10 Best Hard Rock Soundtrack Albums

Most of the heavier side of music tends to belong to the action movie tie-in. As opposed to just making a typical bunch of songs meant to bang your head to, it tends to work a lot better when you have some badass fight sequences going on underneath it all.

Then again, sometimes a soundtrack turns out so good that you don't even need the visuals.

Across every decade of film making, people have put together amazing track listings that tell more of a story that the actual film that it accompanies. Done in the old Tarantino style of soundtrack, most of these run less like orchestral score and more like mixtapes, as if you're getting a peak into the mind of the director as they pick the best music to suit what's happening.

Whereas some of these might work best with just random obscure songs, the best are when they take either a new song or a classic one and recontextualize it to mean something different then it originally was going for.

While the writers might have had other intentions in the beginning, a lot of these albums still hold up even if the films do not. Drop the needle and get a taste of what classic albums you've been missing after all these years.

The entire film industry seemed to shift on a dime after seeing the Matrix for the first time. Being one of the first major leaps into the world of full-on CGI, all other film studios had their fair shot at incorporating more computerized elements into their films, both for better and for worse. No matter what happens in the story though, the actual soundtrack had the feel of the film down to the letter.

Since most of the themes of the Matrix involved delving into the unknown wonders of technology, the incorporation of some of the most hard-edged rock and roll made almost too much sense. Breaking into the industrial genres, the pedigree on here reads like a who's who of the heavier side of the tracks, from Marilyn Manson turning up on Rock Is Dead to some of the more respected names in the industry like Rob Zombie and Deftones having a fair shake.

When it comes to the actual use in the film though, nothing gets better than Rage Against the Machine's Wake Up being played in the final moments of the film, almost to put a firm point on the fact that nothing is quite as it seems. While some may claim it reeks of the early '00s now, the music behind it is still one of the most consistent mixtapes of the industrial movement.