The 13 HEAVIEST Bands of All Time

Who are the heaviest bands of all time? What makes one type of ‘heavy’ heavier than others? Is it speed? Lack of speed? Low pitch? Subject matter? Even album art?

I’d say it all plays a part to one degree or another, but there aren’t any set rules. Since music isn’t a sport, simply going faster won’t win any prizes, nor will technical ability.

So, I guess it’s vision and execution. Those with the heaviest musical visions - and the ability to fully realise those visions - are the artists who matter most in the ‘heaviest of all time’ stakes.

Those artists are the ones I’ll be mostly paying attention to today. Not popularity or influence, but vision, intention and execution. I’ll have some pioneers on here, some relatively famous names too, but also a number of bands that you may not be familiar with. All I can tell you is that they are here in this article for a reason, and that it’ll be worth you at least knowing who they are and what they sound like. There are many ways to achieve colossal heaviness, and I want to show you some of the best today. If you like your metal raw and intense, then this article is for you!

There’s no appropriate way to measure how important Black Sabbath are to heavy music. From the stories of dark spirits visiting bedrooms to the fingers being sliced off in accidents, theirs is a singular story in metal.

But stories are not songs, and Sabbath’s songs are how they changed music. Tony Iommi’s workplace injury obliged him to innovate with his guitar equipment just so that he could play at all, and by tuning to C#, he discovered an entirely new vocabulary for guitar. Sabbath were the first to make a feature out of dramatically downtuned riffs, and married them to songs about occultism, mental health, megalomaniacs and other modern plagues of the soul. In doing so, they not only invented metal, but defined it for every subsequent generation.

These pioneering Swedes completely redefined the term ‘heavy’ in the mid 90s, whilst the rock world was perhaps more in tune with Nu metal and post-grunge. Meshuggah were seemingly oblivious to all of that, instead cooking up some of the most notoriously intense metal music that has ever existed. 

They are obviously more ‘niche’ than ‘mainstream’, but within heavy guitar circles, I don’t think it’s much of an overestimation to call Meshuggah second to only Black Sabbath in terms of long-term influence. They completely changed how bands approached tunings, drums, riffs, solos, arrangements and sheer ability. Meshuggah are a band who are somehow not technical at all, and simultaneously one of the most technical bands ever to meet worldwide success. Put simply, it is impossible to out-metal this lot.

No drums, almost never any vocals, and basically precious little apart from a couple of outrageously loud, fuzzed-up guitars. It’s Sunn0))), one of the most divisive heavy bands in existence. Some people hear subtle cathedrals of micro-melody inside those nauseating waves of sonic assault, whereas others merely hear sporadic chord bashing and a lot of posturing.

In truth I cannot tell where I lie with them - and that’s after interviewing them myself - but there’s no debating a band’s heaviness when they make their audience routinely throw up and pass out. If you like slow, deliberately impenetrable walls of extreme noise, then I believe it's time for you to buy some robes and join up!

Click to Read our Exclusive Sunn0))) Interview

As a kid, Cannibal Corpse’s album covers were so disturbing that my friends and I genuinely wondered how they were allowed to exist. That was in the good old 90s, and it’s fair to say that not many bands have pushed their imagery further without being banned. 

I’ll let you search for those cover art images yourself, but grisly art isn’t enough to get on this list today. Cannibal Corpse (surely the most metal band name ever?) also bring their brutality to the recording studio. Fast, extreme and uncompromising metal is the order here, with songs themes that directly reflect their horrific cover art.

Before guitarguitar friend Devin Townsend became an all-conquering prog metal hero, he was in one of the most outrageously heavy bands ever. Strapping Young Lad was his response to a number of things: phoneyness, posturing, indifference, mental health issues and a general middle finger pointed at society. Sonically, Dev’s breeze block riffs met Gene Hoglan’s drums and one of the most ferocious combos in metal was born.

SYL are relentless to almost comic levels, but the quality of riffs and grooves elevates the music beyond empty salvos of fury into a fairly righteous musical indictment of mainstream mediocrity.

Of thrash metal’s Big Four, Slayer were always the heaviest. Their sound had rough edges and atonality to match the precision demanded of their music, and those edges were the radical difference, in my opinion.

On top of that, Slayer’s subject matter went beyond the previous generations ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ levels of fantasy horror and into real life atrocities, adding undeniable weight to the overall package.

Polish ‘Blackened death metal’ band Behemoth have the distinction of being led by a genuine Satanist in the form of Adam ‘Nergal’ Darski. Behemoth’s music is exceptionally heavy in terms of drum dynamics and vocal performances, and there is a huge streak of antireligious rage throughout most of their output.

