Progressive Metal - History

History

The mixing of the progressive rock and heavy metal styles can be traced back to the late 1960s and early 1970s. One of England's heaviest progressive rock bands, High Tide, fused the elements of "metal progenitors such as Cream, Blue Cheer, and the Jeff Beck Group" into their sound. Other bands such as King Crimson and Rush were also incorporating metal into their music, as well as Uriah Heep, whose "by-the-books progressive heavy metal made the British band one of the most popular hard rock groups of the early '70s". Rush songs such as "Bastille Day", "Anthem", "By-Tor and Snow Dog", "2112", "The Fountain of Lamneth" and "Something for Nothing" have been cited as some of the earliest examples of progressive metal. Another early practitioner of progressive rock and heavy metal were Lucifer's Friend. Night Sun was also an early band who mixed heavy metal with progressive rock tones, though only releasing one album. However, progressive metal did not develop into a genre of its own until the mid-1980s. Bands such as Psychotic Waltz, Fates Warning, Queensrÿche, and Dream Theater took elements of progressive rock groups (primarily the instrumentation and compositional structure of songs) and merged them with heavy metal styles associated with bands like Judas Priest and Black Sabbath (both of these bands had some progressive influences on their early albums). The result could be described as a progressive rock mentality with heavy metal sounds.

These three early flagship bands for progressive metal (Fates Warning, Queensrÿche, and Dream Theater) each had somewhat different sounds. Queensrÿche had the most melodic sound of the three and achieved, with Operation Mindcrime and Empire the genre's most immediate commercial successes, which peaked with the crossover single "Silent Lucidity" reaching number nine on the Billboard Hot 100. Fates Warning were the most aggressive and heavy and arguably had the most in common with the thrash and extreme metal scenes of the time, due to the fact that they started out their career playing metal in the vein of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. Their 1989 album Perfect Symmetry broke away from their NWOBHM influenced sound and became the mold for early progressive metal that Dream Theater would expand on. Dream Theater drew more heavily upon traditional progressive rock and also built much of their earlier career on the band members' virtuoso instrumental skills, despite also achieving an early - and unexpected - MTV hit with the eight-minute "Pull Me Under" from 1992's Images and Words.

Though progressive metal was, and has remained, primarily an album-oriented genre, this mainstream exposure increased the genre's profile, and opened doors for other bands. Over the 1990s, bands such as Pain of Salvation, Vanden Plas, Seventh Wonder, Threshold, Circus Maximus, Anubis Gate, Coheed and Cambria, Symphony X, Tool, Andromeda, Porcupine Tree and Arjen Anthony Lucassen's Ayreon project all succeeded in developing their own audiences and signature sounds. In the decade which followed, artists who began their careers outside of the progressive milieu, such as Sweden's Tiamat (originally a death/doom act), Green Carnation and Opeth (both formed in the death metal mould), developed a progressive sound and became identified with the progressive metal genre.

Ayreon stayed with the traditional prog metal themes, but mixed them with many other influences, such as rock opera, folk music, and ambient. Pain of Salvation experimented with both progressive rock and progressive metal, made extensive use of polyrhythms, and abruptly switched between calm and heavy passages. Seventh Wonder stayed within the prog metal mold, but had a larger focus on melody than most other progressive metal bands. Symphony X married progressive elements to power metal and classical music. Tool created a progressive sound using alternative rock elements and odd rhythms. Porcupine Tree began as an psychedelic/space rock band, but developed a progressive metal sound with 2002's In Absentia. Steve Vai's former singer and heavy metal band Strapping Young Lad's singer and guitarist Devin Townsend combined elements of post-metal and ambient with traditional progressive metal on his first two solo albums Ocean Machine: Biomech and Infinity. Mastodon also combined progressive metal with sludge elements. Opeth, Skyfire, and Between the Buried and Me combined (in very different ways) their prog influence with death metal. Bands such as 30 Seconds to Mars created a more traditional progressive sound that incorporated elements of space rock.