The 100 Greatest Heavy Metal Songs of All Time

Thousands of after the Bronze and Iron Ages, the true Metal Age dawned half a century ago. In 1970, Black Sabbath convincingly evoked the true essence of evil with the lumbering, three-chord opening guitar riff to the song “Black Sabbath,” consecrating the first pure heavy-metal crusher, and the ripples have been spreading virulently ever since. Judas Priest tuned into Sabbath’s darkly jagged melodies to create their own intricate, law-breaking mini-epics, Metallica revved up Priest’s tempos to give headbangers cases of whiplash, hair bands like Mötley Crüe and Quiet Riot spruced up the music for MTV, and nu-metal mutants like Korn and Slipknot gave it a bleak post-alt-rock and hip-hop edge. At the same time, its true believers have created extreme global offshoots like death metal, doom metal, and black metal.

In those five-plus decades, fans of metal have embraced the genre’s songs as intense declarations of individuality. To be a metalhead, you’re rejecting normalcy, you’re willing to believe in yourself and visit your dark side because you know the eardrum-slaughtering decibels and aggressive lyrics are the crucible in which you feel something new and unique. Years removed from its initial rumbles, metal is now a cultural force. Over time, heavy metal has topped the pop charts, served as the basis of hit movies, saved the day in TV shows, and even signaled prosperity around the world.

What millions of fans around the world have realized is that a good metal song transports you. Amid the deafening drums and growling vocals, the ideal metal tune relates power, resilience, and even hope. Where less cultured ears hear only noise and rage, metalheads recognize nuance. A song like Metallica’s “Fade to Black,” for instance, actually helps you escape your personal darkness rather than encouraging it. Metal has always been about overcoming fear and finding community among like-minded outcasts. It’s about togetherness.

The group of headbangers that Rolling Stone gathered to rank the 100 Greatest Heavy Metal Songs of All Time debated the merits of more than 300 worthy songs over several months. These people include writers and critics who have been writing for Rolling Stone for decades and contributors to metal-focused publications. Many list voters contributed to RS’ Greatest Metal Albums list a few years back.

This time, we discussed the earliest metal songs going back to Blue Cheer’s deafening cover of “Summertime Blues” through recent instant classics like Power Trip’s “Executioner’s Tax (Swing of the Axe).” And while keeping our minds open to the basic definition of metal (weighty riffs turned up to 11), we debated the fine lines between hard rock and metal: Motörhead and AC/DC, hard-rock bands who recorded awe-inspiring statements of fury that cross over into metal, are here, while Guns N’ Roses and Kiss, whose music bears more of an overall hard-rock swagger, are not. Similarly, you’ll find songs by Def Leppard, Lita Ford, and Ratt, bands who defined a metal ethos for the time they came out even if their songs don’t sound as intense as, say, Emperor. In the cases of metal’s forebears, like Led Zeppelin and even Black Sabbath, who have shunned the “metal” tag, we picked the most metal songs in their catalogs. Our contributors submitted ballots of their personal picks for the top metal songs, we tallied them up, and we spotted a few pleasant surprises in how the ranking shook out.

So don your battle vests, raise your horns, and keep a neck brace handy as Rolling Stone counts down the 100 Greatest Heavy Metal Songs of All Time.

Hear this playlist on Spotify.

100. ‘Welcome to Hell,’ Venom | 1981

Blasphemy has been an effective attention grabber for centuries, but until 1981, heavy metal had never seen a band go as all-in on Satan as the three lads from Newcastle calling themselves Venom did. Contrasting with the forward-thinking innovation of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (a.k.a. the NWOBHM), the trio stripped heavy metal down to its most primitive, bluntest form. The title track to their debut album is a devilishly enduring classic, boasting a wicked riff that rivaled Motörhead’s “Fast” Eddie Clark, not to mention some of the most gleefully cartoonish lyrics the genre had ever heard. Critics were appalled, metal fans ate it up, and soon a generation of Scandinavian teenagers would take Venom’s “black metal” concept and run with it, straight to the gates of hell. —A.B.

99. ‘Planets Collide,’ Crowbar | 1998

In the early Nineties, Crowbar established themselves as the gruffest act on the bustling New Orleans metal scene. But “Planets Collide,” the leadoff track from the band’s fifth album, 1998’s Odd Fellows Rest, showed that there was way more to guitarist-vocalist-bandleader Kirk Windstein than his bellowing, grimacing MTV visage suggested. The song replaced the hardcore-infused wallop of earlier Crowbar with a gorgeously hazy melodic trudge, no doubt informed by Windstein’s abiding love of ‘70s AM gold, while the vocalist traded his signature bark for a gravelly croon as he chronicled his sister’s struggle with substance abuse. The result was perhaps the first sludge-metal power ballad, and the blueprint for the “heavy, emotional music” that’s since become a Crowbar trademark. —H.S.

98. ‘Executioner’s Tax (Swing of the Axe),’ Power Trip | 2017

Everything about Power Trip screamed throwback — from their tasteful marriage of hardcore and thrash, building on the golden era of so-called “crossover,” right down to their 1987-style album-cover font. But their compositional smarts and ferociously intense delivery combined to create a true new-school anthem with “Executioner’s Tax (Swing of the Axe),” the standout from their 2017 LP, Nightmare Logic.  “Go on and look at you/Today’s your lucky day,” frontman Riley Gale spat in the opening lines, taking aim at the soporific stupor that conceals the grimness of modern life. “The executioner’s here, and he’s ready to make you pay!” Following Gale’s tragic passing in 2020, many “Swing of the Axe” cover versions sprung up, including one featuring members of Obituary, a band beloved by the late vocalist, cementing the song’s status as a modern metal standard.  —H.S.

97. ‘43% Burnt,’ The Dillinger Escape Plan | 1998

Prog and hardcore punk once seemed like polar musical opposites, but by the late Nineties, a handful of innovative acts had found a way to combine the complexity of the former style with the fury of the latter. The Dillinger Escape Plan’s “43% Burnt” — from the New Jersey band’s landmark 1999 debut LP, Calculating Infinity — became something like a theme song for the movement later known as mathcore. The song’s brilliance lies in its contrast between the groovy, head-nodding crunch of its bookend breakdowns and the frenetic madness of its midsection, in which pointillistic odd-time pummel collides head-on with clean-toned jazz-fusion-esque passages. Guitarist Ben Weinman later told Decibel of the Calculating Infinity era that “the only way to get energy from technical stuff was to make it like a machine gun hitting you in the chest,” and “43% Burnt” was the archetype for that widely imitated approach. —H.S.

96. ‘Yeah Right,’ Girlschool | 1981

Combining NWOBHM thump with classic rock & roll sass, Girlschool’s 1980 single offered a charmingly snotty two-fingered salute to naysayers everywhere. The song’s message of staying focused in the face of negativity — whether you’re making much-needed life changes or just getting your drink on — would resonate in any era, but the fact that it’s delivered by an all-female band (who recorded it at a time when such things were still a relative novelty) gives it an extra kick. So, too, do a couple of searing leads from Kelly Johnson, who remains one of the most underrated guitarists of the era. —D.E.

95. ‘Davidian,’ Machine Head | 1994

Robb Flynn played an important role in the mid-Eighties Bay Area thrash scene, but the guitarist-vocalist’s greatest contribution to the heavy-metal canon came at the helm of Machine Head, the band he founded in 1991 after leaving Vio-lence. “Davidian,” the opening track from the band’s 1994 debut, Burn My Eyes, crystallized the sound of Nineties heaviness with a seismic sense of groove and almost industrial-sounding central riff, which brilliantly combined menacing power chords and piercing harmonics. The song drew inspiration from the 1993 Waco siege — during which more than 80 members of the Branch Davidian religious cult were killed by law enforcement in Texas — but Flynn’s lyrics about violent catharsis are general enough to apply to almost any scenario of rising above oppression. —H.S.

94. ‘In the Meantime,’ Helmet | 1992

Helmet came out of the noise-rock underground, debuting on the Minneapolis punk label Amphetamine Reptile with the cold-eyed assault of 1990’s Strap It On, fusing orchestrated noise, metal precision, tricky time signatures, avalanche riffs and singer-guitarist Page Hamilton’s mosh pit drill-sergeant bark. “I really liked noisy stuff and I really liked funky stuff. I really love AC/DC and Sonic Youth and Led Zeppelin,” Hamilton recalled, “Somewhere in there is Helmet.” It all came together with glorious brute force on “In the Meantime,” from their 1992 album Meantime, one of the least likely, most extreme MTV breakthroughs of the post-Nirvana alt-rock feeding frenzy. —J.D.

93. ‘Hammer Smashed Face,’ Cannibal Corpse | 1992

From the mid-Eighties through the early Nineties, metal’s fringes grew more and more extreme, but Cannibal Corpse dialed up the darkness to genuinely uncomfortable levels, fashioning songs that played like aural snuff films. Their greatest track is a relentlessly bludgeoning ditty about, yes, caving in a helpless victim’s face with a sledgehammer. The music fits the mood: a brutish yet ultra-catchy stop-time intro is broken up by jackhammer blast beats, which give way to a dexterous bass break, but it’s the near-subsonic growl of Chris Barnes (“I … feel like killing … youuuuu” is one of the only lines you might be able to decipher without a lyric sheet) that makes “Hammer Smashed Face” as unshakeable as a Faces of Death clip. Millions of unsuspecting viewers would get their first taste of the gruesome tune, and death metal as a whole, when it turned up in an unlikely setting: a club scene from the goofy 1994 Jim Carrey hit Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. —H.S.

92. ‘All We Are,’ Warlock | 1987

If Rob Halford is the Metal God, then Warlock’s Doro Pesch is the Metal Goddess. The singer co-wrote the thunderous, fist-pumping anthem “All We Are” with producer Joey Balin after moving from West Germany to New York City. It became an immediate global hit, thanks to its irresistible, shout-along chorus and Pesch’s empowering lyrics, delivered in her trademark, multi-octave snarl. To this day, Pesch remains one of metal’s most beloved icons, a trailblazer for female metal musicians across the globe, and “All We Are” remains her signature tune. “Maybe God said, ‘OK, you guys now have a little hit,’ ” Pesch told The Classic Metal Show in 2017. “It was a little bit surprising. But when people were singing on it in the studio, I could tell there was some magic there which was powerful.” —A.B.

