unite, 1989; Images and Words, 1992)

"Images & Words" had a way bigger impact. It's where the band crafted it's OWN sound that has not been replicated. There were still a lot of hints to a more traditional style on "WD&DU".
 
"Images & Words" had a way bigger impact. It's where the band crafted it's OWN sound that has not been replicated. There were still a lot of hints to a more traditional style on "WD&DU".

Ok, I took the first album off the entry.

I snuck a few updates onto the list (Atheist, DT and Priest) last night. I'll try to get more in later. I just picked a really bad time to resurrect this thread with the school semester coming to a close. :lol:
 
How come you have yet to add Stained Class to the entry for Judas Priest? It's probably their most influential and defining album.
 
Yeah, but Meshuggah was Metallica/Testament worship until 1991 (and even there, it was simply very technical Metallica worship). I don't know much about Arcturus' pre-debut career, but even the debut was significantly different from what came after.

True, but they became pretty unique and influential after that. Destroy Erase Improve was a groundbreaking album and different from just about everything else going on in 1995.
 
kind of depends how you define power metal. stuff like heavy load, manilla road, omen, jag panzer, manowar can be called early power metal as far as i'm concerned