10 Greatest Drum Performances In Rock Music History

When talking about the traditional rock band lineups, the drummer always seems to get the raw end of the deal. Since everyone wants to focus on the guitar player or the frontman, it’s hard to really draw any attention to yourself when you’re stuck behind the drum set. The foundation of any great rock song is the rhythm though, and these drummers have written a clinic on how to make the low end seem interesting.

In each of these tunes, the drummer sometimes serves as the lead instrument instead of the guitarist, going on long tangents and different drum fills that would take a marathon runner’s amount of stamina to pull off well. For all of these performances though, they do still need to serve the song they’re a part of.

As much as some of these bands have entire songs dedicated to having a drum solo, these performances work much better in the context of working off the rest of the band, knowing just when to break and making sure the entire track comes alive whenever they hit the skins. The guitarist may give some attitude to rock and roll, but these are the beating hearts that are never going to get old no matter how many times you hear them.

There are normally two schools of thought when it comes to Lars Ulrich's drumming in Metallica. While many people may cite him as one of the titans of thrash metal, he's not exactly the most stable of drummers of the era, and the test of time has not been kind to his steady rhythm if you watch the live videos of his more recent stuff. As much as James Hetfield gets more credit as the timekeeper with his rhythm guitar, Lars could bring the intensity when he wanted to.

As much as And Justice For All gets labelled as the more progressive metal album by Metallica standards, One is about as thrashy as it gets, blending the ballad style that you got on tracks like Fade to Black and ramping it up in intensity across 7 minutes. Although what Lars does is serviceable for the first half of the song, the moment that the song turns a corner is when he strips everything out and brings out the double bass pedal, with the guitars following his lead right behind him.

Since this song is meant to tell the story of a man suffering from multiple casualties of war, the sound of those kick drums could practically be the machine gun fire, as he recalls the memories of being on the battlefield and being physically torn apart. Even when the tempo increases slightly during the solo section, it's almost like you're getting a peek into this man's state of mind. It might not be the most consistent thing in the world, but being this unhinged is what the human heart rate does when terror fully consumes it.