91. ‘Pull Me Under,’ Dream Theater | 1992

In the wake of Eighties trailblazers like Queensrÿche and Fates Warning, Dream Theater became the leaders of American progressive metal in the Nineties. A year after Nirvana released “Smells Like Teen Spirit” with all its crudely simple guitar riffs, Dream Theater held fast to the showy technicality of prog rock, improbably earning a hit with the dizzying showmanship of their debut single, “Pull Me Under.” A slickly arranged epic built around Mike Portnoy’s massive-sounding drums and guitarist John Petrucci’s muscular-yet-intricate riffs and Yngwie Malmsteen-esque flourishes, the track effortlessly shifts from movement to movement, echoing Yes from two decades earlier. Singer James LaBrie passionately belts out verbose, philosophical lyrics inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, keeping this seemingly arch composition accessible for eight exciting minutes. —A.B.

90. ‘Bring the Noise,’ Public Enemy feat. Anthrax | 1991

Public Enemy’s Chuck D needed convincing that “Bring the Noise,” a single off the rap group’s revolutionary 1988 masterpiece, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, could function as a metal song. Then Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante sent him a demo of their speaker-destroying vision. It clicked with the rapper because of the thrashers’ inventive guitar interpretations of the original song’s samples and Benante’s live take on James Brown stickman Clyde Stubblefield’s “Funky Drummer” beat. It felt so good, the two groups decided to hit the road together, mounting the first rap-metal tour, during which they performed the song live. “Even with Anthrax thrashing their guitars through the number — when we got down live, I cut through that motherfucker like a buzzsaw,” Chuck D recalled in the book The Sound of the Beast. “George Clinton said, ‘Damn, you’re one of the few people I know that can bust a Marshall amp in the ass.’” —K.G.

89. ‘You Can’t Bring Me Down,’ Suicidal Tendencies | 1990

The Mike Muir who railed against schools, churches, and a mom who wouldn’t honor his simple request for “just one Pepsi” on “Institutionalized” sounded like a whiny teenager compared to the irrepressible dynamo he embodies on “You Can’t Bring Me Down,” the track that solidified Suicidal Tendencies’ transformation from hyperactive Eighties skate punks to sophisticated Nineties metal act. Penned by Muir and guitarist Rocky George, the song builds from brooding, clean-toned arpeggios to furious uptempo shred, as the frontman hammers home the song’s core message of all-purpose defiance, while firing off plenty of his patented amped-up one-liners. “And if I offended you, oh, I’m sorry,” he quips near the end, preparing to cap off one of metal’s all-time-great middle-finger anthems, “but maybe you need to be offended. But here’s my apology. And one more thing … Fuck you!” —H.S.

88. ‘This Time,’ Life of Agony | 1993

River Runs Red, Life of Agony’s classic 1993 debut, chronicles a young man’s life coming unglued during the course of a single horrific week, and album opener “This Time” establishes a key bit of backstory, detailing the protagonist’s frustration with his unreliable father. The song showcases the singular blend that made the New York quartet one of the freshest heavy acts of the early Nineties, setting burly, hardcore-esque riffs against the emotive, melody-forward vocal style of Mina Caputo. “Got time but you ain’t got time for me,” she wails bitterly during the song’s stomping midsection, bringing the intergenerational angst of the album — which bassist-lyricist Alan Robert once described as “basically my diary” — to a wrenching yet cathartic early climax. —H.S.

87. ‘Slaughter of the Soul,’ At the Gates | 1995

At the Gates rose out of Gothenburg, Sweden, summing up the port city’s melodic death-metal revolution with their 1995 masterwork Slaughter of the Soul. Frontman Tomas Lindberg’s tormented shriek never hit so hard as in the title track. “There was something a lot more hardcore about what I wrote as compared to before,” Lindberg told Revolver. “All mention of dragons and Vikings went out. I concentrated on real life and social issues. It was more down to earth and less mythical.” Less than a year later, At the Gates shocked everyone by breaking up at their artistic peak. But their influence remains vast — you can hear “Slaughter of the Soul”” in the roar of American metalcore bands from Lamb of God to As I Lay Dying. —R.S.

86. ’21st Century Schizoid Man,’ King Crimson | 1969

The central motif of “21st Century Schizoid Man,” the opening track from King Crimson’s classic 1969 debut, In the Court of the Crimson King, is a strong contender for the title of greatest proto-metal riff. It’s a doomy, swaggering figure, enhanced by the swinging savvy of guitarist Robert Fripp and drummer Michael Giles, that inspired Pete Townshend to dub it, in a contemporary label ad, “the heaviest riff that has been middle frequencied onto that black vinyl disc since Mahler’s 8th.” Peter Sinfield’s poetic yet disturbingly graphic anti-war lyrics (containing lines like “Blood rack, barbed wire/Politicians’ funeral pyre/Innocents raped with napalm fire”) and an overdriven effect on Greg Lake’s voice heighten the song’s forbidding mood, making even the classical- and jazz-inspired instrumental excursions in the song’s midsection feel like expressions of pure apocalyptic terror. —H.S. 

85. ‘There Goes the Neighborhood,’ Body Count | 1992

In between recording as a pioneering gangsta rapper and playing a cop on TV, Ice-T was briefly the most controversial metal artist in the world, thanks to Body Count’s widely banned “Cop Killer.” But in some ways, “There Goes the Neighborhood” (from the same album) was a more blatant challenge because it was a metal song, played by Black musicians, that vocally challenged racist attitudes among metal fans. “Don’t they know rock is just for whites?” Ice-T sings mockingly, before the rest of Body Count shows off its mastery of metal styles, from slow-grinding, Sabbath-style riffage to full-throttle thrash to Van Halen-esque shred. Sometimes, playing well is the best revenge. —J.D.C.

84. ‘Thunder Kiss ’65,’ White Zombie | 1992

“It was our most normal song,” Rob Zombie said of White Zombie’s mainstream entrée. “A song that a normal person might enjoy.” Even in grunge-addled 1992, “Thunder Kiss” was an uncanny hit, its unapologetically simple groove caked with the plangent squeal that betrayed the band’s New York noise-scene roots. Above police sirens and B-movie samples, Zombie grunts and stammers his creation myth, an art-school outcast — born in ’65, natch — who gets off on Harleys, horror, and lusty Satanism. “Demon-warp is coming alive,” he coughs in the chorus, presciently announcing his arrival as one of the last metal dudes to become a pop culture mainstay. —G.H.C.

83. ‘World Eater,’ Bolt Thrower | 1989

A sober depiction of the horrors of war that nonetheless feels like a triumphant call to arms, Bolt Thrower’s “World Eater” is driven forward by the band’s trademark hard-charging gallop, meaty riffage, and Karl Willetts’ subterranean growl. A squealing midsong solo and pitiless blast beats only add to the chaos. It’s a primary example of the British death metal band’s heroically uncompromising attitude. “Pride is the most important,” guitarist Gavin Ward told an interviewer in 2002. “We knew early on Bolt Thrower would never be a big band, ’cause we’d never have commercial vocals. We’d never play the game. We’d never bow.” —K.K.

82. ‘Spit,’ Kittie | 2000

When Kittie burst onto the metal scene in 2000, the young Canadians (all of whom were between 15–18 years old at the time) were immediately placed on a spiky pedestal due to their status as a “girl band,” a label they despised. Their debut album, Spit, was an endearingly rough-edged blend of thrash, grunge, death metal, alt-rock, and pure adolescent rage. Its title track is a murderously heavy proto-feminist anthem that takes aim at misogynists and lands a kill shot in under three minutes. More than anyone else at the time, Kittie understood the power they wielded. “There’s something magical about Spit in general,” Lander reflected in 2021. “You can feel our youth, our anger, all these emotions that made Kittie who we were back then.” —K.K.

81. ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It,’ Twisted Sister | 1984

It took Twisted Sister a decade of gigging around New York City in the Seventies for them to arrive at “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” which features the catchiest drum intro since Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” and one of metal’s most phenomenal hooks. “I’m from the Alice Cooper school of ‘School’s Out,’ ‘I’m Eighteen,’ ” Snider told NPR. “And Alice was very big on these anthemic songs. So I wanted to write an anthem for the audience to raise their fists in the air in righteous anger.” Snider and Co. drove their message home in an unforgettable music video that quickly became an MTV mainstay thanks to its sense of humor and the band’s New York Dolls–on-steroids look. Snider soon started hosting MTV’s Headbangers Ball predecessor, Heavy Metal Mania, but the bubble burst after he testified at the PMRC hearings, softening his public image, even though standing up to Tipper Gore was the ultimate act of questioning authority. —A.B.

80. ‘My Own Summer (Shove It),’ Deftones | 1997

“My Own Summer (Shove It)” served as the lead single from Deftones’ sophomore album, Around the Fur, and would not only become the band’s breakthrough hit but also come to define the sound of nu metal for decades to come. It’s a master class in tension building, with a pulsing guitar underneath vocalist Chino Moreno’s quiet-loud performance. And at a time of raw anger in the genre, Deftones led the pack with smart, complex lyrics (“The shade is a tool, a device, a savior/See, I try and look up to the sky/But my eyes burn (cloud)”) that made songs like this as dynamic and revelatory as they were just deeply appealing to play at full volume. —B.S.

79. ‘Balls to the Wall,’ Accept | 1984

Metal bands are not known for admitting vulnerability, but in the early Eighties, the members of West Germany’s Accept were smart enough to recognize their limitations, so they asked their manager, Gaby Hauke, who spoke English better than her clients, to write lyrics for them. She ended up writing shocking visions of toxic masculinity — sex, violence, dystopia — for their Balls to the Wall album, and the title track is a seething Cold War-era anthem. The twin lead guitars are razor-sharp; camo-clad Udo Dirkschneider leads the charge with his gravel-gargling voice and creepily grinding teeth; the production evokes leather, chrome, and steel; and Hauke’s lyrics are rife with provocative images of torture, sodomy, piles of dead bodies, and revolt. Thanks to a memorable video and some of the best riffs this side of AC/DC, the song became an instant classic. —A.B.

