The first time I liked metal, I thought metal was only extreme metal. I stupidly hated the so-called commercial music. I received complaints from my family (who actually likes metal, but just traditional heavy metal). I discovered many other underground music genres than metal. I started wanting to end my family's prejudice about extreme metal, from being sort of disgusted to being modest.
I think I have experienced MANY things during the first times I liked metal, how about you? Feel free to share your experiences here!

The first time I listened to Darkthrone's Transilvanian Hunger I thought I would be possessed by the devil. I stuck to Soulside Journey for a while.

I smiled and humbly laughed on it, but I also do agree with you. Transilvanian Hunger is truly devilish.

When Diabolus in Musica came out. I was about 15 and that was when the whole metal thing made sense to me.

I was a young'un at the time growing up in the era of Aqua's Barbie Girl, Eminem, and all that rubbish. Discovering metal for me was like a christian discovering God as it was life-changing, and it still throws up the occasional surprise band that I missed in the 80/90s even today.

In high school, my best friend liked bands like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden and long haired boys. She had a car so we would drive around at night with these boys she was friends with and I would be stuck in the back seat, wishing they would stop playing that awful, boring music.

Then one night this guy put a new tape and I thought "this sounds different from that other stuff. This isn't awful at all. I like it!" I said "Please keep playing that. I don't hate it. Who is it?"

told me it was Metallica and the bass player had just died and that was his last album. Anyway, I went out immediately and bought it, and then their other albums.

I was trolling the nightclub party people on facebook with some other dudes and one of em kept writing "death metal rulez \m/" at the end of his every post. It was like his signature. Those days the only bands I knew to be metal were System of a Down, Iron Maiden and Metallica. So I asked him about his fav death metal bands and he gave me a top 10 list full of all the melodic death metal bands. I checked those bands out and thought it was different and yet I liked all of the bands. So I dug deeper and got onto many other sub-genres

Being into commercial techno as a teenager, when a classmate passed me a Walkman (remember those?) with Iron Maiden's 'Best of the beast' at age 13 was the most religious, breathtaking and exciting experience of my life. I'll never forget how my eyes widened, my pulse accelerated and I thought 'I'm sure I've known this all my life' when 'The number of the beast' kicked in.
The rest, as they say, is history...

I've been listening to metal since i was 4 years old and I'm 23 now so 19 years of metal and counting!

Both my folks are old skool metalheads so metal was encouraged growing up

My first Vinyl was Johnny The Fox by Thin Lizzy my dad gave it to me and then a few months later when i was 5 my uncle gave me 2 cassette tapes one was Ace Of Spades and the other was Killers by Maiden

Every time i hear The Ides Of March I'm taken straight back to the first time i heard it aged 5 sat in front of the big black Hi Fi in the living room and i also remember how at the end of the tape when it finished the tape went red at the top and that meant that you had to turn it over

When I was a kid (around 12) every one I knew listened to whatever was popular in the late 90's and early 00's and my mom listened to strictly Jesus music. I had heard some stuff like Rage Against the Machine, Faith No More, and some Metallica before and I quit liked it but the band that drove metal home for me was Static-X. I know most people around these parts don't consider them metal at all but damn the first time I heard Push It I remember thinking this is it, this is music and it was love at first listen.

Never had any family or social backlash. I just pointed to my younger brother who listened to hip hop and said "Hey at least I'm not him" and then I resumed my listening. Metal sings about stuff no other style of music really approaches....

My parents were very conservative christians, but my uncle had already corrupted me with his Metallica, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Slayer, and Megadeth records.

I always thought of it as "skull music", because so many of the albums featured skulls in their artwork and the dark menace of the music often made me think of what was on the album cover, so from then I was hooked.....

For about a year in high school I was listening religiously only to Iron Maiden, Megadeth, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Scorpions, Metallica, Slayer and some classic rock. The 'metalheads' in school all liked the screamo and core crap and I thought that was all modern metal had to offer, so I stuck with what I had for ages. Kreator's extreme aggression changed that for me. I heard Betrayor and the rest is history.