Behemoth are less about riffs than about the ensemble effect, delivered with panache and some theatre. But Nergal’s the real deal in terms of beliefs, and whether you are in line with his thinking or not, there’s no denying his passion. Check out a classic Nergal interview here, from an in-person conversation I had with him a number of years ago.

Now for some black metal. For those a little confused by the term, please click across to my Metal Subgenres article, where you’ll find all the answers you seek.

Satyricon are Norwegian, and their first handful of records typify black metal, in my opinion. Now a two-piece, Satyricon are no less of an assault on the senses as a result. Brilliantly, they were initially named Eczema after the common skin complaint, and sacked their first drummer because he “preferred hanging out with his girl at the time rather than kicking down gravestones together with the band". Well, what’s the point if you aren’t going to commit?

The first thing I heard about this band was that they decided to use programmed drums because no humans seemed fast enough to play their tunes. THIS is the attitude that gets things done in the metal world, and this grindcore band from Springfield MA are a scuzzy delight.

Male and female vocals trade horrors, the drum programs hyperventilate and the sludgy guitars sound like helicopters covered in mud. Two members are from the band Pig Destroyer and the band has a release called ‘Frozen Corpse Stuffed with Dope’, so don’t expect to see them headlining Glasto next summer, okay?

Relentless. That is my word for NAILS (yes, ALL CAPITALS, who are the type of band you’d love as a kid because you were secretly terrified of them. Their blend of ultra-hard groove metal is sped up, stuck into an industrial grinder, and spat out raw and bleeding. Their songs are short, immense blasts of rage that might prove wearing in the long run, but for short bursts, are pretty exhilarating.

Nails, sorry, NAILS are from California and are considered a Hardcore punk band, which every mosher knows is just another term for very aggressive metal. Their albums are 22 minutes long, so it won’t take long to check them out!

In order to truly rule in metal, your band name has to be as metal as your sound. In this case, with Birmingham (Home of Metal™) metallers Annal Nathrahk, their name comes out of the mouth of Merlin the wizard in Excalibur, the gleefully bonkers King Arthur movie from the 80s. Indeed, it’s part of a spell and apparently refers to ‘snake’s blood’ which is all superbly metal.

Sonically, this two-piece are an absolute force who combine death metal, black metal, industrial and hardcore into a molten melting pot that delivers punishing brutality alongside a dark symphonic edge. There’s a live drummer, but as with Agoraphobic Nosebleed, they are programmed on recordings to allow for maximum efficiency of their pulverising sound. Interesting fact! The guy responsible for all of the instrumental music and production - Mick Kenney - is also none other than ‘drift phonk’ pioneer Kordhell!

It’s a possibility that this lot doesn’t actually take themselves too seriously. A rare thing in extreme metal circles! The TDTA are a mathcore band, and whilst most mathcore bands are good at being technically showy and noisy, most of them don’t actually achieve much in the heavy stakes, do they?

Not this lot. Talk about pulverizing? They are a downtuned 8-string and cargo shorts kinda band, with a sound that tips their collective baseball hat in the direction of Meshuggah, but they definitely have their own brand of psychotic, polyrhythmic metal going on here! This is the type of music that makes people who should know better dive around like kids until they hurt themselves.

This Finnish metal band has a storied history. From finding inspiration to their biggest song Flooding Secretions from listening to the sound of a reindeer carcass getting stuck in an industrial meat grinder, to their decision to bring the corpse their deceased original drummer with them on tour, this is a band who clearly do not know the meaning of the word ‘compromise’. If that were not metal enough, their appearance at a Norwegian metal festival was even facilitated by live-action historical cosplayers who ferried them across in a Viking longship!

Okay, I’ve left out one detail here. Impaled Rektum are a fictional band from the Finnish movie Heavy Trip. Sorry, but also not sorry because their song is genuinely good (written by members of Mors Subita) and the film is one that all metalheads should file under ‘essential viewing’.

It doesn’t come any heavier than that, folks. Well, it does, but a lot of heavy bands sound pretty much identical to each other, and so I wanted to at least reflect some variety and colour in the choices.

What did you think? We all have particular tastes in our metal: some love a classic sound in E standard, and others love a modern djent thing in drop-A. I ignored trends and fashions today, because this is metal! I hope you found some of my choices to be worthy, and perhaps I even unveiled some new acts for you to check out?

Who is the heaviest band of all? You tell me, but I’ve got a feeling they’re in this article.