78. ‘Concubine,’ Converge | 2001

Converge burst into taboo territory in “Concubine,” making brutalist metalcore noise from the wreckage of a dysfunctional relationship. The song is only 80 seconds long, yet that’s all Converge need to make “Concubine” a blueprint for the raging emotional catharsis of their 2001 classic Jane Doe. The band started in the Massachusetts hardcore punk scene, but evolved into metallic math-core, with Jacob Bannon screaming his tonsil-frying poetic angst over the off-kilter polyrhythms. Bizarrely, when Converge recorded it, they were in the same studio as a certain Seventies soft-rock legend. “James Taylor was across the hall from us,” bassist Nate Newton told Decibel. “And he kept sending his engineer over to tell us to be quiet. ‘Mr. Taylor is trying to record vocal tracks, and you guys are goofing off and being way too loud over here.’ ” But “Concubine” still brings the fire and rain. —R.S.

77. ‘Jesus Christ Pose,’ Soundgarden | 1991

Opening with a swirl of feedback over thrumming bass and pounding tom-toms, “Jesus Christ Pose” is first and foremost a sonic assault, Soundgarden at their most brutally intense. But it had the words “Jesus Christ” in the title, so of course some folks were eager to be offended. Although singer Chris Cornell explained to Spin that the song was actually a criticism of celebrities claiming victimhood — “It’s pretty much a song that is nonreligious but expressing being irritated by seeing that” — its crucifix-filled music video was nonetheless pulled by MTV. But you don’t need visuals when you’ve got sounds as expressive as Kim Thayil’s stabbing guitar behind Cornell’s shrieks of “Saved! Saved! Saved!” —J.D.C.

76. ‘A Fine Day to Die,’ Bathory | 1988

Bathory were trailblazers of the Swedish black-metal scene, and  “A Fine Day to Die” from 1988’s Blood Fire Death shines darkly as their finest moment. The lo-fi bloodthirstiness and shivery solos that defined the band’s early sound are front and center, and yet you can already hear them pushing past the style they just invented to create the bombastic Valhalla-bound sound known as Viking metal. It’s a hybrid beast that spins together the best of Bathory into an eight-ish minute epic that manages to transcend a genre it’s only just defined. —K.K.

75. ‘Youth Gone Wild,’ Skid Row | 1989

The Bon Jovi-esque power ballads “18 and Life” and “I Remember You” catapulted Skid Row to mainstream success in 1989, but “Youth Gone Wild” had already won over much of the metal crowd. Although written by band leaders guitarist Dave “Snake” Sabo and bassist Rachel Bolan, it was Skid Row’s loudmouthed, charismatic vocalist, Sebastian Bach, who turned “Wild” into an anthem for rebellion. He sang couplets like “I never played by the rules, I never really cared/My nasty reputation takes me everywhere” with such ferocity, as he strutted and snarled, that it became a star-making performance. “When I joined the band, I got the tattoo of ‘Youth Gone Wild’ on my arm before we had a record deal, before we had a manager,” Bach told Guitar International. “I believed in that song with all my heart before anybody else did.” —A.B.

74. ‘Chopped in Half,’ Obituary | 1990

Obituary delivered peak death metal in its true warts ‘n’ all glory. On their second album, 1990’s Cause of Death, the swamp-grown Floridians refined their sound (a little) from their earliest splatters, but kept the oozing grooves, Southern swagger, sporadic speed, and pummeling riffs. Vocalist Donald Tardy has said, “It was the album that really started kids to realize what the two words mean when they say ‘death metal,’” and its crowning jewel, the bloodily anthemic “Chopped in Half,” is the platonic ideal of Nineties death metal — an impossibly heavy, bass-driven, thrash-infested ode to literally chopping a guy in half. Bleed! —K.K.

73. ‘Du Hast,’ Rammstein | 1997

Thudding and dance-y, Rammstein’s 1997 single was an unlikely global breakthrough in the nu metal era. It would lead to millions of teens learning at least one German phrase, if they didn’t sprechen ze Deutsch already. The industrial jam has a goth rave edge to it, with its stomping beat and a couple of techno breakdowns in the back half. Guitarist Richard Kruspe would note that the song is about loyalty, specifically the type of matrimony-like commitment the band made to one another. It’s as catchy as it is hard, with a shocking mass appeal that would lead to a pop superstar like Lizzo gleefully covering it this year. —B.S.

72. ‘You Suffer,’ Napalm Death | 1987

Napalm Death’s “You Suffer” boiled grindcore down to it primordial, unrestrained id. The track comes off the British band’s 1987 debut, Scum, and its Guinness record-setting 1.316 second runtime started as a joke but became a perfect distillation of the nihilistic jumble of sneering hardcore punk fury and manic thrash speed that animate grind’s best moments, while its four-word lyrics are a quicksilver paean to the heartbreaking futility of existence. As Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt— himself no stranger to a lyrical flourish — commented after his band took on the tune during a 2017 festival appearance, “It’s so spot on: ‘You suffer/But why?’ You don’t need to be Bob Dylan.” —K.K.

71. ‘Blood and Thunder,’ Mastodon | 2004

Mastodon had already decided they wanted to do a concept album about water — in contrast to their debut LP, Remission, which centered around fire — when drummer Brann Dailor picked up a copy of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick en route to meet the rest of the band for a series of gigs in Europe. He quickly wrote the bulk of the song based on Captain Ahab’s quest for aquatic vengeance, even borrowing several seafaring-madness lines directly from the book; the central riff and the bridge, he says, are partially based on Egyptian pop music from the 1990s. “I was just a few pages in when [the characters] start referring to the whale as ‘the sea-salt mastodon,’ ” Dailor says, interpreting the mention as a sign. “By the time I got to the U.K., I had my elevator pitch worked out for the guys.” They would end up with a driving, pummeling breakthrough hit. —D.F.

70. ‘Flying Whales,’ Gojira | 2005

Even though Gojira’s  “Flying Whales” contains samples of whales moaning in and around Joe Duplantier’s moody riffs, the singer-guitarist claims he had never even seen one of the great mammals before writing the tune. Nevertheless, this highlight from the band’s breakthrough LP From Mars to Sirius became one of metal’s great environmentalist anthems. As if ripped from some climatological-futurist manifesto, “Flying Whales” finds Duplantier imagining our largest animals after they’ve fled to space’s relative safety, “looming out of the dark.” The song’s dizzying dynamics and rhythm maneuvers spotlight the stakes of survival involved. “It may seem paradoxical to have a message of hope,” Duplantier later said, “and play this violent music.” But the bands created a pathway out of abject despair. —G.H.C.

69. ‘Evil,’ Mercyful Fate | 1983

“I was born on the cemetery under the sign of the moon,” King Diamond belts at the top of “Evil,” the opening salvo of Mercyful Fate’s first LP, Melissa. With those lyrics, King’s glass-shattering screams, and the band’s assertive riffing, the tune lived up to all the rumors that surrounded the band: King’s mic stand was a cross of human femurs, he sang to a skull named Melissa, and scariest of all, his richly Satanic lyrics were delivered with liturgical solemnity. “Evil” proved Mercyful Fate were a band that could compose as skillfully as they could shock, showcasing groove, ornate melodies, and masterfully timed dynamics that complemented King’s terrifying tale of necrophilia. “We were serious about what we were doing,” King Diamond once told author Martin Popoff. “It’s never been just an image. Playing, writing music was just by candlelight. … In the studio I would have two candles so I would just see the lyric.” —A.B.

68. ‘Runnin’ With the Devil,’ Van Halen | 1978

With its foreboding thump and dramatic chords, the opening track of Van Halen’s self-titled 1978 debut skews considerably darker than the good-time hard rock that they would become best known for. Eddie Van Halen keeps the lead-guitar heroics to a minimum, as if he’s conserving ammo for a bigger battle yet to come, while the grim lyrics David Lee Roth delivers over his bandmates’ expert tension-and-release dynamics espouse a street-hardened worldview at odds with his Louis-Prima-in-assless-chaps persona. And when the song’s mighty chorus kicks in, its message of Satanic solidarity sounds serious enough to scare pious churchgoers right out of their pews. —D.E.

67. ‘Blind,’ Korn | 1994

Originally written for Jonathan Davis’ band Sexart, “Blind” would not only introduce the world to Korn but also help usher in the reign of nu metal. The lead single off the band’s debut album is full of twists and turns — each musical and vocal choice feels like a shock. Davis’ tense vocals veer wildly between strained restraint to feral screams. Beneath his vocals is a sound that is both groovy and full-sludge heavy but informed by the grunge and rap that were dominating music at the time. No “Are you ready?” in music has ever been asked with more necessity and intensity. —B.S.

66. ‘Bang Your Head (Metal Health),’ Quiet Riot | 1983

Quiet Riot spent nearly a decade gigging around Hollywood’s clubs by the time they released their right time/right place third album, Metal Heath, in 1983, securing their legacy. If the album’s Top Five-charting cover of Slade’s “Cum on Feel the Noize” was the bait, its title anthem was the trap, clinching the band’s place in headbangers’ hearts and propelling the album to become the first metal LP to hit Number One on the Billboard 200. “It felt like a runner that’s running up a mountain and is so busy huffing and puffing that you don’t lift your head to look at the beautiful scenery of what you reach,” bassist Rudy Sarzo told Rolling Stone. “It wasn’t just a long, steady climb, but long and hard.” Boasting a monster riff by guitarist Carlos Cavazo, skull-rattling drums by Frankie Banali, and a deliriously bombastic performance by lovable loudmouth Kevin DuBrow, “Metal Health (Bang Your Head)” is still enough to drive you mad. —A.B.

65. ‘Over My Head,’ King’s X | 1989

“Over My Head” is a song about two other songs. As the lyrics make clear, it’s partly inspired by bassist dUg Pinnick’s memories of his grandmother singing the gospel song “Over My Head” while praying. (Weirdly, “Disco Inferno” by the Trammps also references that spiritual.) But as he told Greg Prato, Pinnick was also thinking of Lenny Kravitz’s “Let Love Rule” when writing the song, particularly the way Kravitz pulls back when he gets to the chorus. “That was the first time I ever heard a chorus that was anticlimactic, but it works.” As it does here, where King’s X goes for the groove instead of plumping for an anthemic refrain with delightfully ethereal results. —J.D.C.

