IRON MAIDEN released "Live After Death" on October 14th, 1985 through EMI in Europe and Capitol in the United States, produced by Martin Birch, with the video following on the 23rd. The double album came from the World Slavery Tour — 187 concerts across 331 days, opening in Warsaw on August 9th, 1984 — with sides one to three taken from four nights at Long Beach Arena in March 1985 and side four from Hammersmith Odeon the previous October. The Egyptian staging built around "Powerslave," sarcophagi and a mummified Eddie, made it the ideal tour to document, and Derek Riggs' gravestone sleeve is among his best known. Both Kerrang! and Sputnikmusic have called it possibly the greatest live album ever made; AllMusic settles for easily one of heavy metal's best. Forty years on, that consensus has barely shifted.

Joseph Bellardini, known as Joey Belladonna, was born on October 14th, 1960 in Oswego, New York. He is best known as the vocalist of ANTHRAX, joining in 1984 and singing on the run of albums — "Spreading the Disease," "Among the Living," "State of Euphoria" and "Persistence of Time" — that made them one of thrash metal's Big Four. His clean tenor was the outlier in that company: where SLAYER, METALLICA and MEGADETH had rougher voices, Belladonna sang melodically over the top of Scott Ian's riffing, which is a large part of why ANTHRAX sounded like nobody else. He was dismissed in 1992, spent the following years on his own project Belladonna and on cover bands, and returned permanently in 2010. He has six Grammy nominations and a reputation for stage energy that has not dimmed in four decades.

DARKTHRONE released their sixteenth album, "Arctic Thunder," on October 14th, 2016 through Peaceville Records, recorded between August and December 2015 at their own Necrohell II Studios and self-produced. Thirty-nine minutes, with "Tundra Leech" as the first single. The title is borrowed from an obscure Norwegian metal band active between 1985 and 1989; Fenriz and Nocturno Culto asked permission before using it. Musically it splits the difference the duo had been working on for years: the black metal of their early-nineties records fused with the traditional heavy metal and crust influences that dominated the previous album. Notably, Nocturno Culto handles essentially all the vocals here, with Fenriz stepping up only to shout the title of "Boreal Fiends." Three decades in, with no live shows since 1996 and no interest in changing that, they remain the most stubbornly self-contained band in Norwegian metal.

EXODUS released their eleventh album, "Blood In, Blood Out," on October 14th, 2014 through Nuclear Blast, recorded between March and July at Goats 'R Us Ranch in Briones and Studio D in Sausalito, and self-produced. Sixty-two minutes, and it entered the Billboard 200 at number thirty-eight — the highest chart position of the Bay Area band's career, and their first appearance there since 1990's "Impact Is Imminent." It marked the return of Steve "Zetro" Souza on vocals, replacing Rob Dukes, and the tour behind it was the first with Souza since he left in 2004 following a falling-out with guitarist Gary Holt. Blabbermouth gave it nine out of ten; AllMusic's James Christopher Monger, setting aside the band's endless singer acrimony, said the eleven tracks mostly crush it, offering textbook thrash mayhem that manages to sound both classic and vital.

SÓLSTAFIR released their fourth album, "Svartir Sandar," on October 14th, 2011 through Season of Mist, recorded that May at Studio Sundlaugin and produced by frontman Aðalbjörn Tryggvason. Seventy-eight minutes across two discs, and the album that took the Icelandic band out of the black metal underground they had started in and into something without an obvious category — post-metal, cowboy guitar twang, psychedelic rock and Tryggvason's cracked Icelandic-language wail, all stretched across arrangements that unfold over eight and nine minutes. "Fjara" was filmed in July 2011 and released as a video the following January; it became by some distance the band's most widely heard song and remains the entry point for most listeners. The black sands of the title are Iceland's own, and few records have translated a landscape into sound this literally or this well.

RAMMSTEIN released "Feuer frei!" on October 14th, 2002 through Motor and Universal, the fifth single from "Mutter," recorded back in May and June 2000 at Studio Miraval in Correns, France and produced by Jacob Hellner with the band. Three minutes and eight seconds. The title is the German military command to open fire, and the song became one of RAMMSTEIN's best-known — though it was pointedly left off the 2011 compilation "Made in Germany," for reasons never explained. Rob Cohen directed the video, cutting footage of the band on a burning stage with scenes from his own film "xXx," where they also appear performing in a Prague club during the opening sequence. It later turned up in an episode of CSI. The UK single was split across three parts in three colours, each with a different tracklist.

WORMROT released their third album, "Voices," on October 14th, 2016 through Earache Records, recorded that year at Inversion Studios and produced by Cedric Chew. Twenty-six minutes across fourteen tracks — long by grindcore standards, and the record where the Singaporean trio stopped simply going faster and started building atmosphere, adding dissonance, slower passages and a genuine sense of dread to Arif Suhaimi's shredded vocals and Rasyid Juraimi's riffs. It arrived four years after "Dirge" and after a period when the band had effectively stopped, having toured relentlessly on almost no money. It was also their first release with drummer Vijesh Ghariwala, who replaced Fitri alongside the two founding members. WORMROT have long been the strongest argument against the assumption that extreme metal only comes from Europe and North America; "Voices" is the album that made international critics take that seriously.

DIMMU BORGIR released their second video album, "The Invaluable Darkness," on October 14th, 2008 through Nuclear Blast, self-produced. It runs to four hours and forty minutes across its full contents, built around live performances captured during the touring cycle for "In Sorte Diaboli" — including sets with full orchestral and choral accompaniment, the scale of production the Norwegian band had spent a decade working toward. The title comes from the closing track of "In Sorte Diaboli," though that song does not actually appear here. By 2008 DIMMU BORGIR were the most commercially successful black metal band in the world and, predictably, the most argued-about: too polished for purists, too extreme for anyone else. This release is the clearest document of what that scale actually looked and sounded like on stage, with Shagrath, Silenoz and Galder fronting an operation closer to a symphony orchestra than a band.

YOB released their second album, "Catharsis," on October 14th, 2003 through Abstract Sounds, recorded that February. Forty-nine minutes across only three songs — the shortest runs past ten minutes — and the record where Mike Scheidt's Oregon band settled into the form that made their reputation: enormous slow riffs, amplifier worship inherited from SLEEP, and Scheidt's high, keening voice cutting through the sludge rather than growling underneath it. AllMusic's Alex Henderson called it enjoyably solid for anyone with a taste for dark, ominous doom metal, which undersells how strange it is; almost nothing else in doom sounded like this in 2003. Relapse Records reissued it on vinyl in 2014, by which point YOB had become one of the most respected bands in American heavy music and "Catharsis" had acquired the status of an early landmark.

IN THE WOODS... released their second album, "Omnio," on October 14th, 1997 through Misanthropy Records, recorded between September 1996 and March 1997. Sixty-three minutes across only five tracks, and one of the strangest records to emerge from Norway in the nineties. The Kristiansand band had started in black metal, but by this point had drifted into something closer to progressive and psychedelic rock, with clean male and female vocals, long instrumental passages and none of the aggression their scene was known for. AllMusic's Thom Jurek called it a devastatingly beautiful marriage of prog metal, gothic texture and epic scope, a tour de force standing as one of European metal's classic recordings, and noted how influential it has remained since release. The band folded in 2000 and returned in 2014; nothing else in their catalogue reaches quite this far.