Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1981

Speed metal

Emerged 1981 Origin Germany / USA Subgenres — Vocals Sung
Heaviness
7
Speed
9
Melody
8

Sung. Melodic singing throughout.

In short

NWOBHM with the throttle down, but the vocals still melodic. The missing link between heavy metal and thrash.

How it sounds

  • Tempos of 180 to 220 bpm with galloping or two-beat drumming.
  • Fast palm-muted riffing, but with vocals that stay melodic and high.
  • Long solos with NWOBHM-school technique.

Hear what that means

  • Alternate picking, not downpicking

    Motörhead - Ace of Spades

    Up and down strokes alternating - the only way to sustain this tempo - which produces a smooth blur where thrash's downpicking produces a chug. The whole distinction between two genres is in this right hand.

    Open on YouTube
  • Rock and roll at an impossible tempo from 1:39

    Exciter - Heavy Metal Maniac

    Strip the distortion and the riff underneath is a Chuck Berry figure. Speed metal is early rock and roll played four times as fast, which thrash is not.

    Open on YouTube at 1:39
  • Where it becomes power metal from 0:54

    Helloween - Walls of Jericho

    The same tempo and picking, and a chorus arriving that the genre had not previously had room for. Two years later this band invented power metal out of exactly this.

    Open on YouTube at 0:54

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Every second here is the uploader's own, read from the recording's tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
180-230 bpm
Song length
3.5-5 min
Tuning
E standard, occasionally a semitone down, on light strings — the tempo is easier to articulate cleanly on nine-gauge than on anything heavier.
Production
Bright and thin, with the guitars stacked and the cymbals loud. It sounds fast partly because there is so little low end in the way.
Written about
Speed itself, Metal as a subject, Nuclear anxiety, Defiance

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Alternate picking, not downpicking — up and down strokes alternating, which is the only way to sustain this tempo, and the exact technical point where speed metal and thrash part company.
  • Bass Following the guitar note for note with a pick, because fingers cannot articulate this cleanly at 220 bpm.
  • Drums Double kick running continuously underneath, with the snare on the backbeat rather than on every upbeat. It drives rather than skanks.
  • Vocals Sung, and often very high — this is traditional metal singing at a tempo that leaves the singer no room to breathe.

What it isn't

That speed metal is just a synonym for early thrash. They were used interchangeably in 1983 and the distinction hardened afterwards, but it is a real one and it is technical: the right hand. Motörhead and Exciter alternate-pick a rock and roll riff very fast; Metallica downpick a syncopated one. Everything else — the vocals, the song structures, the descendants — follows from that difference.

Told apart from

  • Thrash metal The defining difference is the picking hand: thrash downpicks everything and gets a percussive chug, speed metal alternate-picks and gets a smooth blur. The riffs can be identical and the feel is not.
  • NWOBHM Speed metal is NWOBHM taken past the tempo at which its gallop still swings. Same harmonies, no swing left.
  • Power metal Power metal is speed metal that grew choruses, keyboards and a fantasy libretto. Musically it is the direct continuation.
  • Technical thrash Technical thrash is as fast and vastly more harmonically restless — if the riff keeps changing key and metre, it has left speed metal.

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

History

Motörhead were the catalyst: a band playing punk on metal instruments and refusing to claim either label. German and American bands took the speed and kept the melody — unlike thrash, which discarded it. Helloween went straight from here into power metal.

Descended from

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

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.