10 Metal Songs That Defined The 1980s

For some, the 1980s were about neon and new wave, yacht rock and wine coolers, wide lapels and pristine pop. For others, the decade is remembered as a time to don a battle jacket, throw up the horns, and bang your head along to some of the best metal songs in history. The 1980s was a transformative decade for metal and hard rock, ushering in changes and a level of mainstream popularity that hasn’t been felt since.

While many think of “hair metal” when it comes to hard rock in the 1980s, that’s an unfair assessment. The decade was much more diverse. Many bands from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHMfor short) released some of their best work, and subgenres like thrash, death and black metal quickly rose up from the underground. There was also a lot of experimentation, as metal interacted with hip-hop and techno, proving that ’80s metal wasn’t just spandex and the Sunset Strip.

Ozzy Osbourne got fired from Black Sabbath in 1979. In 1980, he released Blizzard of Ozz. The lead single not only kicked off (which will conclude on July 5, 2025, when Ozzy plays his final show and performs with Black Sabbath for one last time), but it showed that the “Prince of Darkness” still had plenty of gas left in the tank.
Ozzy would be a metal mainstay throughout the decade with albums Diary of a Madman and Bark at the Moon, and it all kicked off with that iconic shout: “All aboard!”

By 1982, Iron Maiden had gone through three lead singers, and it seemed like the band would never break through. When Bruce Dickinson replaced the outgoing Paul DiAno, something clicked. The resulting album, The Number of the Beast, elevated the group from mere metalheads to metal gods. Dickinson’s soaring vocals became synonymous with Maiden, and the group’s high-voltage heavy metal became the soundtrack to the early ’80s.

Def Leppard – “Photograph
It was in 1983 that we saw the rise of metal in the mainstream, thanks a lot to the release of Def Leppard’s Pyromania. The band shifted away from their heavy metal sound to more radio-friendly tracks, and Def Leppard was all over the radio in the 1980s. “Photograph” was huge in the US, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock charts and No. 12 on the Hot 100. It also laid the foundation for glam and hair metals success in the subsequent years.

Ratt – “Round And Round”

Album: Out of the Cellar (1984)

1980’s hair metal mixed glam, glitter, and pop with hard rock. The sound spawned bands like Mötley Crüe, Poison and Dokken, making Los Angeles the center of the metal world. In the decades since, many have dismissed hair metal as music by pretty boys in makeup and spandex, but as Metalocalypse pointed out in 2006, there was plenty of sleaze on the Sunset Strip

One of the bands that conveyed this marriage of scum and sexiness was Ratt, whose big hit is good enough that it’s often a guilty pleasure for the sternest of gatekeeping metalheads.

Faith No More – “We Care A Lot”