64. ‘Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All),’ Type O Negative | 1993

Despite the pitch-black nature of their doom-powered compositions, Brooklyn mope metal kings Type O Negative and their towering vocalist, Pete Steele, loved a good joke. Their first major single, 1993’s “Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All),” is a classic case in point: Narrated by Steele in his rich, velvety baritone purr, it sends up all the schlockiest goth tropes with studied seriousness, from Nosferatu to Lily Munster, set to a grandiose soundtrack of harpsichord, thrumming bass, and rollicking rock riffs. “Type O Negative took it to the nth degree. You had to take everything with a pinch of salt,” recalled Greg Mackintosh of Type O tour mates Paradise Lost. “Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare All),” which began as a tongue-in-cheek tribute to an ex-girlfriend, ended up as an iconic moment in American gothic metal. —K.K.

63. ‘Summertime Blues,’ Blue Cheer | 1968

Often credited as America’s (and quite possibly the world’s) first heavy metal band, Bay Area biker faves Blue Cheer beat Black Sabbath to the charts by two years with this bludgeoning and brutally distorted cover of Eddie Cochran’s teen alienation anthem, blazing an eardrum-busting trail for countless stoner, doom, and other earthquaking bands in the process. “Blue Cheer made an enduring impression on this once-young drummer,” the late Neil Peart told Rolling Stone in 2009, “and definitely played their part in shaping Rush’s beginnings — a loud power trio with a fortress of amps, cannonades of drums, and a bass player’s high voice trying to pierce the darkness.” —D.E.

62. ‘Dragonaut,’ Sleep | 1992

This San Jose, California band may be best known for crafting Dopesmoker, a concept album that consisted of a single 63-minute song. But it’s the glorious, doomier-than-thou opener of 1993’s Sleep’s Holy Mountain that holds the distinction of featuring the purest strain of their pot-fueled sound. Kicking off with Matt Pike’s straight-outta-“Into the Void” guitar riff, this paean to cosmic warriors who “ride the dragon toward the crimson eye/flap their wings under Mars’ red sky” is a bong load of both sludge metal and sci-fi and fantasy tropes — imagine a character in a Frank Frazetta painting coming to life and grabbing a drop-tuned Gibson Les Paul in between monster hits. “There was obvious worship for Black Sabbath,” Pike admits, with regard to the song’s sonic template. “But we were also listening to a whole lot of dub … and smoking endless amounts of pot.” —D.F.

61. ‘We Will Rise,’ Arch Enemy | 2003

This highlight from Arch Enemy’s breakthrough 2003 album Anthems of Rebellion is a thrilling artifact of the early-aughts melodic death-metal boom. Daniel Erlandsson’s pummeling drums, Michael and Christopher Amott’s thickly layered guitars, and (especially) Angela Gossow’s venom-spitting vocals combine to deliver equal parts uplift and menace, encouraging the listener to empower themselves and seriously fuck shit up at the same time. On paper, a line like “In this sea of mediocrity/I can be anything/Anything I want to be” might read like a bland self-affirmation platitude — but launched from Gossow’s hell-scorched larynx, it sounds like a goddamn threat. —D.E.

60. ‘People = Shit,’ Slipknot | 2001

“I’m in this band because of everything that I hate about everything in the world,” Slipknot drummer Joey Jordison told Rolling Stone in 2000. Actual children of the corn, the nine mutants of Slipknot came out of Iowa in the late Nineties with their scary masks and bone-breaking live shows, and made their eye-popping extremism the most explosive attraction on Ozzfest. They summed up their hate-everything worldview with succinct fury on the nu-metal maelstrom “People = Shit,” an undeniable statement of tribal misanthropy and outcast self-determination. —J.D.

59. ‘Freezing Moon,’ Mayhem | 1994

“Freezing Moon,” one of black metal’s defining anthems, went through serious growing pains before its official release in 1994. The band’s frontman, Dead, a Swede who joined Norwegian black-metal innovators Mayhem in 1988, wrote its lyrics from the perspective of a vengeful ghost, but he died by suicide in 1991 before the band could record it in the studio. So Euronymous enlisted one of Dead’s favorite singers, Hungarian black-metal O.G. Attila Csihar from Tormentor, to attempt it. The result — with its funereal riff, cryospheric poetry, and seesawing drums — made for a grindcore monument that black-metal groups have aspired to copy ever since. Best yet: Euronymous’ gratuitous solo is a wonderful paroxysm over drummer Hellhammer’s swinging rhythms, an unsentimental celebration of the very suffering Mayhem had already and would continue to endure. —G.H.C.

58. ‘Refuse/Resist,’ Sepultura | 1993

In the mid Eighties, thrash was already slightly subversive, but in Brazil — just emerging from 21 years of military dictatorship — thrash bands like Sepultura were downright subversive. Sepultura, though, not only thrived in their environment but managed to suggest a sense of national pride by bolstering their thrash-guitar style with a percussive groove derived from traditional Brazilian music. Still, when guitarist Max Cavalera saw the phrase “Refuse/Resist” on a Black Panther’s leather jacket, a sound immediately came to mind. “It reminded me of a riot,” he told Kerrang! “Cars burning and upside down, shit spread out all over the place, chaos everywhere. When I listen to it and close my eyes, I can see a riot even now.” —J.D.C.

57. ‘The Cry of Mankind,’ My Dying Bride | 1995

An 11th-hour miracle, “The Cry of Mankind” evolved from guitarist Calvin Robertshaw finger-tapping the song’s eerie opening melody (which runs forever through the 12-minute song) and building out each part as the gloomsters of My Dying Bride divined them. Even after the “song” part of the doom-metal epic devolves into heavy atmospherics, they tried new things as singer Aaron Stainthorpe played the bottom string of a five-string violin to evoke a mournful ship’s horn. The effect is both bleak and romantic, as Stainthorpe — drunk on Byron, Keats, and Shakespere — moans like a lonely vampire over his bandmates’ crushing riffs. “I thought, ‘Rather than write about the typical heavy-metal subjects — the devil, blood, guts and mistreating women — why don’t I write about something more thought-provoking?’” he told Decibel. “I’m sure some people thought my lyrics were shit and not very heavy metal, but … I wanted to write about powerfully emotive subjects.” —K.G.

56. ‘Bark at the Moon,’ Ozzy Osbourne | 1983

In the aftermath of fleet-fingered guitarist Randy Rhoads’ tragic death in 1982, it was imperative that Ozzy Osbourne find a player who could deliver the same flash, and he found a perfect foil in Jake E. Lee as heard on the title track of their first album together, Bark at the Moon. “The title for this song came from a joke I used to tell where the punch line was, ‘Eat shit and bark at the moon,’ ” Osbourne recalled in his The Ozzman Cometh liner notes. “It was the first song [Jake and I] wrote together.” Built around a distinct, staccato riff that combined muscle and melody with shocking dexterity, “Bark at the Moon” brilliantly played up Osbourne’s “Prince of Darkness” moniker with lyrics that read like a Hammer Horror movie, and its werewolf-themed music video won over a new generation of metalheads. —A.B.

55. ‘Caffeine,’ Faith No More | 1992

“Caffeine” is the heaviest and most hair-raising song from Angel Dust — Faith No More’s masterful 1992 album about, as drummer Mike Bordin put it, “the beautiful and the sick.” Musically, it deploys a metal version of the old Holland-Dozier-Holland trick of pairing an upbeat sound with a sad message. “Caffeine” is slightly more depraved than Motown. “Pour shame all over us/ harden into a crust,” Mike Patton slur-screams. As the song progresses on the back of Jim Martin’s pulverizing blues-rock guitar and Roddy Bottum’s theatrical synths, Patton spirals Hamlet-style into madness. He allegedly wrote the song amid a sleep deprivation exercise that, in a kind of Method-acting way, let him embody the object of his contempt: society on autopilot. “Coffee shops and white-trash diner places were great for inspiration,” Patton told Circus in 1992. —S.G.

54. ‘Photograph,’ Def Leppard | 1983

Def Leppard came out of the N.W.O.B.H.M., but they didn’t stay in that world very long. As physically presentable as any New Wave band, with hooks as big as their riffs, riding the teflon glide of Mutt Lange’s production on their 1983 breakthrough, Pyromania, these rock & roll clowns became the quintessential Eighties pop-metal band, extending the music’s reach to people who wouldn’t have come within a country mile of a Motörhead song. “Photograph” was their big, lip-smacking U.S. breakthrough, with its strutting cowbell thwunk, Joe Elliott’s comely spin on the standard metal-guy shriek, and a wistful, pretty melody on the chorus. No one ever got the fluff-dog formula down better. —J.D.

53. ‘Forty Six & 2,’ Tool | 1996

By the time Tool were starting to put together their second full-length, Ænima, singer Maynard James Keenan was looking for ways to change up his cathartic, primal-scream way of writing. That involved him doing “a lot of esoteric research, reading a lot of mathematical and psychological books.” The result was a standout track that touches on the Jungian idea of the shadow self and New Age philosopher Drunvalo Melchizedek’s concept of a genetic mutation that would signal a more “unified” humankind. How better to evolve than with a song about a literal evolution? “‘Forty Six & 2” also features some killer stop-start syncopation, and one of their most rhythmic bass lines, courtesy of the band’s fresh blood: new bassist Justin Chancellor. “He wrote the most of the riffs on ‘Forty Six & 2,’ ” drummer Danny Carey says, “and if you go back listen to the takes, you could tell there’s a lot of spontaneous energy there.” —D.F

52. ‘Deliverance,’ Opeth | 2002

A sprawling, 13-minute epic, “Deliverance” neatly encapsulates the various musical impulses that find a home in this Swedish quartet’s sound. First, there’s the suite-like, multipart structure in which the band changes moods, textures, and meters every minute or so; then there’s the contrast between the band’s prog impulses and its death-metal side, neatly mirrored by Mikael Åkerfeldt’s Jekyll and Hyde vocals — on one hand, a sweet Greg Lake tenor, on the other, a growling Cookie Monster. As powered by the double-kick attack of drummer Martin Lopez, the band sounds like a monster, but don’t be fooled. As Åkerfeldt admitted, “English rock bands, they could probably beat us up any day.” —J.D.C.

