In the 80s you then had bands that were Progressive rock but added Metal attributes, because all of them wanted to be like Rush, Genesis, Yes but also loved the new sounds from Metallica.

Yeah I'm pretty much in this boat. As long as metal has been around it's had pretty obvious prog tendencies. Would I say that Sabbath came out of the gate with a fully formed "prog metal" sound? No, it was definitely primitive. But I don't think any definition of progressive metal that excludes what Sabbath was doing right from the beginning is getting the whole picture. Definitely huge strides in the genre were made later by other bands, especially Rush in the 70s and Queensryche in the 80s, which would lead to the what I think of as the "definitive" prog metal band, Dream Theatre.  But I can't say DT was first, nor can I say that for Queensryche, nor for Rush. Metal was born with strong progressive leanings from the nature of the styles it came out of (psych and hard rock, and of course early prog like KC). 

However, in my mind the band and album that did the most work in carving out a place specifically for progressive metal to thrive as its own subgenre was Rush with 2112.

Deep Purple hits progressive a bit more and Rush hits it even more with FBN. King Crimson has too much of a jazz/fusion type flavor, maybe one or two songs has some slight metal but that's a stretch. Albums like Poseidon and Lizard, no metal. As far as Red its a bit harder but other bands were more metal......

You can push really, really hard and go ahead and make it Black Sabbath. But I think both Deep Purple and especially Rush are a more accurate choice if your looking for a balance of Progressive and Metal, rather than a little bit of one or the other.

Bands like Fates Warning and Dream Theater worked hard to be both on purpose, because of the bands that came before them.

It precedes Watchtower and all those bands by over a decade.

Sabbath is just heavy paint-by-numbers blues riffs downtuned, very little progressive aspect or even innovation.

Sabbath starting metal? Sure. Prog metal? Not even close.

If we're going to argue "Well they inspired...", well then yes, no sh*t, follow the full logic all the way then because The Beatles owe all due to cavemen banging sticks, that's what go the Beatles where they are!

 

Even when they'd try, other bands still did it better. Sabra Cadabra is their closest prog track and it's less than stellar.

I'd give credit to DP or Rush WAY before Sabbath for any progressive tendencies in that sound, and I've been in metal bands nearly my entire semi-professional career as a musician.

As far as the "first" prog metal album, I'd suggest Uriah Heep's earliest LPs.  "Bird of Prey" always floats my boat!

I think Sabotage is the proggiest Sabbath album. Anyway, I've heard about prog-metal starting from Dream Theather. Looking back, Emerson Lake and Palmer "Living Sin" from Trilogy is quite metal.

Good points about Uriah Heep and also Blue Oyster Cult. 

I tend to agree, a lot. As I said in my first post I also think many forget about Rainbow, they are rarely mentioned here as an early band that was hard rock/metal but also had that melodic base that grew into progressive tendencies. 

Black Sabbath are easily the Fathers/Creators of Heavy Metal, stretching them to include Progressive is well too much of a stretch, others were more balanced between Metal and Progressive.

In that case we would consider everything that came earlier as Proto-Prog Metal. They could have elements of prog and metal, but the style had not even been recognised as a genre in itself. Same as, for example, Days Of Future Past can be considered Proto-Symphonic.

Except the problem by doing this, is that bands and artists are bound by one genre within PA, despite how different the individual albums might be. I suspect most Queensryche fans themselves, would not consider The Warning to be a prog metal album, even if the band became such.

Having just come from reading the discussion under your Stats post, I noted that you mentioned Ulver as being one of the first to appear as Post Rock/Math Rock, with an album that has none of that at all, and is definitely an album that (in PA terms) is actually Tech/Extreme Metal.

Put simply, attempting to find the starting point of any genre by using PA “genres” is pointless, and likely to be erroneous.

Oh yes yes, for sure. I only wanted to contribute to the healthy discussion. The PA subgenre allocation is as subjective as any other criteria may be.

