“Child in Time” by Deep Purple

"Child in Time" sprawls across more than ten minutes of Deep Purple in Rock, the band's fourth studio album from 1970, and it's the longest thing on the record. The words take loose inspiration from the Cold War, but the real story is the sound: Jon Lord's Hammond organ laying down a slow, ominous hymn, Ian Gillan climbing from a hush to a full-throttle banshee wail that shows off every inch of his range.

Then the band cuts loose. Ritchie Blackmore's electric guitar and Lord's organ trade and tangle through a long instrumental stretch, with Roger Glover's bass and Ian Paice's drums pushing the tempo until it feels like the whole thing might fly apart, before it slides back into the gloom and starts the climb all over again. The writing is credited to all five, Deep Purple produced it themselves, and Andy Knight engineered.

It's hard rock as a slow-motion nightmare, heavy and grand at once.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.