Which heavy metal albums have hit number one?
At the time of writing, we’re five days out from Birmingham’s Villa Park playing host to ‘Back to the Beginning’. A concert billed as Black Sabbath’s farewell show, but was, in practice, the heavy metal answer to Live Aid. Not the only one to exist, actually, due to 1986’s sanity-stretching charity record Hear ‘n Aid. Thankfully, this was Live Aid in the “stadium full of people watching the biggest names of the day play some of the most famous songs in the genre”.
There are many ways you could show how heavy metal has become one of the biggest music genres on the planet, yet a cursory glance at that concert’s poster would arguably do the best job of it. The star power on display is staggering. Black Sabbath headlining, Ozzy Osbourne playing a solo set of his own, Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, Tool, Slayer and many others. Along with are members of Aerosmith, Van Halen and Rage Against the Machine turning up for a cup of coffee, too.
Half the bands on the bill would have a chance at headlining their own show at the 45,000 capacity stadium and selling it out, let alone putting them all together. There’s a livestream of the show being watched by 6.8 million people, a number that could sell out Villa Park 151 nights over. Numbers that are backed up by the sheer number of records sold by all those bands on the bill. No matter how much of a cult concern heavy metal is, some of the most successful albums ever made come with a heaping dose of riffs.
So, let’s have a look at some of the heavy metal albums that have taken pride of place at the very top of the music world. Whether it’s the UK or US album charts, a quick look through which records have hit the top takes us through a potted history of the genre and its commercial ups and downs. We begin, fittingly enough, with the band that started this article and who, all but certainly, started heavy metal as a whole.
Which heavy metal albums have topped the charts?
Now, as with all analyses like this, a few caveats have to be declared about what constitutes “the first” of anything. Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin both had number one albums in the late 1960s, and if you will scweam and scweam and scweam if they’re not considered heavy metal, then sure, it’s an argument I’ll listen to. Good luck trying to convince me that Black Sabbath’s second album, Paranoid, is anything other than the first heavy metal album to hit number one on the UK album charts, though.
Over the next decade, heavy metal had a decent showing at the UK albums summit. Deep Purple topped the list with Machine Head and Fireball, as did Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies. The aforementioned Led Zeppelin were also mainstays, flickering as they did on that precipice between hard rock and heavy metal. However, no such luck in the US of A, which held out on heavy metal at the summit of the Billboard 200 until the glory days of the 1980s.
Ironically, nothing proves just how big of a deal hair metal was in the 1980s quite like the fact that an also-ran like Quiet Riot got the first number one album on the Billboard 200 in the history of heavy metal. The honour didn’t go to Mötley Crüe or Bon Jovi or Guns N’ Roses (who all had number one albums in subsequent years), or anyone else who had a legacy beyond 1987. It went to the band who are notable for two things: giving the world Randy Rhoads and having heavy metal’s first number one album with their third effort, Metal Health.
That truly is how you know you’re at the start of a movement, when the tide doesn’t just raise the legends of the game but the minnows too. In the States, this continued into the 1990s, where Metallica ascended into mainstream pop culture with The Black Album, a number one on both sides of the Atlantic. Van Halen, Alice in Chains and Rage Against the Machine would follow suit. Then, as if to truly prove my point about minnows, you get nu-metal.
Multiple albums by Korn and Limp Bizkit reached the top of both the US and the UK album charts, which was a damning state of affairs. Perhaps out of shame, the tide has never been that high again since then. At the album chart summit, pickings have been truly slim since, on both sides of the Atlantic. The occasional legacy act gets to the top slot the way that Black Sabbath themselves did in 2013. Slipknot have a handful of number-one albums, but beyond that, metal on the charts is a ghost town. Something that may sound fitting for the genre’s spooky soul, but isn’t great news for the industry.
Or, so it would seem. The likes of Spiritbox, Sleep Token and Ghost point to a rich future for heavy metal. One that, in Sleep Token’s case, in particular, has already shown some life on the charts. Given time, hopefully, we can see another heavy metal act reach the summit of music once more.
