In a scene loaded with innovators but rife with amateurs that lacked marketing vision, Iron Maiden immediately distanced themselves from the rest of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal on April 14, 1980 when they released their landmark debut album. While other emerging bands relied on a more DIY approach in regards to album packaging — the specific reliance on distinct, creative, and brand-able band logos set the standard for heavy metal for decades to come — Iron Maiden, delivered on all fronts. In addition to a striking logo that looked great on a t-shirt, the self-titled album boasted a stunning cover painting by Derek Riggs featuring a zombie in a t-shirt on a London street corner, staring daggers into the owner. That first appearance of the iconic Eddie is a classic lesson in Metal Marketing 101: Iron Maiden didn’t seem like a band, but more of a mysterious entity, and you just had to find out what this thing sounded like.

Once you delve into the music inside that garishly designed package, what you hear is a young, fiery band hitting the ground running. Five years is a long, long time for a band to go from inception to first album, but that extended period in which to gestate, to hone that sound, to tighten it up by playing show after show, worked wonders for the East London crew. By the time the band was ready to record that first album, they were primed, quickly completing it in 13 days.

With the original UK pressing clocking in at 37 minutes, by far the shortest album in the discography, Iron Maiden is lean, ferocious, and despite the band’s dislike of the production — Will Malone is credited as producer but the band says they were essentially left to do the bulk of the work themselves — it sounds wonderfully gritty, straight out of the gutters of lager-soaked, blue-collar Leyton and East Ham. Just like 1979’s The Soundhouse Tapes demo EP, the album kicks off with “Prowler,” but this time around the tempo is picked up drastically, with more bite in the band’s performance, and more menace in Paul Di’Anno’s singing. Playful and cheeky, Dave Murray’s “Charlotte the Harlot,” the only solo composition the guitarist would contribute to the band, shows a seedier side of the band that they’d downplay in subsequent years. The single “Running Free,” meanwhile, is a Di’Anno tour de force, as the frontman is in full thug mode, exuding arrogance atop Clive Burr’s Gary Glitter-derived rhythm and Harris’s lively bassline. Di’Anno was always most at home when singing the band’s more abrasive material, and “Running Free” is his defining moment as a metal singer. Interestingly, the single “Sanctuary,” a brilliant, savage little tune originally written by former guitarist Rob Angelo that was released a month after the album came out, was left off the original UK pressing but included on the North American version that same year. And for good reason, too, as the song is an early Maiden classic, one that remained a live staple for a long time.

For all that grit on the record, Iron Maiden most importantly lays the groundwork for the future sound of the band, the progressive side that Harris was always most keen on developing more. “Remember Tomorrow” is an extraordinary piece, an exercise in heavy metal dynamics that captures that ebb and flow of mellow and powerful perfectly. “Strange World,” by contrast, is strictly a mood piece, but sublimely executed. It’s the timeless “Phantom Of The Opera,” however, that sets the stage for a decades-long career. The best track on the album, Harris’s seven-minute piece is chilling, wrought with tension and menace, Di’Anno leering and looming, the guitars by Murray and Dennis Stratton intricate and searing. Stratton’s contributions cannot be underestimated, either, especially on these more prog-oriented tracks, as he came up with the bulk of the guitar harmonies and vocal harmonies, not to mention singing the backing vocals on “Phantom Of The Opera” himself. Unfortunately he was less enamored of the band’s harder-edged material, and would leave the band in the fall of 1980.

And what of “Iron Maiden,” that peculiar calling card that the band has never neglected to perform as the climactic conclusion to their concerts? It remains Harris’ strangest song, not making very much sense lyrically, built around a weird riff and even weirder syncopation. But that whole mess somehow works, dammit, and epitomizes a stupendous album that the most significant, game-changing debut since Black Sabbath ten years earlier. These five young Cockney blokes cast their gaze beyond their dinky little island of a country and set their sights on the rest of the world. In just less than two years they’d be well on their way.