Two decades into the century, we thought we’d try to give ourselves a headache by counting down the 100 greatest songs of the last 21 years! The only rules? One song per band, songs from 2000 onwards only. That’s it. So, without further ado, here’s the best playlist you’ll see this year - as picked by us, you guys and some of metal’s biggest and best names…

WORDS: MERLIN ALDERSLADE, ELEANOR GOODMAN, STEPHEN HILL, JONATHAN SELZER

Nine Inch Nails, channelling ‘2015 UK metal band’s first promo shoot’

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100 ATREYU

BLEEDING MASCARA

(The Curse, 2004)

‘Goooooooooooooooooo!’ raged Alex Varkatzas over a screaming guitar, opening the love/hate song that captured a moment. US metalcore was invading Britain and edging out nu metal, and this Orange County lot were serving up just the right amount of gothic lyricism on top of a scene-friendly melodic chorus.

99 SÓLSTAFIR

ÓTTA

(Ótta, 2014)

‘Metalheads destroyed by banjo’ wasn’t the most predictable headline of 2014. Emerging from a tapestry of lush, searchlight guitars, that forlorn orbital riff waxed and waned like it had been abandoned by time immemorial. But it wove together the year’s most magical and transformative experience, imprinting itself into the deepest crevices of the heart.

98 ELECTRIC  WIZARD

FUNERALOPOLIS

(Dopethrone, 2000)

BRAND PICK!

“The song slowly gathers force and escalates like a storm. From desperation towards rage and destruction. It has given a lot of meaning to me in its nihilism, and reflects my darker feelings towards our society very accurately. The climax is definitely the end part where you can literally hear an electromagnetic pulse caused by nuclear warheads passing through the band.”

JUN-HIS, ORANSSI PAZUZU

97  NINE INCH NAILS

THE HAND THAT FEEDS

(With Teeth, 2005)

Trent Reznor was out of rehab and going… disco? His first new music after delicate and distorted album The Fragile might have been a surprise, but this upbeat industrial dancefloor filler – complete with a synth solo – became his biggest hit single, leading into the fertile second act of his career.

96  TWIN TEMPLE

SEX MAGICK

(Twin Temple (Bring You Their…), 2018)

Sex Magick was the irresistibly seductive centrepiece of one of the most unlikely breakout albums of the decade. A subtly subversive, dreamy bop built around the hypnotic vocals of Alexandra James, it proved that A) The Devil really does have the best tunes and B) Doo-wop could be metal as fuck.

Twin Temple: dance with the devil in the pale moonlight, people

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95 SIKTH

BLAND STREET BLOOM

(Death Of A Dead Day, 2006)

Just how big would Sikth be if they’d released Death Of A Dead Day in 2016 instead of 2006? We’ll never know, but one of 21st century UK metal’s most influential bands assured their moment in the sun all the same, not least courtesy of this scattershot, frenetic, genremashing banger. It still sounds huge.

94  BODY COUNT

NO LIVES MATTER

(Bloodlust, 2017)

Preceded by an impassioned monologue by Ice T, No Lives Matter offered incisive takes on the issues of racism, police brutality and civil unrest. Of course, the lyrics were helped along by some seriously monstrous riffs, proving that Body Count were still sitting on top of the rap metal pile.

93 KVELERTAK

BLODTØRST

(Kvelertak, 2010)

“Blodtørst highlights Kvelertak’s explosive ferocity, combining 100-proof Scandinavian metal, huge classic rock choruses and the energy of an out-ofcontrol party. It’s inspiring for Norway to see Kvelertak succeed internationally while singing most songs in Norwegian. They kicked a game-winning goal on album one and they’ve kept scoring.”

