Metallica: Ride The Lightning - Ranking Every Song Worst To Best

Insidiously slinking its way in at the close of Ride the Lightning to deliver a final, foreboding statement of intent that this was no longer the band who brought Kill 'Em All to record shelves, the near-nine-minute endgame is one of the band's best instrumental pieces by a fair margin; a low-slung quasi-prog metal suite that brings together the album's multiple sounds and bleeds them into a speaker-smashing finale.

Built upon a chord progression intro penned initially by former guitarist Dave Mustaine - who would later recycle the riff with Megadeth - it's a great, big, paradoxically lumbering slab of virtuoso musicianship that captures the unspecified, otherworldly menace of the works of HP Lovecraft from which it takes its title (albeit with a spelling tweak to make it more obviously pronounceable).

The song arguably became the signature tune of the S&M project after it was rearranged by Michael Kamen for the band's performances with the San Francisco Symphony , and it formed the centerpiece of their most recent performances last autumn when they reteamed with the orchestra for a pair of shows at Chase Center in California for fan club members.