Fates Warning, Watchtower, Queensryche, Savatage, Crimson Glory, Voivod, Heir Apparent (and many other) all contributed to creating a new sound. 

that's actually my general stance on "first of anything", like for example "first prog album"

Tend to agree with credit going to the early work of Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, Pink Fairies, etc.

sure, I'll add Deep Purple, Rainbow, Black Sabbath with Dio, even Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. 

you can't stay away, even from topics you don't know much about, music you do not even like. 

I was thinking the same thing, even on here the first Progressive Metal album is 6 years before Pyscho's suggestion. RYM has Watch Tower - Meltdown in 84. Wikipedia has Queensryche & Fates Warning in 84.

I Love Satori by Flower Travelling Band.  That album's top of my list of Japanese Psychedelic Rock albums.

And are we going to accept RYM and Wiki and not our own database as Gerinski suggested? Like it or not it is our database.......

It does not matter what Queensryche fans think, that fanbase is not here, they also do not consider Iron Maiden to have any prog tendencies they would all laugh at us. Adrian Smith was on That Metal Show few yrs ago and he mentioned how some of what they were doing was prog....Trunk and the others looked at him like he was nuts!

I think I would put The Warning way up on that list, I'll have to play that album later today its been awhile. Fates Warning could be a top contender also. 

I was thinking the same thing, even on here the first Progressive Metal album is 6 years before Pyscho's suggestion. RYM has Watch Tower - Meltdown in 84. Wikipedia has Queensryche & Fates Warning in 84.

I must confess, I don't know any of those three bands you mentioned, so that blows my Dream Theater suggestion clean out of the water.   

 

I wish they played music like that on our radio stations over here in England.

No, we are going to use common sense, and accept our database has limitations. 

My post was not really against Queensryche, per se, if you read it as I intended - but rather that going by the PA genre alone will not always come up with the desired result - unless you really do think Ulver’s debut was a post rock/math rock album.... 🙄

You’re speaking anecdotally only. I know plenty of Queensryche fans here (myself included), and I also know FAR more Iron Maiden fans who think that band has prog tendencies than not. And, yes, I’m speaking anecdotally too - just to show you how useful (ie useless) that is. In fact, if anything Iron Maiden have been more progressive than Queensryche, and earlier. Queensryche’s first recordings were very much an American sounding Maiden, but without so much of the progressive tendencies.

Also, I think it’s been established that progressive tendencies alone do not a prog metal band (or album) make. If that’s the case, then I would go with Black Sabbath, too.

I think the best way to look at this question is to ask what came first, the chicken or the egg? Scientifically it has to be the egg (specifically, the egg that contained the first chicken). Until that time there were a series of proto-chickens that are not considered to be chickens. The first chicken that was considered to be a chicken had to be hatched from an egg that was laid by the closest relative that was not a chicken.

So we are looking for the egg only that contains the chicken, not any one of the proto-chickens or any of the eggs that were laid before, but did not contain the first chicken. That knocks out all those metal bands that are metal with progressive tendencies, but not prog metal. In my opinion, if not yours, it knocks out The Warning, too. I’m not alone in thinking that Rage For Order was Queensryche’s first Progressive album, and I suspect you would be in a minority (though likely not alone) in believing The Warning to be a prog metal album, so much as a metal album with progresssive tendencies.

I love your courage 

As far as one of the main "eggs" of Prog Metal my bobble friends have spoken.....

Are you sure they didn’t? They reached 11 in the NZ charts. (I was quite surprised, as I thought it had been higher, so much do I remember the video being played on tv, and the song on the radio.) Googling tells me it got to 18 in the UK charts, which suggests to me it had similar airplay over there. Perhaps you were just not listening to the right station(s)?

https://nztop40.co.nz/chart/index?chart=3462" rel="nofollow - https://nztop40.co.nz/chart/index?chart=3462

(For the record, the only radio I ever heard was the middle-of-the-road station my Dad listened to, because he wouldn’t let me tune into any other.)

