Thunderstruck

It begins with a single guitar and a sound that is almost onomatopoeic — the repeated picked notes building a tension that is purely physical before the band even enters. When it drops, it drops completely, Johnson's voice arriving like something that cannot be argued with. The song sustains this extraordinary rhythm-section interplay for the full duration, Rudd's drumming locked impossibly tight to Malcolm Young's chug, the whole thing generating a kind of momentum that feels structural rather than decorative. Angus Young plays his solo with a rawness that other players would spend careers trying to replicate — he bends into notes like he's pulling them out of something reluctant, and the phrasing has a quality of barely contained chaos kept in check by instinct. The lyric is arena-simple: electricity as metaphor for energy and desire, nothing more, nothing less, and the directness suits the sonic experience exactly. Released in 1990, it arrived late in the band's commercial peak but felt like a distillation of everything they'd learned about how to generate pure physical excitement in a listener. Play it loud in a car, or before something physically demanding, or when you need to understand why simplicity in music is not the same as limitation.