For me the first time I heard Metal was I was watching gameplay video of Dragon Age of the fight against flemeth and the guy had used Rhapsody's rain of thousand flames as backround music, I really liked the song, so I asked him who was the song by and the name of the song. From there I checked out the rest of the bands stuff, and my metal journey started from there. Before this I though all metal was extreme and screamo, however about 2 years after getting into metal, I started getting into Death/black/Melodeath metal.

Like most of young ppl, i listened to a pile of crap back in the day. Atrocious french rap, and mainstream stuff everybody HAD to like at school.
Then a cousin of mine made me listen to Dire Straits at 14yo. That's not metal at all, indeed, but it gave me suddenly a taste of how modern music should be done. Back at my house, i pulled all my poser posters down. Then i got into Guns n'Roses and ACDC at 15yo thanks to a friend of mine. This same guy had an old cassette of Iron Maiden's Powerslave as well.

I will remember all my life what i felt when Aces High was playing. It hit me like a fucking brick and i said to myself "THAT's the stuff i want to listen to all my life "

Er, so the OP is asking basically how our metal journey has progressed?

My first CD I ever bought was Master of Puppets when I was 10. I must have listened to it a hundred times before I even thought to check out Metallica's other albums, and then after reaching the conclusion that Ride the Lightning was the best album ever created, I quite happily listened to just that for about a year. I kind of went through the "I listen to Metallica so I'm a metalhead!!!1!" phase in middle school but thankfully survived the -core wave that swept through the area. I went to a few metalcore concerts with friends but never liked the music. Anyways, some relatives from Norway visited the summer of my freshman year in high school, and when one cousin found out that I listened to metal (or so I thought), he showed me Amon Amarth's The Avenger. It fucking blew me away. I devoured their entire discography and began to search for more bands like them. I came across Wintersun, Empyrean Sky, Cormorant, Bolt Thrower, and a few others, and began to check out folk metal as well. Then on some metal forum someone mentioned Immortal's All Shall Fall which had just come out at the time. That was my first experience with black metal and it both scared and exhilarated me. I bought everything Immortal has made and then began the typical black metal discovery arc and checked out Burzum, Emperor, Gorgoroth, Dimmu, Dissection, Satyricon, etc. and since I enjoyed that, I began to look for more.

That's where I am today; still loving black metal and trying to shrink my ever growing 'want' list, but I still listen to some folk or melodic death metal now and again. I'm only eighteen so I suppose I have plenty of time to change what styles I like, but what I like to listen to hasn't really changed for the past couple years. Well, that's not entirely true. The past couple weeks I've been in the mood for some power metal and since I've never really listened to it before, I'm having a lot of fun just looking through the suggestion/help sticky and finding some new music.

Up until 8th grade I threw everything I listened to under the "rock music" banner (unless it was blatantly something else like hip-hop or something), which included some radio hard rock/grunge (Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Shinedown, etc.), some nu-metal (Drowning Pool, Mushroomhead, Linkin Park), and some entry-level actual metal (solo Ozzy, Black Label Society). One day I was sitting on the bus home listening to Mushroomhead's XIII and the girl sitting next to me asked to check it out, so I handed her the headphones and she said something to the effect of "it's okay, I just don't like metal that much."

I didn't think I liked metal that much either, but apparently I was already listening to it and didn't know it, so I decided to explore further. It started with Lamb of God and Killswitch Engage (the latter of whom are from 30 minutes away from me), and gradually I got into melodeath and Nile and such. Took until college before I really got into trad metal/doom/OSDM.

The heaviest stuff I first started on were guys like AC/DC and Rob Zombie, both of whom I'll still occassionally spin. But ironically I guess I could credit my younger brother for kickstarting my love for metal. He used to listen to Slayer and Metallica, but now arrogantly considers all metal to "sound the same, and it's always about death". He also reffered to grunge as a type of metal....

But be that as it may, Slayer was too much for me yet at the time. But after hearing "Breaking The Law" on the radio, I eventually went out of my way to buy "British Steel", and it was love at first listen. Priest is still my favorite band, and eventually this led to more traditional heavy and speed metal, then power metal, and then one day thrash thanks to Slayer, Venom, Exodus and Testament.