51. ‘Slateman,’ Godflesh | 2001

“I’m basically a weak person,” Godflesh’s Justin K. Broadrick once said, “generally quite nervous and very, very weak.” The Birmingham, England, industrial-metal band perfectly captured that internal turmoil — and offered a blueprint for metal’s impressionistic potential — on “Slateman.” The drum machine on the track is like a mechanical animal showing no mercy, and the savage, weirdly suffocated-feeling guitars are just as vicious. But it’s Broadrick’s far-away voice, and buried by loam, blurred by wind, that’s most striking, seeming more and more wounded as the song goes on. “Slateman” is the rare metal song that overcomes you with its vulnerability, rather than its power. —G.H.C.

50. ‘Procreation (of the Wicked),’ Celtic Frost | 1984

Few musicians can wring as much darkness out of a string bend as Thomas Gabriel Fischer does on 1984’s “Procreation (of the Wicked).” One of the towering geniuses of heavy metal, Fischer, better known as Tom G. Warrior, first made his mark with crude, black-metal forebears Hellhammer before forming the more ambitious Celtic Frost with longtime creative partner, the late Martin Eric Ain. A standout from their debut, Morbid Tales, “Procreation” elevates the primitivism of Venom to something more avant-garde and more philosophical. Fischer’s lurching riff repeats and repeats in a phantasmagoric trance until the sacred and the profane coalesce into a simultaneous exaltation and lament that foreshadows Celtic Frost’s future explorations of extreme metal and high art. “It’s genuinely heavy and primitive,” Ain said of the song. “It was sort of like if Robert Johnson lived in our time and played heavy metal … it just seems really timeless.” —A.B.

49. ‘Just One Fix,’ Ministry | 1992

Ministry madman Al Jourgensen reached metal godhood with “Just One Fix” — 10 years after the band began as Eighties New Wave synth-twerps. “I start with a sellout little pop record, and wind up playing this metal monster,” Jourgensen told Rolling Stone. “I’m just bass ackwards.” “Just One Fix” comes from Ministry’s 1992 breakthrough, Psalm 69: The Way to Success and the Way to Suck Eggs. It’s a rapid barrage of industrial guitar sludge and sampled voices from drugged-out flicks like Sid and Nancy (“Never trust a junkie!”), The Man With the Golden Arm, and The Trip. That’s Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern at the start, muttering, “Gimme that Thorazine, man!” For the video, Jourgensen upped the outrage ante by recruiting one of his literary outlaw heroes, William S. Burroughs, barking “Bring it all down!” Plus the bloodiest vomit ever depicted on MTV. —R.S.

48. ‘Walk in the Shadows,’ Queensrÿche | 1986

With their gothic trench coats, piles of keyboards, and opera-trained lead singer, Queensrÿche were the sophisticates of hair metal. What could that possibly sound like? Behold, “Walk in the Shadows”: an arena-ready anthem resplendent in dueling electric guitar solos, razor-sharp harmonies, and Geoff Tate’s towering four-octave vibrato. And the whole thing is about vampires. After the ‘Rÿche’s first album, management pushed the progressive rockers to make a more polished, radio-friendly follow-up (less Bowie, more Bon Jovi). The result, Rage for Order, masterfully sneaked elements of brainy prog-rock into the glam-hair-hard-rock soup of the day, providing a blueprint for countless prog-metal bands — among them Dream Theater, Ayrean, and Transatlantic — to follow. —S.G.

47. ‘Locust Star,’ Neurosis | 1996

Neurosis guitarist-singer Scott Kelly once claimed he wrote the multilayered “Locust Star” — the centerpiece of 1996’s Through Silver in Blood, the career-making album of Bay Area punks turned beautiful doom brooders Neurosis — backstage in Portland in a minute or so, which is quite a feat. Each of the song’s elements — the wobble and roar of the group’s two guitarists, the piercing caterwauls, the bass thumping like an anxious heartbeat — shape a six-minute gestalt that’s both unsettling and rich. “Star, reign down on you,” Kelly demands in the galvanizing chorus, pausing to reinforce that last word. “Punk, to me, was something that came from within and had no boundaries,” the band’s other vocalist, Steve Von Till, said at the time. “It’s protest music.” —G.H.C.

46. ‘Night Goat,’ Melvins | 1993

Whichever way you prefer your “Night Goat” cooked — the 1991 seven-inch single on 1993’s Houdini, or the more recent acoustic from 2021 — it’s never stale. Featuring a teeth-gnashing intro, the low plough of Dale Crover’s drums, and Buzz Osborne’s primal bark, “Night Goat” is a monster of a jam that remains unsurpassed. Melvins are one of the few bands (other than maybe the Rolling Stones?) that every sub-genre of rock, from sludge to punk to metal to indie and beyond, has claimed as an influence. There are lots of reasons, but the brilliant thrust of “Night Goat” is the easiest explanation. As Sebadoh’s Lou Barlow said in 2016, “When Nirvana came out, it was like, what is this? The Melvins Junior?” —S.G.

45. ‘Symphony of Destruction,’ Megadeth | 1992

Across their first four albums, Megadeth steadily evolved into the busiest and most formidably technical of thrash metal’s Big Four. But on 1992’s Countdown to Extinction, they regrouped and decelerated, circling back to the hypnotic midtempo chug of 1986’s “Peace Sells” for what would become one of the defining anthems of their career. Opening with a sample of a Mozart mass, “Symphony of Destruction” quickly establishes a steely central groove, built around a rumbling bass line and minimalist, stop-start power chords. “It was one of those songs where you play the riff, and all of a sudden, something inside you just perks up,” bandleader Dave Mustaine once recalled. The lyrics channeled the plot of The Manchurian Candidate to paint a portrait of a politician who attains godlike powers and leads humanity to ruin. Appropriately, Megadeth have never sounded more sinister — or more majestic. —H.S.

44. ‘Green Machine,’ Kyuss | 1992

“We thought we were this heavy version of a punk band,” Kyuss guitarist Josh Homme has said about his groundbreaking group. These residents of Palm Desert, California conjured something as riff-laden and ominous as Sabbath but with their own slightly psychedelic and skewed, sun-baked bent. And no song better captures that than this propulsive 1992 cut off the Chris Goss-produced Blues for the Red Sun, in which singer John Garcia sings about how “he’s got a war inside his head” and is ready to rip it all up and start again. Despite being pioneers of Nineties stoner rock, the song isn’t about the joys of toking up; rather, Garcia is hellbent on “shutting down your greed for green, baby!” It was pure punk in the back, metal in the front — and heavy as fuck all around. —D.F.

43. ‘Bring Me to Life,’ Evanescence | 2003

Led by a piano and singer Amy Lee’s dreamy, operatic voice, “Bring Me to Life” transforms from a dreamlike ballad into a surprisingly heavy, goth-metal moment that sounded akin to Tori Amos fronting Korn. The juxtaposition of Lee’s voice, Evanescence’s hard rock angle and the rap-vocal interjections from 12 Stones’ Paul McCoy brought them to the top of the charts and made “Bring Me to Life” a breakthrough nu-metal hit in 2003. Lee would explain later that she had written the song at 19 after a friend noticed the front she putting up while in the midst of an abusive relationship. That friend turned out to be Josh Hartzler, the man she would end up marrying a few years later. —B.S.

42. ‘Curse You All Men!,’ Emperor | 1999

In four minutes’ runtime, Emperor squeeze about six different songs into one deadly, all-encompassing curse. It moves from an off-time, unheadbangable intro to a rising, galloping riff to a bracing pummel (“Curse you all men whose coil is strong,” frontman Ihsahn hectors) and then comes circus calliope keyboards, Viking chants, and maybe even a key change or two. Norway’s greatest musical athletes play 16th notes at 200 b.p.m. (that’s really fucking fast) for most of the song, propelled by drummer Trym’s battering-ram assaults. “The chord progression is moving a minor chord in chromatic steps back and forth, and still, I put a lead melody on that,” Ihsahn once explained. “We’ve kind of used common tones and managed to twist it into becoming something harmonic.” Ultimately, it’s a powerful and maybe even positive curse because no one ever comes out of it worse than they entered it. —K.G.

41. ‘Bleed,’ Meshuggah | 2008

Meshuggah’s breakthrough album, 1995’s Destroy Erase Improve, was the Terminator 2: Judgment Day of extreme metal, pushing the genre into a realm of cyborg-like technicality. But during the next decade-plus, the mad-scientist Swedes found a way to combine their signature ballet mécanique with a surprisingly warm-blooded groove. The shining example of that evolution was “Bleed,” a song from 2008’s obZen that got incredible mileage out of a deceptively simple rhythmic hiccup — known as a herta in drum-geek parlance — played in militaristic unison by the entire band. “I just basically had to kind of change my approach to how I play the bass drums,” drummer Tomas Haake later said of his famously endurance-testing role in “Bleed,” orbiting around arguably the most iconic and widely emulated double-kick-drum part in metal since Lars Ulrich’s “One” breakdown. “It’s more like tap-dancing, so you play it softer, in a more fluid way.” —H.S.

40. ‘Victim of Changes,’ Judas Priest | 1976

Judas Priest bridged the gap between metal’s firebrands (Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep) and their own dark, uncharted realms with the pummeling “Victim of Changes,” essentially rewriting metal’s rulebook. For the first four-and-a-half minutes, the band churns out a heavy, Peter Green-esque blues jam, while a young Rob Halford does his best Robert Plant strut. Then the song downshifts into a quiet, brooding bridge, and begins building momentum, until Halford dramatically explodes into a high-pitched scream of the titular line at the 6:40 mark with astonishing, genre-altering power. “Out of all the songs that Priest have ever made, it’s genuinely the one for me,” Halford told Kerrang. “It’s got the double intro guitars, the big slamming riff, the vocal, and the brilliant lead break from Glenn [Tipton], plus the outro section and the high-pitched screams. It’s really got everything in one metal song … it is probably the definitive Judas Priest number.” —A.B.

39. ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls,’ Metallica | 1984

Metallica’s first truly heavy song took form, oddly enough, on their bassist’s acoustic guitar. “[Cliff Burton] used to carry around an acoustic classical guitar that he detuned so that he could bend the strings,” guitarist Kirk Hammett once said. “When he would play that riff, I would think, ‘That’s such a weird, atonal riff that isn’t really heavy at all.’ I remember him playing it for James [Hetfield], and James adding that accent to it and all of a sudden, it changed.” (Even in Metallica, no man is an island.) After crushing power chords, Burton summons lightning and thunder from the upper echelons of his bass before the band settles into a swinging groove and Hetfield gives his finest Hemingway book report (even if he skipped to the few pages). The song became the benchmark by which all heavy Metallica songs (“Harvester of Sorrow,” “Sad but True”) have been judged ever since. —K.G.

38. ‘Killing in the Name,’ Rage Against the Machine | 1992

Rage Against the Machine’s explosive 1992 debut single, “Killing in the Name,” was a groundbreaking mashup of hip-hop, metal, and rock. The song was inspired by the police beating of Rodney King and the Los Angeles riots that followed. But the lyrics are elastic enough to apply to most any injustice — especially Zack de la Rocha’s furious “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” coda. As guitarist Tom Morello told Rolling Stone, “It relates to Frederick Douglass. He said the moment he became free was not the moment that he was physically loosed from his bonds. It was the moment when his master said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘No.’ And that’s why it’s encouraging to hear it shouted at the Fed goons who are shooting tear gas at American citizens.” —A.G.

37. ‘Chop Suey!,’ System of a Down | 2001

It would be hard to imagine a better example of the pointlessness of major label content policing than System of a Down’s “Chop Suey!” Originally, the song — a playfully tuneful bit of nu metal prog — was called “Self-Righteous Suicide,” but the brass at Columbia Records took offense, insisting the title be changed. “I remember wanting to go to the mat and keep the title,” recalled producer Rick Rubin. “The band decided, ‘Let’s call it “Chop Suey!”’ which I thought was kind of funny.” Meanwhile, the phrase “self-righteous suicide” remained the lynchpin of the song’s refrain, while the words “Chop Suey!” were nowhere to be heard. —J.D.C.

36. ‘Rock You Like a Hurricane,’ Scorpions | 1984

It took eight studio albums, but by 1984, the Scorpions finally hit pay dirt with one of the most ubiquitous mainstream metal songs of the decade. The band had steadily developed a trademark sound built around Rudolf Schenker’s economical yet contagious rhythm riffs, and his intro for “Rock You Like a Hurricane” — the riff that’s since launched a thousand airshows — captured lightning in a bottle. Coupled with Matthias Jabs’ wicked melodic leads and Klaus Meine’s clumsy yet oddly endearing double-entendres, the Scorps became instant, well-deserved megastars. Regarding disputes over how a rocking hurricane might sound — yes, metal fans are this nerdy — Schenker told Martin Popoff, “Some people think it [should] be faster, some people think it must be more crazy. But I think the double-meaning lyrics give the whole thing a kind of sexual hurricane.” —A.B.

35. ‘Fade to Black,’ Metallica | 1984

A year after Metallica introduced thrash as the most extreme metal yet, they dialed it back on their second album with “Fade to Back,” a power ballad about feeling disaffected. Although some fans screamed sellout, the song, written in a depression after the band’s gear was stolen, also touched many who could relate to lyrics like “Growing darkness taking dawn/I was me, but now he’s gone.” For all its darkness, though, the track’s instrumental climax offers a transcendent glimmer of hope as Lars Ulrich’s double-kicks propel the song skyward. Its tuneful melodies and powerful riffs made the track a fan favorite and a set-list staple. “It’s a suicide song, and we got a lot of flak for it, as if kids were killing themselves because of the song,” James Hetfield told Guitar World in 1991. “But we also got hundreds of letters from kids telling us how they related to the song and that it made them feel better.” —A.B.

34. ‘Smoke on the Water,’ Deep Purple | 1972

According to Nineties sketch comedy crew the Kids in the Hall, the opening riff to “Smoke on the Water” is “the Holy Trinity of Rock.” For guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, who wrote it in 1971, it was a lark, an inverted take on Beethoven’s Fifth. To Deep Purple bassist Roger Glover, it was simply another riff with potential as the band prepared to record it in Montreux, Switzerland. Then “some stupid with a flare gun” set fire to a Frank Zappa concert causing Glover to see a gray haze on Lake Geneva, and frontman Ian Gillan chipped in some dryly humorous lyrics and an ominous-yet-catchy chorus. It’s since become the first riff every budding guitarist learns. “We never thought for a minute it was going to have the kind of future it was gonna have,” Glover told author Steven Tow. “It wasn’t us that chose ‘Smoke on the Water.’ It was first of all some DJs, and then the public at large turned it into the song it’s become. Now, listening to it, it’s obvious. The riff is so simple and yet so different to anything else.” —A.B.

33. ‘Kiss Me Deadly,’ Lita Ford | 1988

Lita Ford’s career got an auspicious start as a member of all-female Seventies rockers the Runaways. But 10 years after the Runaways peaked, and following two under-performing solo albums, she was still trying to find her footing as a solo artist. One turning point was hiring Sharon Osbourne as her manager, but more pivotal was the discovery of a wicked little demo by songwriter Mick Smiley that quoted a 1950s film noir. Opening with the very Runaways-esque line, “I went to a party last Saturday night/I didn’t get laid, I got in a fight,” “Kiss Me Deadly” is half hooks, half attitude — a perfect fit for Ford’s aesthetic. Backed up by Pat Benatar’s rhythm section and bolstered by sleek, radio-friendly production, Ford struts, swaggers, and shreds her way through the song, living up to the potential many knew she had. —A.B.

32. ‘Mother,’ Danzig | 1998

This slick, Rick Rubin-produced song was always primed to be a Top 40 hit, but it took six years for it to finally claim its glory. Danzig originally released “Mother” as the lead single for 1988’s Danzig, but immediately faced the blowback of people claiming they were Satanists (its MTV-banned video, which featured a chicken being sacrificed on a cross, didn’t help). Lyrically, the song was a direct response to Tipper Gore and the PMRC’s crackdown on explicit music content, making for a delicious, devilish invite to the dark side. Thankfully, it would get a second life after the lightly remixed “Mother ’93” blew up. —B.S.

31. ‘Heaven and Hell,’ Black Sabbath | 1980

By all logic, the departure of Ozzy Osbourne from Black Sabbath in 1979 should have hopelessly crippled the band as it headed into the Eighties. But they brought in Rainbow’s Ronnie James Dio, burrowed themselves into the studio, and cut their best album in years. The seven-minute title track is the highlight, and only Dio could write lines like, “The world is full of kings and queens/Who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.” Paired with a haunting Tony Iommi riff, the epic tune stands all these years later as one of the mightiest Sabbath works of any era. It also neatly sums up Dio’s entire worldview.  “It expounds on my belief that the Earth can be a place for good and bad,” Dio said in 2010. “How you live is up to you.” —A.G.

30. ‘Enter Sandman,’ Metallica | 1991

God’s greatest gift to sports-arena playlists was the simplest song Eighties thrash gods Metallica ever wrote. “It’s basically a one-riff song with variations of that riff on the bridge and chorus,” drummer Lars Ulrich said in a documentary on the Black Album. Kirk Hammett came up with the riff while listening to Soundgarden, trying to create the next “Smoke on the Water.” After hearing his ominous riff, singer James Hetfield proffered a mysterious title he had tucked away for more than six years that, according to him, “no one liked until we yanked it out again.” When “Sandman” came out in 1991, anyone who purchased Master of Puppets saw it as embarrassing MTV-bait. But the mainstream Godzilla earned its keep; the song sired multitudes of metalheads the world over and, 30 years later, it’s still making converts. —S.G.

29. ‘Walk,’ Pantera | 1992

Pantera’s groovy but still heavy 1993 single would become one of the band’s signature and bestselling songs, even without breaking the mainstream threshold. With the song’s perfect scream-along hook, it’s Dimebag Darrell’s shuffle groove, paying homage to the Southern rock the Texas band grew up with, that makes the track stand out. “Walk” was inspired by the changing attitudes of their “friends” back home after they got signed to a major label. “Basically, my message is, ‘Take your fucking attitude and take a fuckin’ walk with that. Keep that shit away from me,’ ” vocalist Philip Anselmo explained. “I was just defending my own un-rock-star-ism, or however the fuck you want to put it.” —B.S.

28. ‘Holy Wars…the Punishment Due,’ Megadeth | 1990

In May 1988, Megadeth played a show in Northern Ireland, at which frontman Dave Mustaine dedicated a version of “Anarchy in the U.K.” to “The Cause.” Misinterpreting that gesture as an allusion to the country’s centuries of sectarian conflict, the crowd rioted, and the band had to be rushed away in a bulletproof bus. The incident inspired this epic meditation on the destructive nature of personal and social division, opening with the sizzling thrash of “Holy Wars” and culminating in the heroically lumbering “Punishment Due,” capped by riveting solos from Mustaine and Marty Friedman. Mustaine cut his solo in one unruly take, fresh out of rehab and playing guitar for the first time in weeks. “He was flying,” bassist David Ellefson later said. “Hearing it come down, you could feel the emotion.” —G.H.C.

27. ‘Living After Midnight,’ Judas Priest | 1980

Judas Priest spent the Seventies creating music for hardcore metal fans, but on 1980’s British Steel, in a move that was partially inspired by AC/DC, they broadened their appeal without sacrificing their edge. That’s most evident on the LP’s leadoff single, “Living After Midnight,” which was born by accident late one night while guitarist Glenn Tipton was working out a riff at England’s Tittenhurst Park, the former home of John Lennon, while everyone else in the band was trying to sleep. “You’re living after midnight down here, you are!” frontman Rob Halford recalled snapping at Tipton in his memoir Confess. “I stopped dead. We grinned at each other. ‘That is fucking great title for this song!’ he said. The next day, I wrote a lyric for it, about parting and having a good time.” The song reached Number 12 on the U.K. singles chart, and it remains their signature song. —A.G.

26. ‘Am I Evil?,’ Diamond Head | 1980

Although Iron Maiden and Def Leppard are the biggest bands to emerge from the so-called New Wave of British Heavy Metal, Diamond Head’s “Am I Evil?” is by far the microgenre’s most influential song: Metallica have been covering it for more than four decades, and they’ve even jammed on it with Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax at the Big Four concerts. The song remains a masterclass in heavy metal dynamics, from its doomy, militaristic intro to its rising-and-falling central riff. For all the occult fun in the lyrics, “Am I Evil?” showed how storytelling could be reflected more vividly with a dramatic instrumental arrangement. “’My mother was a witch’ was a great opening line,” guitarist Brian Tatler told Classic Rock. “[Singer Sean Harris’] mum probably took offense, but she’s probably forgiven him now.” —A.B.

