10 Best Hard Rock & Heavy Metal Songs Of 2018
1. Orphaned Land – “The Cave”
Why is “The Cave” number one? Simple: it achieves every single thing that anyone could ever want from an individual song.
The track is the opening cut of Orphaned Land’s masterful Unsung Prophets & Dead Messiahs, an album which expands a progressive metal backbone with eclectic, Middle Eastern instrumentation and Islam-inspired melodies. “The Cave” introduces these techniques on the first Orphaned Land album in five long years, commencing with dulcet humming and luscious strings.
After this ambient introduction, the track explodes into an exotic metal onslaught. Guitars and drums rock the listener, while bombastic symphonies, foreign instruments and Kobi Farhi’s clean singing all craft a beautiful yet unfamiliar landscape.
From then on, the lengthy extravaganza tucks and dives between death metal grunts, sweeping verses and increasingly grandiose instrumental segues. Its composition and technical prowess – especially from the crunching riffs and luscious orchestras – are all sublime enough by themselves to get the song onto this list, but the addition of insightful lyrics elevates “The Cave” to an entirely new level.
The band draw influence from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave for the song, narrating a dark, poignant and philosophical story via some of the very best lyricism of 2018, bar none.
Heavy, multicultural, inspired and essential, “The Cave” is nothing short of a metal masterpiece.
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Check out our list of the best heavy metal live bands of 2018 here.