Among the Living

This song arrives at a sprint and never relents. The opening riff has a circular, grinding quality — not quite thrash in the purest sense, but faster and more aggressive than anything the New Wave of British Heavy Metal had produced. Scott Ian's guitar work is angular and almost rhythmically percussive, creating a feeling of mounting pressure that the whole band sustains without release for nearly six minutes. Joey Belladonna's vocals cut through the density with surprising clarity, his tenor giving the track a melodic backbone that keeps it from becoming pure aggression. Lyrically it draws from Stephen King's post-apocalyptic mythology, and the weight of that source material — plague, judgment, the reckoning of civilization — bleeds into the sonic atmosphere. The song moves through the crowd at high velocity, demanding physical response. It defined a particular moment in American metal when the genre was becoming more musically sophisticated without losing its aggression. Best experienced at high volume, standing up, in a space where moving your body is not only acceptable but expected.