75 Best Metal Songs of All Time Ranked

Eight minutes and thirty-five seconds long and it never drags. That is the thing about Master of Puppets that gets lost in the conversation about its legacy: how well it's actually constructed as a piece of music. The main riff is one of the great thrash riffs, fast and precise, but the song earns its length by genuinely going somewhere. The clean guitar section in the middle, where James Hetfield sings over arpeggios before the tempo collapses back in, is the kind of structural decision that separates a great song from a good one.

Metallica wrote it at a point when they were the best thrash band in the world and knew it. Cliff Burton died in a tour bus accident seven months after it came out, which gave the whole record a retrospective weight it didn't need. It was already the definitive thrash metal statement before any of that happened. The song is about drug addiction as a form of control, which Hetfield has said came partly from watching someone he knew lose themselves to it. The metaphor of a puppetmaster pulling strings gives the lyric a theatrical quality that makes it work as a metal song rather than a public health warning.

It's been played at virtually every Metallica show since 1986. It was the song playing in Stranger Things Season 4 when Eddie Munson played guitar on the roof in the Upside Down, which introduced it to a new generation in 2022. That it still works forty years after it was written tells you most of what you need to know.

Tony Iommi wrote the riff in about five minutes because the album needed another track and they were almost out of time. Geezer Butler wrote the lyrics in the same session, based on something Ozzy said about feeling paranoid. The whole thing was recorded and mixed in a single afternoon. It is two minutes and forty-eight seconds long and it is the second most important metal song ever made.

The reason Paranoid works so well as a metal song is its directness. Black Sabbath's other early landmarks, War Pigs, Iron Man, Black Sabbath itself, are slow, heavy, atmospheric. Paranoid is fast. It sounds almost like a punk song played with a metal sensibility, which makes it the most accessible thing on the album and, as it turned out, one of the most accessible things in the genre's history. The guitar solo is twelve seconds long and completely right for the song.

It's easy to underestimate how strange and original this sounded in 1970. Led Zeppelin were doing something similar in terms of heaviness but nothing that quite sounded like this. The fact that it came from a five-minute accident in a recording session is not the interesting part of the story. The interesting part is that it still sounds like nobody else.

Dave Mustaine wrote the first part of this song after a confrontation with a religious sect in Belfast who were selling bootleg Megadeth merchandise and told him not to say anything bad about them onstage because it would cause trouble. He went back to his hotel room and wrote a song about religious violence. The second part, The Punishment Due, came from a separate idea about the Punisher comic book character. Mustaine stitched them together and they became the opening track on Rust in Peace, which is the most technically accomplished thrash album anyone made.

Holy Wars is extraordinary because it sustains a level of complexity and aggression for six minutes and thirty-two seconds without the energy dropping. Marty Friedman's guitar playing on this record is some of the finest lead work in the genre. His solo on Holy Wars is the centrepiece: melodic, precise, completely at odds with the chaos of the rhythm guitar underneath it. Nick Menza's drumming gives the song its physical force. The production is clean enough that you can hear every element working.

Kirk Hammett brought the opening riff to a rehearsal and James Hetfield immediately knew it was something. The Black Album sold thirty million copies. Enter Sandman was the first single and the song that introduced Metallica to an audience that had not been paying attention to thrash metal in the 1980s. Lars Ulrich has said that the band deliberately set out to make a record that would play on the radio, which infuriated a portion of their existing fanbase and made them one of the biggest bands in the world.

The song works because Hetfield's vocal melody on the verse is genuinely strong, which was not always a priority in Metallica's earlier work. The lyric about children's nightmares and the sandman is theatrical without being silly, and the quiet-loud dynamic gives the song a shape that rewards repeated listening. The mid-section breakdown, "exit light, enter night", is one of the great crowd moments in rock or metal, which is why it still opens Metallica sets in stadiums.

Black Sabbath originally called this song Walpurgis, a song about witchcraft. The record label made them change the lyrics because they were worried about satanic content. Geezer Butler rewrote it as an anti-war song. The result was a piece of writing about Vietnam-era political reality that was more genuinely radical than almost anything else on the radio in 1970, delivered on top of one of the heaviest and most distinctive opening riffs in rock history.

