Blue Oyster Cult

Few American rock bands sound quite like Blue Öyster Cult, a group that fused hard rock with psychedelia and filled its songs with occult imagery, fantasy and deadpan humour. Formed among students at Stony Brook University on Long Island, the band built a cult following before its sound filtered into heavy metal, where its influence on the genre is widely felt. Its lyrics owed much to manager Sandy Pearlman and critic Richard Meltzer, both fellow Stony Brook students, whose words gave the group its distinctive tone.

The band began life in 1967 as Soft White Underbelly, playing house gigs on campus before a run of name changes and a stint of shelved Elektra recordings. It signed with Columbia and found mainstream success with "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" in 1976, followed by "Godzilla" in 1977 and "Burnin' for You" in 1981, songs that remain staples of classic rock radio. Its videos were also heavily rotated on MTV in the channel's early years. After Imaginos flopped in 1988 and CBS/Columbia dropped the group, it returned with Heaven Forbid in 1998, and it released Ghost Stories in 2024, which is said to be its last album.