What is the BPM speed of 'heavy metal music'?

It varies a lot. And I mean a lot. If you look at the really slow, repetitive, drone metal pieces, they play at somewhere around about 40-50 bpm. (I'm not entirely sure, not a fan of drone metal) and some speed metal and really fast grindcore and mathcore is ridculously fast, like 300-400 bpm. read more

There's slow metal (like doom metal) that can be down as low as 50 or 60 bpm, there's thrash metal that can blister along at upwards of 150bpm, and there's probably a metal song for every point in between, and likely songs that are faster or slower than those numbers. read more

Nile just has to be on the list due to speed and accuracy. My Horus says this should be at number 1. Look, THIS is the fastest song on this list. Just check out the song sample. Currently this is my idea of "fast". Drums: George Kollias - Metal_Treasure. Update: I added songs that are probably faster than this song. read more

Brutal Death Metal is an enigma, as a lot of people measure tempo by the speed of blast beats in songs (the snare drum is usually considered to be playing eighth notes), but it's not uncommon for guitars to play mostly quarter and even half notes, with some eighth notes in faster parts, so the music feels much slower when you listen to the guitars than drums. read more