Best Proto Metal Songs

This IS a metal song and not a non-metal song with metal elements. All elements in this song are metal - riff, solo and operatic vocals with screams. Moreover, this song DEFINED metal more than any other song.
Unlike hard rock, blues rock and heavy blues rock, metal isn't blues inspired. Metal is classically inspired so no blues and psychedelic influences in metal.
In Highway Star Ritchie Blackmore used Bach scales (J. S. Bach), including the solo with its Bach-like chord progressions, so it was the first true metal solo as we know it now. Guitar solos based on blues idioms are not metal solos.

This song is amazing, it was probably the heaviest sound heard in music up until that time, and it's amazing, I would have voted for I Want You (She's So Heavy), but it was too low to win.

I completely agree with the visitor's comments - most of the songs on this list are blues based meaning they are not related to metal (except Deep Purple songs and the Queen song). You can't invent a classically inspired genre (metal) with blues inspired songs. Can you invent jazz with rap songs?
By the way, the mentioned Black Sabbath album (in the list description) is not a metal album - it's heavy blues rock with funk, psychedelic and even jazz elements. The biggest misconception in metal is that Black Sabbath invented metal. This is related to another correct observation of the visitor - people think that any heavy sound is heavy metal sound. NO, it's NOT. If a song sounds heavy but is blues based it's not a metal song - metal songs use classical scales. Examples - Guns N Roses are pretty heavy but were labeled hard rock and not metal because they are blues inspired. Same for Led Zepp, ACDC, Whitesnake - not metal.

Ay-yi-yi! Just because it has power chords, and introduced the phrase "heavy metal" (in reference to MOTORCYCLES) into popular music, does NOT make it "metal"-- of ANY kind. The basic riff is a variation of a John Lee Hooker-style Delta blues riff.

Good grief, this is tiresome. It's BLUES rock. Clearly, you've not listened very much or closely to the progenitors of American music.

I agree with the visitor again - I am a die hard metalhead but I have to admit that most of the metal fans think that "anything loud, energetic, with power chords, is metal". This is wrong. Very often metalheads confuse metal with heavy blues rock, hard rock, punk, blues rock, grunge and even glam rock.

This. Is. BLUES. Rock. Why do metal heads think anything loud, energetic, with power chords, is metal? Y'all need some serious courses at the College of Musical Knowledgr.

Whoops. That would be "knowledge."

Probably this isn't a metal song but I have to agree that 2 elements in this song can be found in many metal songs: the gallop and the polished operatic vocals. But this song came out in 1977 and gallops were used by Deep Purple before that in several songs (example - Hard Lovin' Man, 1970).

Yes, this is proto-thrash metal.

Basically proto-thrash metal.

Jazzy, yet include metal-like elements, so maybe proto-progressive metal?

A Psychedelic masterpiece, it's a true shame that these guys never made a full album.

Not the White Album version, the single version with the screaming vocals and heavy, distorted guitars

This is one of the very few proto-metal songs by Led Zeppelin.