(Credits: Far Out / NASA / Uwe Conrad)
Way back in heavy metal‘s first explosion, few could have predicted just how lucrative the headbanging world could be. While Black Sabbath and Deep Purple’s engulfing blues attack paved the way, it took the UK’s new wave of British heavy metal in the late 1970s to permanently cement in the public consciousness the stylings, aesthetic, and a fiercely devoted fanbase that few genres can match in loyalty.
Soldiering through minimal press attention and scant mainstream presence, Iron Maiden scored a UK number one with 1982’s The Number of the Beast and would make millions in album sales, world tours, and their official merch sporting ghoulish mascot Eddie.
To this day, German industrial pyromaniacs Rammstein sit confidently in the top 20 highest-grossing tours of all time, generating a tidy near $4million for their 2019 to 2024 fire-blasting stadium shows. The road to metal’s commercial clout was made possible by key records which broke sales records and still stand as some of music’s unsurpassed giants of Billboard history and beyond.
Hard rock boasts some mammoth LPs. Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth 1971 record still stands at the 11th biggest-selling album with 37m reported sales, helped by the mythic ‘Stairway to Heaven’ that sits as its grand centrepiece. Meat Loaf’s Wagnerian theatre rock Bat Out of Hell comes in at number nine, nestled between Bee Gees and Fleetwood Mac, but hard rock’s biggest success story is AC/DC.
Despite losing their lauded original singer Bon Scott, a switch to Bryan Johnson yielded 1980’s Back in Black, a monster-selling record that was showered with over 50m reported sales and is second only to Michael Jackson’s pop behemoth Thriller.
So, what is the best-selling heavy metal album?
After NWOBH had ebbed and spandex glam was the MTV stars of the day, an underground reaction was eagerly pulling metal back down to the gutter. Sparking primarily in California and New York, thrash would weld metal’s complex arrangements with a dose of hardcore punk’s urgency and shred their way into the metal world fatigued by Van Halen’s acrobatics. Thrash’s ‘Big Four’, Metallica, Anthrax, Megadeth, and Slayer, would become Kerrang! and RIP Magazine‘s new, spotty poster boys.
By the 1980s’ end, Metallica towered above the thrash competition following a worshipped run of records with co-producer Flemming Rasmussen, Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, and …And Justice for All celebrated for their ambitious compositions and progressive scope. Yet for their fifth LP, and first for the 1990s, Metallica sought to refine their metal attack toward a tighter, more conventional songcraft that broadened their commercial appeal while rubbing their purist fanbase the wrong way.
Released in 1991 and led by the monster ‘Enter Sandman’ single, Metallica stormed the charts with over 31m reported sales and still stands as the 19th biggest-selling album of all time. Metallica’s sleek and mysterious black cover—seeking to capture some of Back in Black‘s Billboard success—and pure, eponymous title set the Los Angeles metal titans toward an unprecedented commercial trajectory across the decades they could never have predicted.
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