25. ‘Rainbow in the Dark,’ Dio | 1983

Ronnie James Dio often recounted how he had to be convinced to keep “Rainbow in the Dark” on his self-named band’s 1983 debut album, Holy Diver, as he felt that its keyboard hook sounded too “poppy.” But with Dio’s ferociously committed vocal performance, Vivian Campbell’s snarling guitar work, and the song’s sublimely air-punching chorus, it’s hard to hear the song as anything other than pure Eighties metal perfection. “ ’Rainbow in the Dark’ was the first Dio song I really loved to death,” Slipknot/Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor told Revolver in 2014. “[It was] just a powerful, high-energy rock song that was so good I wished I’d written it.” —D.E.

24. ‘South of Heaven,’ Slayer | 1988

After they perfected speed metal with their 1986 album, Reign in Blood, Slayer knew they’d reached a pivot point. “We didn’t want to try to beat that album. It’d be kind of ridiculous,” guitarist Jeff Hanneman recalled to Decibel. ”So, we all talked about it: slowing the record down a bit to freak everybody out.” They did that and more on the opening, title track, which boasts one of the most spine-tingling riffs in the entire metal canon: a Hanneman-penned motif that sounds like a slow-motion descent into hell. More than 90 seconds transpire before the band kicks into a higher gear, with Tom Araya stepping forward to conjure end-times dread by invoking “chaos rampant in an age of distrust” and the “never-ending search for your shattered sanity.” The song’s patient construction showed that Slayer didn’t need breakneck tempos to assault fans’ senses. —H.S.

23. ‘Shout at the Devil,’ Mötley Crüe | 1983

As anyone who saw the fourth season of Stranger Things knows, the religious right had a full-on conniption about supposed satanic imagery in metal music back in the Eighties. In 1983, Mötley Crüe decided to lean into the controversy by calling their second album Shout at the Devil, and placing a pentagram on the cover. The anthemic title track showcases all of the band’s strengths in a mere three minutes: soaring vocals, killer guitar work, and a chorus that seeps into your brain after one listen. And in the truth, the song has little to do with summoning up evil forces from hell. “It has always been a song about pushing back,” Nikki Sixx said in 2015. “It can be about the perceived enemy at hand, the devil inside, or someone on a wobbly campaign trail.” —A.G.

22. ‘Caught in a Mosh,’ Anthrax | 1987

Even if Anthrax had never made another record after 1987’s Among the Living, their place in the thrash pantheon would be secure — thanks in part to that album’s classic “Caught in a Mosh.” Although it was initially written about the frustrations of dealing with idiotic and aggressively negative individuals on a daily basis, the mosh-pit anthem’s jackhammer assault, neck-snapping time changes, and anthemic gang chorus provide a wonderfully cathartic antidote to the toxic BS, serving up a textbook example of the transcendent and transformative power of metal. Of course, having an otherworldly rhythm section like Charlie Benante and Frank Bello doesn’t hurt at all in the “transcendent” department, either. —D.E.

21. ‘The Trooper,’ Iron Maiden | 1983

The heavy-metal rhythmic “gallop” had been around well before the 1980s — Deep Purple’s “Hard Lovin’ Man” from 1970 is arguably the first example — but Iron Maiden perfected the style via Steve Harris’ distinct, fleet-fingered bass-playing style. Maiden have anchored many songs to Harris’ upper-register bass lines rather than the guitars, and the way he leads the charge on the rousing, bracing “The Trooper” is their best stampede. The song explodes out of the gate, and singer Bruce Dickinson maniacally and seemingly unceasingly barks lyrics inspired by the Charge of the Light Brigade from the Crimean War. “[‘The Trooper’] was a vocal twister indeed,” Dickinson told Martin Popoff. “As we’ve played it over the years, it’s gotten progressively faster and faster, and I’ve taken more chunks off the end of my tongue as my teeth have collided with it.” —A.B.

20. ‘Round and Round,’ Ratt | 1984

Ratt scurried up to L.A. from San Diego and adapted themselves to the nascent early Eighties Sunset Strip hair metal scene. They hit the Top 20 with the garage-glam glory of “Round and Round.” The song had a lot going on, probably more than it needed: a brisk, bullying two-guitar attack, some nifty ride-cymbal swing, a highbrow literary allusion from singer and noted Shakespeare scholar Stephen Pearcy, comedy legend Milton Berle appearing in drag in the video, and a surprisingly vulnerable tone in the lyrics, especially Pearcy’s odd admission of self-abnegation, “tightened our belts, abused ourselves.” Hey, whatever works, you sexy rodents. The result was the catchiest hit of metal’s catchiest era. —J.D.  

19. ‘Peace Sells,’ Megadeth | 1992

The title track of Megadeth’s breakthrough album serves as a venomous response to anyone who assumes metalheads lack intelligence. “What do you mean, I ain’t kind?” he spits. “I’m just not your kind.” With David Ellefson’s jazzy bass line, Gar Samuelson’s stomping drum beat, and some tourniquet-tight crunching and shredding by Mustaine and Chris Poland, “Peace Sells” was a perfectly timed clarion call for the MTV generation, the song that made Megadeth a major player in the burgeoning thrash scene. “I wrote it because I was tired of people mocking metal in general and mocking people who are metal fans,” Mustaine told Rolling Stone. “It was hard for me to watch the way we were stereotyped on TV, just as dumbasses. For the most part, I think that a lot of musicians are very intelligent and very talented. It’s a bummer the way people had been stereotyped.” —A.B.

18. ‘Immigrant Song,’ Led Zeppelin | 1970

Lots of rock bands of the early 1970s looked (and acted) like Vikings — Led Zeppelin were one of the few who could write a song about actual Vikings and make it sound like an already-in-progress pillaging. An anomaly on the folkish, largely acoustic Led Zeppelin III, this battle-cry banger was inspired by a visit to Iceland (“We did come from the land of ice and snow!” Robert Plant has said), Zep’s ode to Norse mythology remains, both musically and lyrically, a metal masterpiece in all but name. “ ‘Immigrant Song’ comes closest to being a pulp classic,” critic Lester Bangs said in his Rolling Stone review of the album, “with its bulldozer rhythms and Bobby Plant’s double-tracked wordless vocal croonings echoing behind the main vocal like some cannibal chorus wailing in the infernal light of a savage fertility rite.” Valhalla, he is coming! —D.F.

17. ‘Back in Black,’ AC/DC | 1980

“Back in Black” may be the single greatest, wildest wake in rock and roll history. Released just five months after the “death by misadventure” of Bon Scott, the AC/DC singer who had presciently belted “Highway to Hell,” this jam recognizes that the wages of sin may be death but still parties on, anyway. When founding guitarists Angus and Malcolm Young asked new vocalist Brian Johnson to write a peppy tribute to his predecessor, he joked, “Well, no pressure there, then.” Still, he didn’t flinch. “I got nine lives … ” he screeches, “abusing every one of them and running wild.” Despite the morbid subject matter (and the album’s Spinal Tap-black cover), “Back in Black” sounds effortlessly alive, even within death’s long shadow. —G.H.C.

16. ‘Hallowed Be Thy Name,’ Iron Maiden | 1982

Picture this: A prisoner is contemplating his final moments before being taken to the gallows, feeling sorrow and growing anxiety. Now imagine that story stretched over seven minutes, sung by the ever dramatic Bruce Dickinson and set to Iron Maiden bassist-songwriter Steve Harris’ greatest slow-burning, shadowy soundtrack, and you begin to understand the majesty of “Hallowed Be Thy Name,” which closed out Maiden’s The Number of the Beast LP. The song’s effect is truly cinematic as the protagonist’s bleakness turns into panic, as the music slowly ratchets up the tension adding to the prisoner’s spiritual transcendence. “If someone who’d never heard Maiden before – someone from another planet or something – asked you about Maiden, what would you play them?” Harris once posited. “I think ‘Hallowed Be Thy Name’ is the one.” —A.B.

15. ‘Angel of Death,’ Slayer | 1986

With its punishing musical attack, pitilessly graphic lyrics, and no-fucks-given attitude, “Angel of Death” remains the quintessential Slayer song, not to mention one of the most crucial thrash-metal anthems ever recorded. Written by the late Jeff Hanneman about the atrocious experiments conducted by Josef Mengele on Auschwitz prisoners, the song has repeatedly drawn accusations of anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathies since its 1986 release; the band, however, always unrepentantly insisted that it was meant as a “documentary” of Holocaust horrors rather than a celebration thereof. Either way, “Angel of Death” was the last song Slayer ever played onstage, capping the final show of their 2019 farewell tour in appropriately ferocious fashion. —D.E.

14. ‘Stargazer,’ Rainbow | 1976

Ronnie James Dio’s signature songs might be “Heaven and Hell” and “Holy Diver,” but “Stargazer” is the man’s finest vocal performance on record. “I wrote that on the cello,” guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, who also wrote “Smoke on the Water,” once told Guitar World. “I had given up on the guitar between ’75 and ’78. I completely lost interest. I was sick of hearing other guitar players, and I was tired of my tunes. What I really wanted to be was Jacqueline du Pré on cello; so I started playing cello.” Luckily, Blackmore came to his senses and teamed with Dio to form Rainbow. On “Stargazer,” Blackmore’s Middle Eastern-flavored riffs and solos back Dio’s operatic tale of a wizard obsessed with building a tower to the stars at the expense of masses of enslaved citizens, creating a searing depiction of madness. —A.B.

13. ‘Paranoid,’ Black Sabbath | 1970

Written and recorded in just slightly more time than it takes to listen to it, “Paranoid” was a last-minute addition to the 1970 album of the same name, yet became a surprise hit on both sides of the Atlantic. With its driving opening riff, surging rhythms, and bummed-out lyrics, “Paranoid” was not only a metal anthem for the ages, but also became an important touchstone for punk bands like the Ramones and the Dickies. “We were as shocked as anybody when that got in the charts,” Tony Iommi told MusicRadar in 2010. “We thought, ‘Bloody hell, there’s all this stuff here we’re trying to do musically and then something as simple as ‘Paranoid’ gets in the charts and everybody remembers it!’” —D.E.