I was watching a late night music show here called Rage back in 1995 and Napalm Death's Suffer The Children came on.
It scared the absolute fuck out of me as it was past midnight, I was eight years old, it was literally the first metal I had ever heard and it's showing distorted video of a cemetery plus it's called Suffer The Children?
Shit man, I am a child and this band wants me to suffer? What the hell did I do?!

Fast forward to around 2008, I saw them live with Dying Fetus as the opening band.

Oh, hell. It was the early '80s, people were listening to all kinds of arena rock and poppy stuff.

I found Screaming for Vengeance and Piece of Mind in a record store, and life hasn't been the same since. That's about it.

My first forays into heavy music was being in my sisters room listening to Queen I and AC/DC.

My first official metal experience was listening to Black Sabbath "paranoid" in my brothers truck. After hearing that record blasting I realized I loved this music.

My next experience that blew me away was discovering a tape of Carnivore "retaliaton" the sheer speed mixed with the sabbathy parts and lyrics just blew me away. Cemented my love for faster, more intense styles of metal.

I've answered a few threads like this now, but I just finished a project for an audio production class I'm taking. The requirement was it had use our own voice, music or sound effects, and be between 3 to 5 minutes. So I decided to do my piece on how I got into music and it summarizes what I've been listening to up till now. Here is the script I wrote, the actual audio piece is supposed to be broadcast on our school radio station which is kind of cool:


It wasn't until I was 17 that I really got into music. In my early years the only music I heard came from movies, television shows, & whatever my relatives played. There was of course songs that I liked but nothing I truly connected to. Then one day while I was watching television at my grandparents house, I happened to catch a commercial for the album “Inhuman Rampage” by DragonForce.

…The sound was intriguing and quite different than anything else I had heard at the time. After I went home, I looked them up online and played the music video. After hearing the music video cut of their song “Operation Ground and Pound” I was impressed and decided to walk over to the mall near my house to see if I could find the album. At this point in my life I had never purchased an album. Because any albums I’d heard at that point had only one or two songs that I actually liked. But I decided to chance it, and bought “Inhuman Rampage” on CD.
I enjoyed the whole album, So I began trying to find more bands similar to DragonForce. This was difficult at first because of the mainstream media miss-categorizing and generalizing music, so I had no word for what I would later come to know as power metal.
I eventually came across a few other power metal bands like 3 Inches of Blood, & Cellador though I didn't care for these bands I at least knew I was on the right trail. It was also at this time the I found the blackened death metal band Aurora Borealis, which was the first extreme metal band I got into.

… So eventually I went on the Google search engine and entered something like “list of every heavy metal band”. This is how I found The Metal Archives website, and when I learned that DragonForce was a power metal band. So I began browsing the website for power metal bands, most of which was Symphonic Power Metal

… This was also when I found Crimson Glory which was the first U.S. style power metal band I had heard.

…At this time I had also begun to branch out into other sub genres of heavy metal, as well as bands that incorporated other styles of music in their sound. Which eventually lead me to experimental bands outside of the genre.

…Eventually I came across the Italian power metal band Trick or Treat which had caught my attention with their humorous song “Like Donald Duck”.
I really liked the band and after buying their albums “Evil Needs Candy Too” &
“Tin Soldiers”, I decided to look for more bands like them. This is when I found out they were essentially a Helloween clone playing in the style of the “Keeper of the Seven Keys” albums. So I purchased the first three Helloween albums all of which I thought were great. At this point I realized that most of my albums were made in the last 10 years and Helloween was one of the few classic heavy metal bands I had in my collection. So after joining the forum on The Metal Archives website. I began to inquire about classic heavy metal bands.

…Lately I’ve been into bands that follow in the epic style of Manilla Road. Which lead me to my current favorite album Meadows of Maseilya by Longings Past.
… through the past seven years what I’ve learned has completely changed the way I feel about music even songs I had heard years before now impact me in a way they never had. It still surprises me how something I had held little regard for has now become one of the most important things in my life.

I was playing Doom and I thought those riffs were totally rad. That's probably a huge reason why I listened to a lot of thrash metal when I actually got into the genre.

Yes, most of the songs sample famous metal songs while some also sample industrial and ambient songs. You can read about it here.

