Revile it if you will, laugh it off—but heavy metal's influence and audience just keep on growing. And nowhere is its brash outrageousness better expressed than on its album covers.

This chunky compendium is a dungeonful of metal overload, complete with leather- and spandex-panted, huge-haired rockers, drooling beasts, and plenty of skulls. Charting a visual course of the genre, Heavy Metal Thunder shows the best album art from its youthful incarnation in the late '70s through the MTV era, when glam and hair metal ruled; to the punk-inflected revolutions of thrash and Nu Metal (with a grunge side trip); to the gory contemporary genres of grindcore, black metal, and doom.

Page after page of aggressive and excessive album graphics makes this the perfect gift for both current metalheads and nostalgic (if embarrassed), thirty-and forty-somethings with headbanging memories.