12. ‘Cult of Personality,’ Living Colour | 1988

It’s hard to talk about Living Colour without bringing up politics, in part because of what it meant to be Black men playing heavy metal in Reagan’s America, but also because “Cult of Personality,” as Greg Tate pointed out, “managed the feat of getting a Malcolm X sample on AOR radio.” (Churchill and J.F.K., too.) Still, despite lyrics that pair Mussolini with Kennedy and Stalin with Gandhi, the hardest-hitting content came from Vernon Reid’s guitar, thanks to a riff he described as having “a Led Zeppelin-ish vibe, but also a Mahavishnu Orchestra thing going on.” —J.D.C.

11. ‘One,’ Metallica | 1988

Between M*A*S*H, Rambo, Platoon, and “Born in the USA,” making sense of the trauma of war was big business throughout the Eighties. In 1988, Metallica took the atrocities of war to their logical conclusion with “One,” a song about a wounded and suicidal WWI soldier who has lost his arms, legs, and ability to speak to a landmine — inspired in part by Dalton Trumbo’s classic novel, Johnny Got His Gun. Between its video, which saturated MTV with imagery from Trumbo’s film adaptation of the movie, and its seven-minute runtime, which rivals “Stairway to Heaven” and “Free Bird” with its obsidian and ironclad climax, “One” catapulted Metallica to stardom. Even now, when you listen to those plaintive guitars, Lars Ulrich’s machine-gun bass-drum barrages, and Kirk Hammett’s perfectly balletic solo, yearning for escape: There may be no better gateway to metal and its rebellious willpower. —G.H.C.

10. ‘Run to the Hills,’ Iron Maiden | 1982

Having parted ways with their lead singer Paul Di’Anno, Iron Maiden soon recruited ex-Samson frontman Bruce Dickinson. “One [concertgoer] wrote a complaint,” Dickinson recalls in his autobiography, about “hearing his favorite songs played through an ‘air-raid’ siren.” Manager Rod Smallwood realized that the new singer’s signature shriek was not a bug but a feature, and quickly made sure it got the showcase that it deserved. That would be the first single off Maiden’s 1982 album, The Number of the Beast, a Western epic complete with a blistering, wah-wah-heavy solo courtesy of guitarist Dave Murray and some of Clive Burr’s ferocious drumming. But it’s that final “run/for/your/liiiiii-vvv-esssss” yowl that turned the song into a metal anthem, and it was the perfect introduction to the new voice of Maiden. “There are some songs you can feel in your bones that will be huge,” Dickinson said. —D.F.

9. ‘Holy Diver,’ Dio | 1983

After making a name for himself as the frontman of Rainbow and Ozzy Osbourne’s replacement in Black Sabbath, Ronnie James Dio launched his own band in 1983. “Holy Diver” was Dio’s first single, and it set the stage for a three-decade career full of demons, dragons, and rainbows. Recorded with future Def Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell, bassist Jimmy Bain, and Sabbath drummer Vinny Appice, Dio crafted the song about a Christ-like figure on another planet who sacrifices his life on a suicide jump meant to transport his soul to another world. “But the people on his planet, mirroring us as humanity, say, ‘Don’t go! They’ll kill you!’” Dio wrote in the liner notes to his Stand Up and Shout comp. “But what they’re really saying is, ‘Hey, we’re all selfish bastards,’ just like most humans are, and ‘We want you all to ourselves.’ In other words, ‘Fuck them, stay with us.’ It’s a reflection of humanity’s inner darkness.” —A.G.

8. ‘Raining Blood,’ Slayer | 1986

“Raining Blood” embodies what heavy metal is all about: mood, power, grandiosity, transcendence. And, in this horrifically beautiful song, actual poetry courtesy of Jeff Hanneman: “Fall into me, the sky’s crimson tears/Abolish the rules made of stone.” Articulated with astonishing clarity by singer-bassist Tom Araya, those lyrics accentuate a highly progressive arrangement that keeps drummer Dave Lombardo on his toes, from the opening toms during the intro’s thunderstorm to the song’s violent, Grand Guignol-style climax before abruptly cutting to that same thunderstorm. “The intro is big with the two-guitar harmony part, and then that first beat that Dave does, that double-kick thing and it’s like this backwards gallop that gets the crowd going wherever you are,” guitarist Kerry King told Decibel. “We could be playing in front of Alanis Morissette, and the crowd loves that part.” —A.B.

7. ‘Iron Man,’ Black Sabbath | 1970

Ominous, colossal, and yet so simple that even a novice guitarist can figure it out, Tony Iommi’s stump-fingered “Iron Man” riff is the very definition of Seventies heaviness. “I just thought it was the heaviest thing I’d ever heard,” Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler said in the liner notes to Paranoid: Super Deluxe Edition, “so I wanted to reflect that in the lyrics.” Taking an additional cue from Ozzy Osbourne’s observation that Iommi’s riff “sounded like some big iron bloke walking through the city,” Butler dreamed up a metallic anti-hero, whose attempts to save the world result only in alienation and destruction — an outcome symbolized by the lumbering rave-up that brings this immortal anthem (and Side One of 1970’s Paranoid LP) to its shuddering close. —D.E.

6. ‘Crazy Train,’ Ozzy Osbourne | 1980

Released in September 1980, “Crazy Train” drew a defining line between Ozzy Osbourne’s Black Sabbath days and his solo career, and served as a signpost to where metal was heading in the new decade. Although the song’s lyrical concerns — mental illness, the specter of nuclear annihilation — would have certainly been familiar to Seventies headbangers, the music was sleeker, punchier, and highlighted by the dazzling (and soon to be profoundly influential) shredding of newly minted guitar hero Randy Rhoads. “I knew him for a very short amount of time,” Ozzy said of Rhoads in a 2021 Rolling Stone interview. “But what he gave me in that short amount of time was immeasurable in fucking greatness.” No one hearing this song could argue that. —D.E.

5. ‘War Pigs,’ Black Sabbath | 1970

Anyone who feels metal is no place for politics must have snagged a scuffed copy of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid LP, since it’s not only the fountainhead for so much heavy riffage on this list but also a premier example of Vietnam-era antiwar agitprop. That sense of political angst comes through right away on “War Pigs,” whose bludgeoning riff and relentless rhythm offer no quarter to the money-hungry politicos who have shipped hapless kids off to die; it’s a theme that would resonate through metal for decades to come, from Metallica to Bolt Thrower. The song ends with Ozzy Osbourne’s vengeful vision of the apocalypse, God and Satan rendezvousing to reclaim what power-hungry men have ruined, before Tony Iommi’s guitar hurls itself into oblivion. “Politicians are the real Satanists — that’s what I was trying to say,” bassist-lyricist Geezer Butler explained almost half a century later. —G.H.C.

4. ‘Breaking the Law,’ Judas Priest | 1980

“Breaking the Law” is proof that economy can be just as effective in metal as grandiosity. Released right when the New Wave of British Metal was reaching its apex, these seasoned Seventies veterans showed their younger, faster, louder peers that they could still evoke teenage angst with the best of them. “Breaking the Law” is rage, catharsis, and pop accessibility neatly wrapped in patent leather and chrome studs. When Rob Halford hollers, “You don’t know what it’s like!” as glass breaks and sirens wail in the background, you can’t help but feel his frustration. “You hear it in all bands, they’d be playing a particular song for so many years that they get fed up with playing it,” guitarist Glenn Tipton told Decibel. “But the simple fact is, once you get on the stage with the audience behind you, you never get fed up with a song like ‘Breaking the Law,’ the audience singing along … It’s more exciting to play than it ever was.” —A.B.

3. ‘Ace of Spades,’ Motörhead | 1980

The New Wave of British Heavy Metal marked the point at which the music went from slow and sludgy to fast and furious, and few songs epitomized that change of pace as completely as “Ace of Spades.” Between the high-voltage twitch of Lemmy’s bass and the manic gallop of Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor’s double-bass drum kit, the band clearly had the pedal to the metal. But while many fans would flash horns up to lyrics like “I don’t want to live forever,” Lemmy had second thoughts, telling journalist Mick Wall, “Actually, I’d like to die the year before forever. To avoid the rush.” —J.D.C.

2. ‘Master of Puppets,’ Metallica | 1986

Metallica had already exerted a revelatory impact by adding an American spin on the New Wave of British Heavy Metal when they invented thrash, but the title track of their third album brought nuance and complexity to their speed-metal assault and opened up the entire genre to new possibilities. The twists and turns of this song are thrilling, from the supercharged verses to the somber middle section, from the thunderous shout-along bridge to guitarist Kirk Hammett’s searing solo run. “What surprises me the most is when I listen to the radio and something from ‘Master of Puppets’ will come on, and I’m amazed at how current and modern it still sounds,” Hammett told Rolling Stone. “I’m thankful for that. That doesn’t always happen.” —A.B.

1. ‘Black Sabbath,’ Black Sabbath | 1970

Heavy metal was born, fittingly enough, in a nightmare. “I was asleep and I felt something in the room, like this weird presence,” bassist Geezer Butler once recalled of the origins of the song “Black Sabbath.” “I woke up in a dream world, and there was this black thing at the bottom of the bed, staring at me. … It just freaked me out.” 

Butler’s band, then known as Earth, had been trying to make it on Birmingham, England’s heavy blues scene for a couple of years when they concocted the idea to write songs that would frighten listeners like horror movies. Guitarist Tony Iommi struck three chords with a sinister quality, and Osbourne reacted to them by imagining Butler’s demon peering at him: “What is this that stands before me?” he bellowed. They called the song “Black Sabbath” in deference to the like-titled Boris Karloff fright flick and decided they liked it so much that they renamed themselves Black Sabbath, too. Finally, they had a song that was truly heavy and after producer Rodger Bain added a thunderstorm and a knelling church bell to the song’s intro, “Black Sabbath” became a true metal original. Today, “Black Sabbath” exudes the same raw, infernal majesty; it’s both scary and fun at the same time. It’s the feeling all metal bands have been chasing ever since and it still reigns supreme. —K.G.

From Rolling Stone US.