It's interesting because Sabbath's debut is often considered the first metal album.  But because early metal had major prog influences, the metal/prog subgenres are starting to blur as time passes.   To me progmetal doesn't start as a movement until Maiden formed, Uli left the Scorps, Ozzy left Sabbath, Yngwie emerged, and Voivod started recording.

First progmetal album?   Probably Iron Maiden in '80.  

Of course there are things like this, brief suggestions of metal as a progressive classical-oriented style :

Automatic Fine Tuning,  from 1976

and C2's Electric Savage in '77 --

http://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=4195" rel="nofollow">

^ That's true, and I think there's little doubt the subgenre emerged largely from heavy metal and not as much from prog rock (i.e. Rush).  

Just for the record, I only listen to the middle-of-the-road BBC Radio 2, which probably explains why I've never heard that song by Queensryche before.

So maybe don’t make comments that you wish they played music like that, when they probably did! 😄

I was fairly certain DT had appeared at least once on Radio 2, and just googled to check. Bruce Dickinson played them on an episode of the (Radio 2) “Masters of Rock” show. If you’re lucky, they might be played again! 

Which is why I mentioned it in my first post which was the second post on here.  Certainly there was stuff before it that was metallish with prog or prog with metal but I don't really think there was anything in the seventies that could be considered bonafide prog metal in the 70's. The closest would probably be a few of the mid seventies BS albums(SBS and Sabatoge), some of the early Uriah Heep albums and most of the 70's Rush albums(all except for their debut maybe). Even all of these would still be proto prog metal imo. Also, parts of LTIA and Red by KC.

I hardly ever listen to BBC Radio 2 in the evening because I'm always right here on the Internet, so it's no surprise I missed them, although I can listen to Dream Theater anyplace, anytime, anywhere, anyway, as I have most of their albums on CD.

The best answer!

really? 

You could argue for years about it. 

So I agree that it evolved from various artists/bands. 

Maybe I'm wrong, but it's difficult for me to choose just one, point to it and say, "Yep, that's where it started."

And for me, Black Sabbath is a band playing hard-rock/heavy-metal, no more no less. It is very strange (or funny) how some proggers want to find progressive music elements everywhere !

Also strange how some proggers don't want to find progressive elements everywhere. 

And in the field of 70's hard-rock/heavy-metal, there were bands with progressive elments in their music: Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep, Rainbow, Deep Purple, ... But nobody talked about bands playing "progressive metal".

For that period, "progressive" was "somewhere" but not "evywhere" in rock music.

Awaken The Guardian rules...so doesn't the album art itself:

Absolutely, Bang-on, Certainly, Definitely! 🤗

I’ve never understood the need to put everything into a neat little box, ans to work out which piece goes first, when it come to music. It’s all music to me. I don’t care what kind of music it is. I care if I like it. Genre definitions are largely arbitrary and subjective, not least because music is ever-evolving while the genre categorisations stay static, or attempt to play catch-up.

It’s clear from this post, and any number of previous posts in this forum, that there is no agreement, because there is no clear answer - and there doesn’t need to be.

Discussions like this can be fun, until someone takes them too seriously. So it’s always important to remember that it’s all music (to me).

 

 

Fair enough.

Bro, don't you know genres are extremely important until they aren't, and you can make anything any genre?

I’m well aware of this, which is why it took me seven years after registering for the forum to make my first post! 😄

(And at least two years of using the site, before I registered for the forum that I didn’t post within for those seven years.)

so the answer to the question "what's the first progressive metal artist/album?" - "it's all music" seems satisfying and great to you? 

I don't even think this thread topic is about categorisations and genre definitions... but ok, if it's all music... 

Satisfying, and perfect!


-------------
https://tinyurl.com/nickhnz-tpa" rel="nofollow - Reviewer for The Progressive Aspect

I think most of us agree on what progressive metal is, so with this in mind we can talk about how progressive metal started. 

You’re funny. I can see why Paul plays with you so much. 😄🤗

I was not trying to be funny. 

