3 Debut Albums That Shaped 1980s Music and Gave Us Rock Icons

If you do a debut album right, it not only properly gives people insight into who you are but also makes them want to come back for more. Here are three debut albums in rock music that helped shape the genre in the 80s.

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‘Blizzard Of Ozz’ by Ozzy Osbourne

Before releasing this project, Ozzy Osbourne had been the lead singer in Black Sabbath for about a decade. After being dismissed by the band in 1979, Osbourne re-met manager Sharon Arden (later Sharon Osbourne), whom he’d originally been introduced to at just 18. Sharon took Ozzy in and helped him restart his career with a series of projects in the early 80s, one of which was Blizzard of Ozz.

“I wanted to call the album ‘Blizzard Of Oz’… You know, ‘The Wizard Of Oz’?” Osbourne told Rolling Stone of the project’s name. “Stroke it up with cocaine, and it becomes your c*ke name. So ‘The Wizard Of Oz’ became ‘The Blizzard Of Oz’. It works. When we were young, we were lunatics.”

The album served as a comeback for Osbourne and also produced hits for him like “Crazy Train”, which is one of the late singer’s most referenced songs today.

‘Kill ‘Em All’ by Metallica

As far as debut projects go, Kill ‘Em All by Metallica was unexpectedly influential, especially for the thrash metal genre. Although the project didn’t get a ton of commercial recognition until Master Of Puppets came out in 1986, it still set the stage for the group’s sound later on.

“We knew that Metallica as a band were like no other band out there. And we were just feeling very, very anxious to go into the studio and record these batch of songs, and have them just etched in vinyl, you know, for the rest of our lives, and memorialized onto vinyl,” guitarist Kirk Hammett shared of the group’s early days. “And we knew we were onto something different, but me personally, I did not think that we would hit the heights that we were going to hit. But we were on a mission – and that was world domination.”

‘She’s So Unusual’ by Cyndi Lauper

Every pop-rock artist dreams of having a debut as strong and influential as Cyndi Lauper’s with She’s So Unusual in 1983. The album not only included huge hits like “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and “Time After Time”, but it also went on to win Lauper two Grammy Awards.

Before her big break as a solo artist, Lauper was the singer for Blue Angel Band, which broke up in 1981. After that, she worked a series of odd jobs, some of which included retail and even being a waitress at IHOP. Little did she know that her next creative endeavor would make her one of the biggest stars of the decade.

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