My dad was really into Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull and Pink Floyd, and I remember sitting in front of the big black Hi Fi in the living-room listening to that as well

My dad was also an avid fan of Deep Purple and Pink Floyd but I had no such common sense as to just sit there and listen do Made In Japan, not realizing it was the best live album of all times. I didn't even care to listen closely, I just thought the Chilli Peppers were it. Back then, age 12, I thought metal was Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park and P.O.D. Shit, that's sad... But in highschool I eventually got to listen do Metallica's S&M and to a lot of Tool, which I immediately loved. Strange as it may be, I then started to listen to a lot of New Age and classical music.

I guess if it wasn't for a certain girl in my first year of university I would've never gotten into metal. She listened to a lot of Iron Maiden, Blind Guardian, Therion and gothic/ doom metal bands like Moonspell, Virgin Black, etc. I remember listening to Opeth and going like "wtf is the matter with the vocals?!?". I laughed at it first but then.... Fucking fell in love with that band within a week. I've been listening to metal ever since, maybe 85% of all I listen.

From that point on I wanted to know what influenced those guys and so I found out about Dream Theater and especially Death and Morbid Angel and that pretty much led me to the fascinating caves of OSDM. Then I wanted to find out how these bands came up with that sound and discovered 80's thrash, german, Celtic Frost and so on. I thought I had a lot of catching up to do.... I still do!!

I eventually found my way to Black Metal by thinking "man that shit is really harsh and hard to listen" and so I had to beat that challenge. The first album I heard was Burzum's Filosofem and then all the other acts from the early norwegian scene, which eventually led me to the more folk/ viking oriented bands.

Never really got into Power Metal or Doom Metal though, but I'm sure I will in the near future

I think during my time in the military was a time when I experimented with all kinds of genres of music (never had this amount of money before to spend...and to a point, now). But I hooked onto whatever Revolver-core band that was big at the moment when I decided that metal was a path to choose. But when I visited the now-defunct Myspace Metal Forums back then, when I saw all these awesome album art, band names and song titles...I was instantly hooked. Upon first listen, I was "what the hell is that that stands before me" (again, it was either Gore Metal or Gorgoroth's Pentagram, can never decide which was my first listen). I have never looked back, except when my stuff got stolen and decided to explore new genres on a limited budget. But ever since March of last year, been on the metal path ever since.

Slightly off topic, but I played plenty of Mega Man on my NES growing up, and a big part of the soundtrack for all of those games is basically 8 bit heavy/speed metal, and I feel like this may have nudged me towards metal, even if I didn't really know it. I mean really, who can listen to that classic Dr Wily track and not think of Iron Maiden?

BE

I remember. It was like hearing music made by aliens. It was both monstrous and intriguing. THe first thing that gave me that feeling was necrophobic's The NOcturnal Silence, maybe the first death metal album I ever listened to. I remember trying to explain this to my girlfriend at the time and telling her that I was laughing but somehow really enjoying it at the same time.

I had been listening to the "pre-metal" standards for a while (System of a Down, Rammstein, etc) but didn't get my first real taste of extreme metal until I heard Cradle of Filth's Nymphetamine Overdose (it seemed extreme at the time...) played on a local radio station (94.1 for the Milwaukee folks here. Also, I find it funny that they played the full-length Nymphetamine while CoF doesn't even do that at their live shows.) I remember at the time, when I was 14, just thinking it sounded like the most evil, surreal thing ever. To this day, I still think that actually stands out as the one good song from Cradle's mopey gothic era; that opening riff just sounds so menacing and the keyboards during the middle section sound so forlorn without being cheesy like the rest of the album. But I digress...

I avoided said song and band as I was somewhat religious at the time and didn't like all the Satanic imagery. Didn't listen to anything new after that until the summer between my sophomore and junior year in high school. My friend and I were into World of Warcraft and were watching a raid video with Dragonforce's "Heart of a Dragon" playing in the background. I was completely amazed with the speed and intensity, which lead to me picking up Sonic Firestorm from the local Best Buy shortly after my junior year started. I remember sitting in my bedroom listening to it and just being completely blown away. It's interesting that for all the new hobbies and interests I've picked up in my life, nothing quite compares to hearing actual metal for the first time - I think that's because none of them have had as much of an impact on my interests/social life/etc.