You think Paul plays with me? 

Then it's ill-will on his part and it's not gonna end well. 

and that being said.....Led Zeppelin, Cream, The Who all pushed the distorted guitar sound towards the metal sound. Everyone wanted to be Led Zeppelin and all of these bands had progressive/psych moments in many of their albums.

Iron Maiden s/t album came out in 1980 and The Warning in 1984, could be a few yrs after what others might consider too late. Based on time frame I could easily warm up to Iron Maiden s/t album as the one.

Where's the ill will? I thought we were best buddies.

I, too, assumed you were best buddies. You’re pretty much inseparable. 👬

AFlowerKingCrimson wrote: I'm more interested in finding the first prog album that had metal elements but wasn't prog metal.

Great question, maybe ...

If musique concréte and John Cage's 4:33 are music, rap/hip-hop is music.

I've read every post on the thread, and I now consider "Larks Tongues in Aspic" to be the first 100% progressive metal LP, from beginning to end.  It pre-dates nearly everything mentioned.  It is verifiably progressive (unlike Black Sabbath, Deep Purple etc.) and certainly set the tone for metal with Fripp's crashing, fuzz-box toned guitar.  

Prog metal did come in drips and drabs.  Iron Butterfly and others experimented with it in the 60s, but bands like Rainbow and Queenryche were much later in the game.  

In The Court Of The Crimson King - 21st Century Schizoid Man

You will get red ink for making that statement . It would be one of the albums I would consider for sure....

If we're being honest, this is probably the most rational argument. KC is not a metal band but absolutely incorporates heavier elements that those bands would later tap into. KC is like a ven diagram of sounds and styles without ever fully committing to one. Pure genius.

There is also an overlap with Jazz Fusion and Technical/Progressive Extreme Metal that most people still don't appreciate or recognize IMHO.

I could agree with that.

That, and Gentle Giant TPATG has more moving parts than an imported Tinker Toy set.

4/5 (see what I did there, lol) of the time I realize I prefer progressive elements, regardless of if it's metal or not. Heaviness is just icing on the cake, and I've never felt like Rush were actually that heavy, nor much heavier, than bands like Gentle Giant that were just tech AF and started crossing over into that territory as a secondary function of their prowess IMHO.

 Incredibly accurate.

COGS IN COGS WHEELS TURNING AROUND! 

I love the album for its progressive roots and one of my favs all time, but hardly qualifies as the start of prog metal.

I don't see how that's possible being that metal wasn't even a thing until the first Black Sabbath album.

I might even go with The Who, either Who's Next or Quadrophenia....

You are confusing signifier with signified, methinks. Things can exist before they are given a name. Besides which, the first metal album/band has been long debated anyway.

However, no-one is suggesting that itchy Cock was a metal album, so much as 21st Century Schizoid Man had metal elements - and I’d find that bloody hard to argue about. That song is metal as firetruck!

Metal with saxophone. I love it. So they were also proto jazz metal. Gotcha.

Anyway, I'm ok with proto prog metal or proto metal or whatever. They weren't the only ones. You could call Pink Floyd's "the nile song" or "the knife" by Genesis proto metal too(imo).

Ah, but you didn't ask for the first album that was prog metal, just the first prog album with metal elements. The riff to 21st Century Schizoid man is totally a metal element, although the crazy jazz freak out in the middle is much more prog.

If we can't call Black Sabbath's debut prog metal, or anything Sabbath, then my money is on Queen II. Prog as heck (most of the time) and heavy as nearly anything else on the market at the time.

Not sure where you’re going with the proto-anything. Someone said first prog song with metal elements. That doesn’t necessarily equate to metal, prog-metal, or proto-prog-metal. That’s only adding additional labels (that may or may not be the case).

As for metal with saxophone - that’s surely the best type of metal? Alright, that’s subjective I know - but I suspect I listen to far more metal WITH saxophone, than without..... 🤔

And if not saxophone, then trumpet and/or trombone! ❤️🖤