Led Zeppelin’s Debut Album Started a Loud & Raw New Musical Genre

This Sunday on the WPDH Album of the Week we are featuring the debut studio album from Led Zeppelin, popularly known as Zeppelin 1.

The album was recorded in September and October 1968 in London shortly after the band's formation. It contains a mix of original material worked out in the first rehearsals, and remakes and rearrangements of contemporary blues and folk songs.

The album showed the group's fusion of blues and rock, and their take on the emerging hard rock sound was immediately commercially successful in both the UK and US, reaching the top-10 on album charts in both countries, as well as several others.

Many of the songs were longer and not well suited to be released as singles for radio airplay, and Page was reluctant to release "singles", so only one single was released, "Good Times Bad Times".

The album was described as a "brilliant if heavy-handed blues-rock offensive" by popular music scholar Ronald Zalkind. Martin Popoff argued that while the album may not have been the first heavy metal record, it did feature what was likely to be the first metal song – "Communication Breakdown".

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