5 Greatest Hard Rock Album Opening Tracks

When crafting an album, the running order is one of the most important parts of the process. After recording your A-material, you've got to sequence each track in a way that gives the record its own cohesiveness. This provides a nice flow to the album experience and never makes the listener feel bored.

Of all these spots, the album opener is the trickiest choice to decide on. This track has to quickly captivate the listener's attention while also setting the tone for the rest of the music that's to follow. With your typical pop formula, it gets all the more difficult to find songs that stick out amidst all the bangers you've already assembled.

However, the hard rock genre has had a track record of making absolutely stellar opening tracks that do their job while also holding up as great songs in their own right. If listened to on their own, these tracks go from merely setting up a scene for an album to taking the listener on a journey within just a few minutes. Here are examples of the tunes that blow the doors off their hinges.

By the time Metallica had reached 1986, they were primarily known for their unique brand of punk and metal that became known as thrash. Across the band's catalog, many opening tracks stand out such as "Fight Fire With Fire" off of Ride the Lightning , which starts off with classical guitars before exploding into the heaviness, or Kill Em All starting with a live barrage of noise before launching into "Hit the Lights."

However, "Battery" opens Master of Puppets by slowly setting up a musical texture. The song begins with a simple acoustic guitar melody, which is then accompanied by another harmony guitar. As more guitar harmonies pile on top of each other, the volume subtly increases before the distortion is cranked and every guitar harmony is playing at 10. Once the build becomes too much to bear, the track takes you down the mountain with James Hetfield's lightning-fast guitar riff that becomes the basis for the song.

While the song itself is fantastic, the intro of the track gets the listener accustomed to the thrash metal hysteria that is to come. A phenomenal starting gun for one of metal's greatest releases.