JO FLEISCHER

92 DIMMU  BORGIR

PROGENIES OF THE GREAT APOCALYPSE

(Death Cult Armageddon, 2003)

“Sven and Galder’s thunderous, riffing madness mixed with the orchestral score and Shagrath’s distinctive vocals made you pay attention right away; they crafted the future of today’s symphonic death metal bands and more. The video was a first of its kind with a high budget and intricate cinematography, which influenced a flurry of bands to follow suit. Not to mention the crazy ending of the song: ‘ONCE AND FOR AAAALL!’ Progenies… is a true classic!”

MAURIZIO IACONO, KATAKLYSM

91 ARCH ENEMY

WE WILL RISE

(Anthems Of Rebellion, 2003)

While Arch Enemy had already established themselves as one of the most solid names in melodic death metal, the arrival of Angela Gossow in 2000, replacing departing vocalist Johan Liiva, undoubtedly pushed them further up metal’s proverbial ladder. Her first album with the band, 2001’s Wages Of Sin, was an ambitious step forward, mixing catchy, shreddy death metal with arena-sized hooks, all led by Angela’s guttural roar. It brought the band legions of new fans -and created instant pressure for a follow-up.

“When Angela joined the band for Wages Of Sin, it made a big impact and a huge difference to what we were doing,” recalls guitarist and band founder Michael Amott. “We had a heavy touring schedule for the first time in our career, so it was a shock when management told us that we needed to start thinking about making a new album. We were like, ‘OK… we don’t have any songs!’ We wrote in breaks between tours – that’s where We Will Rise came in.”

Come 2003, Arch Enemy were on the verge of an unlikely breakthrough into metal’s upper tiers. As they set about writing the follow-up to Wages Of Sin, they needed a song that would firmly and loudly plant their flag for the next era. Plus, given that the crowds were growing, they needed an anthem that’d be guaranteed to go off live.

“I’M NOT PLAYING ANYTHING FOR HALF THE VERSE!”

MICHAEL AMOTT

“When you go out on tour and play a lot of shows, you start noticing what goes down well and what doesn’t, and so we wanted an anthem that would be a good track for the set,” Michael notes. “Chris [Amott, Michael’s brother and former Arch Enemy guitarist] brought in the basic riff, the main theme for the song, and a couple of the other riffs as well. I added a few bits and pieces and we all arranged it together. It felt pretty sparse and very straightforward, but we were very interested in doing something like that because we had a lot of very busy tracks. The busier songs were not going down as well as the more mid-tempo anthemic songs, so We Will Rise was perfect.”

Unusually for Michael -whose mixture of flamboyant melodies and fretboardsizzling shredding has made him one of extreme metal’s foremost guitar heroes -We Will Rise represented a learning curve in how to show restraint to make the most out of a great song.

“We had much more confidence after touring so much, and particularly with Angela in the band. We were excited to do something new and We Will Rise was just that. There was a bit more air in the song. It had a lot more dynamics than we’d had previously. We’d always been totally full-on before! We’d always hidden behind the full-on attack, playing a lot, all the time. You’re more vulnerable when you just stop and let the song breathe. For half of the verse in We Will Rise, I’m not actually playing anything!”

Despite the bold new song structure, the band’s label were confident in We Will Rise’s potential for big things, launching it as the lead single from Anthems Of Rebellion. Its video, featuring hordes of metalheads sprinting across a beach, flags in hand, made a huge impact, receiving regular airplay on hallmark rock channels like Scuzz, MTV and Kerrang! TV, and getting featured on the revived Headbangers Ball show on MTV2 (it was also included in an official Headbangers Ball compilation album later that year). While the song’s catchy, (relatively) simplistic nature made it perfect single fodder to begin with, its lyrics, portraying ideals of unity, rebellion and rising up against oppression, evidently hit the mark with metal lovers the world over.

“They are pretty anthemic, aren’t they?” admits Michael. “To be honest, my lyrics are always the same. I’ve been writing the same song for 25 years! Ha ha ha! It’s just variations on how I feel about things. I just nailed it on that one, a bit better than on some others. It’s one of those songs, it brings everyone in the room together. The song is about being an outsider so it resonates and I think it applies to metalheads or any kind of subculture. I guess we’re stuck with it now!”

