Thousands of years 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. Wet Coal Crusher
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mixed Coal Crusher 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