In all honesty, being a fan of rock music is often about hindsight. A band release their first album, and while it's good, it's either not at all what you're excited about right now, or nothing like the music that's blowing up at the time. Then, five years later, all of your friends refer to that record as a pinnacle of sonic innovation, and every young act out there is doing their best to rip off that band's sound.
In most cases, these moments are more heartwarming than anything else – underdog stories about bands blowing up even though everyone doubted them. But in some, they're absolutely mind-boggling tales of the world eventually catching up with music that's doing something powerful and different. And right now, in the shifting state of rock and metal, there are a handful of bands whose current status as musical influencers (even if they weren't very successful, in some cases) leaves us gobsmacked. It's not that these guys aren't awesome, or that they haven't always been – just that, for whatever reason, if you'd told us that their music would become hugely influential when they dropped their first album, we might not have believed you.
Here are 10 bands whose influence on rock, punk, and metal we never saw coming…