The rest is history-over the rest of the year I got into Savatage, Kamelot, Blind Guardian and Sonata Arctica, creating a power metal phase that lasted toward the end of my senior year in high school, when I started getting into extreme metal.

This. Whenever I listen to Master Of Puppets it reminds me of playin Ninja Gaiden on NES.

In an old issue of EGM, they interview Anthrax with their thoughts on Ninja Gaiden 2, haha.

My dad have a huge pile of Lps, most of them are classic rock group like Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Cream,Beatles, Bachman Turner Overdrive, Humble Pie, Black Sabbath,Jimi Hendrix Exp, Jefferson Airplane etc, but unluckly no turntable to play them, it just sat there on the corner until i was 15 years old, he managed to buy a brand new turntable, i love spending whole my time after school hearing all those stuff, my favorite were Bachman Turner Overdrive - Fragile and Black Sabbath - Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, i think both are the heaviest record inside the collection and it's catch most of my attention as a young teen, i remember asking my father why he only got one album of Sabbath, i told him these stuff are way more cooler than Cat Steven (he has two albums of Steven) LOL, so my journey for finding heavy music begin, i start hanging on cassette store, my first purchase was Yngwie Malmsteen-Seventh Sign by the recommendation of store clerk, it was the first time for me to hear a shredder album, high paced guitar, ultra fast guitar solo, i was hooked, a year later my book shelf was fill with albums of Metallica, Maiden, Yngwie, Sabbath and Priest.

Hearing King Diamond at age 18, found it more of a novelty at the time and fairly humorous at times.

The more I listened, the more I realized how amazing it is. Mercyful Fate/King Diamond are now unrivaled bands in my opinion. 9 times out of 10 when I listen to music, I put on something King Diamond related (or Candlemass).

my dad was always into classic rock growing up, and i liked it, i never really got into anything until i was about 12 when i heard metallica (this was right as reload came out) and regardless of that album not being particularly well liked, hearing fuel and the unforgiven II for the first time really struck me. so i got that album, then load, then went on getting the rest of their albums from there. that was all i listened to in middle school, then in my freshman year my cousin gave me a few cds to borrow, ozzy's the ozzman cometh, megadeths youthanasia, and led zeppelin IV, after that i got really into those bands. later that year i discovered maiden, and then priest, then shortly after iced earth/blind guardian. i hated extreme metal back then, it wasnt until a year or 2 later i discovered venom and fucking loved it. then i got into celtic frost, bathory, and then got really into black metal and early death metal

I barely remember what I was thinking at the time, but it was Sabaton's Panzer Battalion on a Warhammer 40k model video. Got me into both, with the Warhammer 40k being subconscious (who could forget the shape of a Leman Russ or a Land Raider?)

I was in 6th grade and my 16-year-old Brasilian cousin, who is a huge Iron Maiden fan, visited my family, and played his Number Of The Beast album, which inspired me to get Powerslave. Best decision I've ever made. Now I'm into thrash like Slayer, Testament, Sepultura, Flotsam and Jetsam, Anthrax, etc. and Progressive stuff like SYmphony X, Angra, Opeth, Ayreon, Adrenaline Mob, etc.

Hmm, I started to like Rock in general due to my dad, who is a big fan of Guns n Roses and Black Sabbath. Since then I listened to nothing but the Rock station here. Eventually I got tired of it and wanted something new, not just 80's Glam bands... It was on 5th grade that I discovered my huge love of Metal. My neighbor back then lent me some songs from Arch Enemy, Slipknot and Children of Bodom and, holy shit, I couldn't stop listening to them. Because of those bands, I eventually found Dream Theater (In the presence of Enemies pt.1) and Wintersun (Beyond The Dark Sun). And that, my friends, was like an enlightened spiritual experience.

Fun Fact: I also started to love Rock and Metal after hearing a background song from the ps1 game Bloody Roar

Hey, I like that game too! I think the heavy metal background songs in the game sound kinda cool.

Haha, I love that game; one of the firsts I've played. Also, I think I found the song. It's the opening theme:


So Speed Metal-influenced haha!