West Midlands Metal

This isn't a genre question, it's a geography question. Birmingham and the Black Country were the engine room of British manufacturing, and every twenty years the music coming out of them got slower, faster or uglier than anything else in the country.

The thread isn't a sound — it's a method: take the blues, or punk, or metal itself, and strip it down to weight and repetition.

Aston, 1968. Four lads who'd worked in sheet metal and factories rename themselves Black Sabbath after a Boris Karloff film.

Tony Iommi lost the tips of two fingers on his last day at a sheet metal plant, wore homemade plastic thimbles, and slackened his strings to ease the pressure — the detuning that became the genre's default.

West Bromwich answered with Judas Priest, who swapped blues shuffle for twin leads and leather. Stourbridge produced Diamond Head in 1976; Metallica later built half a career on their songs.

Then 1985: Napalm Death, teenagers from Meriden and Birmingham, playing anarcho-punk at ludicrous speed in Sparkhill. Daz Russell, promoter of the Mermaid club in Birmingham, had made them essentially the punk house band.

Earache Records in Nottingham pressed it. Grindcore existed.

Godflesh came out of the same bedrooms in 1988 and swapped drummers for a machine.

Who: Iommi and Butler in Aston; Halford, Tipton and Downing in West Brom; Brian Tatler in Stourbridge; Mick Harris, Nik Bullen, Justin Broadrick and Lee Dorrian around the Mermaid in Sparkhill.

The rooms: Rich Bitch in Selly Oak, an eight-track where side A of Scum was cut for £50 in August 1986. What: low tunings, flattened fifths, riffs built on repetition rather than resolution, vocals that bark or wail with nothing in between.

How a record gets in: it has to be made by people from these postcodes who took an existing form and made it physically heavier — more weight, more speed, or more machine.