War Pigs is nearly eight minutes long and structured in a way that was entirely new for heavy music at the time. It opens with that slow, grinding riff. Iommi tuned his guitar down because he'd lost the tips of two fingers in a factory accident and needed lower tension to play comfortably, which is why Sabbath's early records sound like they do. The song builds through tempo changes, drops into a quieter middle section, and then the whole thing accelerates into a final stretch with a completely different feel. The band were basically inventing progressive heavy music and a genre called doom metal simultaneously, on their second album.

System of a Down are a genuinely strange band. Four Armenian-Americans from Los Angeles who fused metal riffing with Middle Eastern musical scales, political lyrics and a vocal style that swings between Serj Tankian's operatic wailing and Daron Malakian's more aggressive delivery. Chop Suey! is the most concentrated version of everything that makes them distinctive, which is why it became the most recognisable thing they ever made.

The song was originally called Suicide, which the label asked them to change after September 11, 2001. Toxicity was released two weeks after the attacks. It starts with acoustic guitar, explodes into a riff, and then does about six different things over the course of three and a half minutes without ever losing the thread. The section where Tankian sings "I don't think you trust / in my self-righteous suicide" in a high, almost operatic register while the guitars drop into something almost delicate is one of the strangest and most effective moments in 2000s metal.

Toxicity went to number one in several countries. System of a Down were on the cover of magazines that didn't usually cover heavy music. Chop Suey! is still one of the most-streamed metal songs on Spotify, which suggests that whatever they were doing in 2001 has held up better than most of what surrounded it.

Lemmy Kilmister has said he found the song a bit embarrassing in later years because it became so definitively the Motörhead song that audiences expected it at every show regardless of what else the band had done. He played it anyway, every night, for thirty-five years. It opens with one of the most immediately recognisable bass riffs in rock history and then stays at that pace for under three minutes before stopping.

The importance of Ace of Spades to metal is in what it connects. Motörhead sat at the intersection of punk speed and metal heaviness in a way that nobody had quite managed before. The punk scene gave them the aggression and the attitude; the metal scene gave them the volume and the guitar tone. The result influenced thrash metal directly. Metallica, Slayer and Megadeth all cited Motörhead as a foundational influence, and you can hear it in the picking speed and the general philosophy of not slowing down for anyone.

Reign in Blood is twenty-eight minutes and fifty-six seconds long in total. Rick Rubin produced it and later said he wanted to see how fast and heavy a record could be without becoming unlistenable. Raining Blood closes the album and it's the moment that justifies the whole experiment. The opening is a storm of noise: a rain effect, then a descending riff that sounds like something collapsing, before Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman launch into one of the most violent guitar exchanges in recorded music.

Slayer were doing something genuinely extreme in 1986. Not just faster or heavier than their peers, but operating at a level of controlled aggression that most bands couldn't match technically. Tom Araya's vocal on Raining Blood is almost entirely screamed, which was unusual for a song intended to close a major-label album. Dave Lombardo's drumming is the reason the song doesn't collapse under its own speed. The final section, where the descending riff comes back and Araya delivers the last line over it, is one of the great endings in metal.

Dimebag Darrell tuned his guitar down and played four notes. Those four notes became one of the most copied riffs in metal history. Walk is the simplest thing Pantera ever recorded, which is precisely why it works. Vulgar Display of Power was a turning point for heavy music. It took the groove and physicality of what Pantera had been developing on Cowboys from Hell and stripped it back to its most direct, confrontational form.

Phil Anselmo's vocal performance is the other half of what makes Walk distinctive. The lyric is about self-respect and refusing to be pushed around, delivered with a level of conviction that sounds genuinely angry rather than performed. The breakdown section, "are you talking to me?", became one of the most quoted moments in metal, regularly appearing in films and TV shows whenever a director needed to signal that a character was not someone to be messed with. Pantera invented groove metal and Walk is its defining statement.

Slipknot made their reputation on Iowa, an album so relentlessly aggressive that it alienated as many people as it attracted. Duality was the moment they figured out how to be heavy and melodic simultaneously without compromising either quality. The verse is all downtuned riffing and Corey Taylor at his most controlled; the chorus opens up into something genuinely huge that works as a singalong in arenas of 20,000 people.

The music video was filmed at a house party in Des Moines that got significantly out of hand. Fans showed up and started moshing in the living room. That energy made it into the final edit, which gave the song a particular context: this is what Slipknot's music does to the people who connect with it. Duality introduced the band to listeners who would not have made it through Iowa, and those listeners then went back and discovered the heavier material. It works entirely on its own terms as well.