https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8ZqFlw6hYg After you've been embroiled in metal culture for longer than say, a few minutes, chances are you'll hear somebody somewhere scream this band name at you, whilst you also somehow come into the knowledge that Raining Blood exists, and it is nigh-impossible to say a bad word about it. If a riff can get more epic thanks to a brilliantly put-together bed of sound and some delightfully satanic context, then Raining Blood is elevated far past the vast majority of the rest of this list thanks to the inclusion of a Sabbathian rainstorm that permeates the beginning of the recording; something that Kerry King clatters through like some man-made thunder-god when his playing ignites the track, prompting the ghost of some nondescript messiah to have a heart attack. As Metal Hammer and The Guardian writer Dom Lawson once mentioned on his blog; the only thing that would survive the apocalypse would be "some guy in a Venom shirt, clutching a half-drained bottle of Merrydown and shouting Slayer! at the top of his voice." And with riffs as immortally population-commanding as this, there's never a truer word been said.