FORMED: 1978, Germany

With their brutal, simple riffs and aggressive, fast tempos, the German heavy metal band Accept was one of the top metal bands of the early '80s. While their sheer speed had a calculable effect in the evolution of thrash and speed metal, it was Wolf Hoffman and Hermann Frank's thick guitars and vocalist Udo Dirkschneider's Bon Scott-styled shrieking that helped earn them a large following in Europe, if not in America. Nevertheless, bassist Peter Baltes and drummer Stefan Kaufmann's manic rhythms are what distinguished the band's early albums from the rest. When the band decided to add some melody to their approach on 1985's Metal Heart and 1986's Russian Roulette, Dirkschneider jumped ship and formed his own band, Udo, in 1987. Accept went through three new vocalists, settling on David Reece, and churned out three more albums before finally calling it quits in 1989. The group reunited in the mid-'90s, releasing Death Row in 1995. Steel Glove (1996) and Predator (1997) followed.

Photograph by Mark Weiss