10 Metal Songs That Are Ridiculously Long

There’s a good chance that half of this list could have been populated with entries by Dream Theater. Throughout their entire run, these progressive rockers have been teaching clinics on how to make long songs interesting, from sweeping epics on Octavarium to comparatively shorter songs like Pull Me Under to get people hooked in. In the age before Pro Tools though, Dream Theater didn’t even bother trying to stick A Change of Seasons on an album to fit the runtime.

Because much in the same vein as their heroes like Rush and Genesis, this is a song that feels like an album unto itself, standing at 23 minutes and being a showcase for nearly everyone in the band. Looking to separate it on its own EP, this was where Dream Theater started to toy a little bit more with what they were capable of, making a song that was a lot more cinematic in scope than what they were already working with on albums like Images and Words.

Even though every band member gets some short of showcase on this song, this isn’t just playing for the sake of playing either, using the song as a way of telling a story, operating as a quite literal change of seasons going from one musical tone to the next across the runtime. Dream Theater were already a phenomenal band from a technical perspective, but this could very well be the moment that things turned a corner in their songwriting. Now with a song like this under their belt, they were more than ready for future projects like Metropolis Part 2 and Octavarium.