The 1980s: the glory days of metal. What can we say about a decade of heavy music that hasn't already been said? We've all spent time arguing about the best metal bands, songs, guitarists, and just ...

Epic riffs by Van Halen, Black Sabbath, and Ozzy Osbourne are sure to inspire the "devil horns," the universal symbol of ...

Metal is a genre that prides itself on its technicality – but sometimes a meaty guitar riff is all you need to serve a great song. Getting faces scrunched and heads banging is one of the best things a ...

The riff. It's everything to metal. You can strip away pretty much any other element that has come to define the genre over the years - haunting atmospherics, scorching wails and guttural screams, ...

Tony Iommi is the undisputed champion of the heavy metal riff. He earned that title in the early ’70s, as his memorable guitar riffs — short, repeated chord progressions that help form the rhythmic ...

Forty years ago this month, five simple notes played on a guitar irrevocably changed the course of popular music. Those simple five notes gave us, in no particular order: Ozzy biting the head off a ...

A lot of people conflate rap metal and nü-metal, but really, how many nü-metal bands rap? Perhaps the presence of turntables and baggy shorts confuses people, but influential acts like Korn, Mudvayne, ...

It’s a slow month for noteworthy new metal, so we’re going to try something different this month. First up: a quick rundown of tracks from January’s handful of standout heavy releases. Then, we’ll ...

If Josh Homme, Tony Iommi and Lemmy were all capable of keeping their egos from getting the best of them for a few hours and split a record, the result would end up sounding something like local ...

The 1970s was an interesting time for heavy metal. Black Sabbath helped birth the genre at the very beginning of the decade, and a host of other legendary bands followed suit. Along with Black Sabbath ...