 The NWOBHM – comprising bands with very different influences and styles – was promoted as both a movement and a distinct music genre only in its formative years during the mid @-@ to @-@ late 1970s . Especially in those early years , what characterised the flood of new music was its raw sound , due in large part to low @-@ budget productions , but also to the amateurish talents of many young bands . Those young musicians were also linked by a shared inspiration from the works of the aforementioned successful heavy rock bands of the late 1960s and 1970s , and kept a sort of continuity with the earlier acts , whose music had temporarily gone out of fashion but was still thriving underground . However , the media of the 1980s and the promotional literature of record labels typically placed rock music that employed loud guitars but was not classifiable as " punk " under the blanket term " heavy metal " , subsuming the entire spectrum of NWOBHM bands within a single music genre . 
