Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1984

Power metal

Emerged 1984 Origin Germany Subgenres 2 Vocals Sung
Heaviness
6
Speed
8
Melody
10

Sung. Melodic singing throughout.

In short

Galloping tempos, choral hooks and lyrics about dragons and battles. Optimistic by definition.

How it sounds

  • Sustained galloping tempos with nearly continuous double kick.
  • Choruses harmonised across many voices, choir style.
  • Keyboards, neoclassical solos and lyrics about battles, dragons and hope.

Hear what that means

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
160-200 bpm
Song length
4-7 min
Tuning
E or D standard, twin guitars harmonised almost continuously, and a keyboard doubling the leads an octave up.
Production
Enormous and layered: choirs of overdubbed vocals, orchestral keyboards, and a mix with no gaps in it anywhere. The opposite of every raw production aesthetic elsewhere on this branch.
Written about
Fantasy and myth, Battle, Friendship, sincerely, Hope, which nothing else in metal will admit to

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Harmonised leads over a galloping rhythm part, with sweep-picked arpeggios in the solos — the pick dragged across strings in one motion while the fretting hand shapes the chord.
  • Keyboards Doing the work an orchestra would, and frequently trading solos with the guitar in unison runs. This is neoclassical metal's inheritance, put to cheerful use.
  • Bass Rarely audible as an independent line, and that is the arrangement's choice: the low end is there to support a wall, not to be picked out of it.
  • Drums Double kick as a continuous bed with the snare on the backbeat, and a great many crash accents. It is the least syncopated drumming in metal, deliberately — the songs are built to be sung along to.
  • Vocals Sung high, clean, and multi-tracked into a choir on every chorus. The lead singer is a tenor doing something closer to opera than to rock.

What it isn't

That the fantasy lyrics are a joke it is in on. Overwhelmingly they are not: this is the one genre on the metal branch built on sincerity, and the earnestness is the point rather than a pose to be smirked at. It is also why the genre is enormous in Germany, Finland and Brazil and marginal in Britain and America, which tells you more about Anglophone irony than about the music.

Told apart from

  • Speed metal Power metal is speed metal with a chorus, a keyboard and a story. The riffs are the same; the intent is the opposite of grim.
  • Melodic death metal The same harmonised leads and the same debt to Maiden, and the whole difference is the voice: one sings, the other rasps.
  • Symphonic power metal Symphonic power metal replaces the keyboard with an actual orchestra and a soprano, which pushes the theatre past what the guitars are doing.
  • Progressive power metal Progressive power metal keeps the sound and adds odd metres and long forms — the difficulty becomes visible again.

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

History

Helloween released Keeper of the Seven Keys Part I in 1987 and set the European template: speed, melody and optimism, the exact opposite of American thrash. Blind Guardian added Tolkien and choirs stacked dozens of tracks deep. The genre is enormous in Germany, Italy, Finland and Japan, and nearly nonexistent in America.

Descended from

Branches into

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

  • Easycore 1.7 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
  • Celtic punk 2.4 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
  • Horror punk 2.4 apart by rating · no shared ancestor

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.