The track paved the way for Anthems Of Rebellion to earn Arch Enemy a newfound level of success. It gave the band’s label, Century Media, its then-highest first-week US SoundScan sales ever, eventually becoming one of the label’s top 10 best-selling albums. While the band have gone on to have even more success since, We Will Rise still endures as one of their -and, indeed, one of metal’s -all-time classic anthems.

“I don’t think we’ve played a show without playing it since we made Anthems, and I don’t think we ever will,” says Michael. “We’ve played it all over the world. Sometimes we’ll play it somewhere like China and it feels really powerful, because some countries don’t have the same kind of freedoms that we have. From the stage, I can see people mouthing the lyrics and it obviously means a great deal to people.”

Arch Enemy: soundtrack to the rebellion

AVALON.RED/MICK HUTSON IDOLS

90  AMON AMARTH

CRY OF THE BLACK BIRDS

(With Oden On Our Side, 2006)

2008’s Twilight Of The Thunder God may have been the album that cemented Amon Amarth as the undisputed kings of Viking metal, but it was With Oden On Our Side that first broke them into metal’s wider consciousness – chiefly thanks to this irrepressible, galloping heavy metal monster. Axe-swingingly epic.

89 SOIL

HALO

(Scars, 2001)

If you knew you were going to be remembered for one track, you could do a hell of a lot worse than this. Giving the nu metal template a kick up the ass by adding some Pantera-sized grooves, Soil staked their place in the rock club anthem hall of fame forever.

88 TURISAS

BATTLE METAL

(Battle Metal, 2004)

“It’s not often that a band comes along and both labels and defines a genre, and Turisas did just that with Battle Metal. From the epic, trumpet-led intro to the rallying battle cry of the chorus, Battle Metal is the perfect soundtrack to get you in the right frame of mind to take on any challenge.”

FREDDY LIM, CHTHONIC

87  VENOM PRISON

ABYSMAL AGONY

(Animus, 2016)

‘SANE DUALI-TEEEEEEEEH!’ Built on huge, rumbling grooves and riffs that sounded like they were written on a chainsaw, Venom Prison stormed onto the scene with this crushing single, dragging UK death metal kicking and screaming into a bright new future and putting the quintet on the map.

Amon Amarth: these Butlin’s chalets get worse and worse every year

Audioslave: a different direction, and a stunning one at that

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86 STRAPPING YOUNG LAD

LOVE?

(Alien, 2005)

Like the title of their debut album had suggested, Strapping Young Lad really were as heavy as a really heavy thing, but Love? was also strangely accessible. During the chorus – which was apparently ripped off from Yes’s City Of Love – Devin Townsend’s operatic vocals soared atop a flurry of blastbeats, turning a relationship crisis into something cathartic and beautiful.

85 AUDIOSLAVE

COCHISE

(Audioslave, 2002)

Despite featuring all the members of Rage Against The Machine apart from frontman Zack de la Rocha, Audioslave were a difference beast altogether. Pressing pause on political agitation, they teamed up with Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell to produce three albums of timeless rock anthems. This was the epic song with which they chose to announce themselves to the world.

Coheed And Cambria: uniting the tribes

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84 COHEED AND  CAMBRIA

WELCOME HOME

(Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV…, 2005)

It was the prog rock song so epic and instantaneous it even had emo kids losing their shit. The closest thing the mid-00s got to its own Kashmir, Welcome Home was both mountain-shakingly bombastic and searingly intimate, its emotional core swathed in proggy tempos and pure, heavy metal thunder. Not bad for a track written in frontman Claudio Sanchez’s bedroom.

