Black Sabbath might've flirted with the Christian iconography that would become so synonymous with gothic metal, but heavy metal's architects can only claim the barest hint of parentage over metal's gothic off-shoot.
Arising from the 80s goth boom, originators like Sisters Of Mercy and Fields Of Nephilim were already bridging the gap when they began incorporating metal into their own gothic sound, while Celtic Frost gave the genre a hefty boost when they began adopting gothic sounds into their own dizzying grab-bag opus To Mega Therion. It was Yorkshiremen Paradise Lost who are widely credited with coining the term "gothic metal" - and over three decades on its stuck as a catch-all term for the symbiotic relationship between the genres explored by everyone from Type O Negative to HIM, Lacuna Coil to Evanescence.
