Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1979

NWOBHM

Emerged 1979 Origin United Kingdom Subgenres — Vocals Sung
Heaviness
6
Speed
7
Melody
9

Sung. Melodic singing throughout.

In short

New Wave of British Heavy Metal: punk speed, twin guitar harmonies and self-releasing on a large scale. The textbook every thrash band studied.

How it sounds

  • Twin guitars harmonised in thirds — the wave's technical signature.
  • Faster tempos than the 1970s, with Steve Harris's galloping bass technique.
  • Cheap, usually self-funded production and seven-inch singles on local labels.

Hear what that means

  • The gallop from 12:48

    Iron Maiden - Iron Maiden

    Down-down-up in triplets on the low string, under a twin-guitar harmony, with the bass playing a third independent line. Everything melodic on the metal branch descends from this arrangement.

    Open on YouTube at 12:48
  • The riff Metallica answered an advert about from 20:10

    Diamond Head - Lightning to the Nations

    A tiny band from Stourbridge, a self-released record with a blank sleeve, and a riff that a Californian teenager heard and built a career on. The transmission line from Britain to thrash runs through this track.

    Open on YouTube at 20:10
  • Speed with a singer still on top

    Saxon - Wheels of Steel

    The tempo is climbing towards what thrash would take, and there is still a tenor doing full-range melodic singing over it. This is the last moment both are true at once.

    Open on YouTube

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 2 of 3 are cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
140-190 bpm
Song length
4-7 min
Tuning
E standard, twin guitars, and a lot of open-string pedal work — the low E hammered under a moving line, which is what gives the riffs their gallop.
Production
Cheap, fast and dry. Most of the founding records were made in days on small budgets, and the thinness is audible: the guitars are bright, the bass is loud because it had to be, and there is almost no reverb.
Written about
History and battle, Escape, The occult, at arm's length, Being young in a country with no work

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Two of them, harmonised in thirds and fourths — the single most consequential technique on this branch, since melodic death metal, power metal and metalcore all inherit it directly. Add the gallop: a down-down-up figure in triplets on the low string.
  • Bass Played with fingers rather than a pick and turned up loud, following the guitars through the harmony rather than sitting on the root. Steve Harris made the bass a lead instrument in metal.
  • Drums Fast but swung, and still recognisably descended from rock rather than from hardcore — the double kick is occasional and the ride carries the pulse.
  • Vocals Sung, high and unashamed, with vibrato and real range. This is the last point on the metal branch where the singer is straightforwardly a singer.

What it isn't

That it was a British scene that happened to be influential. It is closer to the single point through which almost all modern metal passes: Metallica formed after an advert quoting Diamond Head, Iron Maiden's twin harmonies are the direct ancestor of the Gothenburg sound, and the gallop is still being played on records made this year. A few hundred cheap singles pressed between 1979 and 1981 set the vocabulary for everything downstream.

Told apart from

  • Traditional heavy metal Traditional heavy metal is the wider, mostly older category — Sabbath, Priest, Rainbow. NWOBHM is the British wave of 1979-81 that took it and made it faster.
  • Speed metal Speed metal is what happens when this is pushed past the point a singer can gallop with it. The riffs are the same shape, played too fast to swing.
  • Thrash metal Thrash is NWOBHM plus hardcore, and the tell is the picking hand: thrash palm-mutes and downpicks where this rings open and gallops.
  • NWOTHM The new wave of traditional heavy metal is a deliberate 2005-onward revival of exactly this sound, made by people who own the records.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

In late-1970s post-punk England, hundreds of metal bands started releasing their own records. Neal Kay's club night and Sounds magazine gave the movement its name. Iron Maiden and Def Leppard went global, but the greatest influence came from Diamond Head — a band that sold almost nothing and that Metallica copied openly.

Descended from

On the timeline

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

  • Easycore 1.0 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
  • Horror punk 1.4 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
  • Hard rock 1.4 apart by rating · no shared ancestor

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim. These share no ancestor with it at all.