“I was still working a nine-to-five job, so Coheed wasn’t a fulltime thing,” he reveals. “We had just signed to Columbia so it was becoming that, but I was living at my parents’. I remember getting the riff and then moving into the chord progression, and being so excited… then my mother walked in to do the laundry! I was in my boxers and she’d caught me in this heightened creative moment. It was pretty embarrassing.”

Nonetheless, the song made an indelible impact, uniting prog heads, metal lovers and emo scenesters, and confirming Coheed as one of the most unique bands of their generation. And yet - perhaps due to its less-thanradio-typical six-plus minutes running time - there were reservations about whether to release it as a single.

“It was the song we thought should be the flagship for the record,” says Claudio. “But the label weren’t so keen! It was kind of given treatment as the soft single, and there wasn’t a lot put behind it. They didn’t see us as ‘that band’, and they thought The Suffering would be the first single. But the band all thought that this was the song that best represented us, and it proved itself, because every once in a while, even to this day, it pops up on something.”

“MY MOTHER CAME IN TO DO T HE LAUNDRY”

CLAUDIO SANCHEZ

‘Pops up’ is an understatement. While Coheed have arguably only got better and better as time has worn on, Welcome Home remains their hallmark single and one of the definitive anthems of its time -over 70 million streams on Spotify alone says it all. It’s appeared in videogames and film trailers, been used as the weekly theme of WWE NXT, and even been sampled by grime heavyweight Ghetts for his 2014 track Menace. All pretty wild stuff for a song that’s layered and expansive enough to warrant the ‘prog rock’ tag.

“We wanted it to be as complex and challenging as we felt the subject material was,” adds Claudio. “It’s a song that came out of, what I thought was, the end of a relationship with a woman who is now my wife. There were a lot of ups and downs, and that record is a kind of perplexing love letter, and with Welcome Home we wanted to reflect that. So I tracked all these vocal tracks that don’t necessarily match up. I wanted it to feel like all these different voices. All these parts of my personality. Like, multiple personalities singing the same thing. It’s kind of jarring!”

Myrkur: extreme queen – all hail!

83 ENSLAVED

BOUNDED BY ALLEGIANCE

(Isa, 2004)

“Isa was the first Enslaved album I heard, and I clearly remember listening to Bounded By Allegiance over and over in my college dorm room back in 2004-2005. It’s a killer, and often-overlooked, song with so many killer moments. FEASTING ’TIL THE END OF TIME!”

BENJAMIN HUTCHERSON, KHEMMIS

82  NEGURĂ BUNGET

ȚESARUL DE LUMINI (Om, 2006)

Steeped in the folklore of Negur ă’s Transylvanian homeland, Ţesarul De Lumini felt like an awakening for both the band and black metal as a whole. Engulfing as if being granted access to an incandescent, otherworldly realm, its 13, heart-stopping minutes culminated in a post-coital, tremolo-picked refrain to echo through the ages.

81 LETLIVE

BANSHEE (GHOST FAME)

(The Blackest Beautiful, 2013)

For a moment, Letlive looked like they could have been the biggest band of their generation – and never more than on this emotional, vibrant single, mashing punk rock fury, flamenco beats and Jason Aalon’s Butler’s gorgeous vocals to craft one of 2013’s biggest anthems. To be fair, he’s done alright since.

80 MYRKUR

FUNERAL

(Mareridt, 2017)

Myrkur’s Mareridt album cemented her as the new queen of extreme, merging Norwegian black metal with ethereal dream pop and traditional folk music. This collab with Chelsea Wolfe proved to be the album’s standout moment, both artists bringing their A-game to a haunting, icy-cold, doomy hymn.

79 MEGADETH

HEAD CRUSHER

(Endgame, 2009)

Endgame wasn’t just Megadeth’s best album in almost two decades – it proved itself one of the greatest thrash albums of the last 20 years. Its lead single, Head Crusher, showcased Dave Mustaine in all his fretboard-shredding, snarling, spitting glory, crowning a second golden era for him and his band.