“Touch of Evil” by Judas Priest

"A Touch of Evil" is the slow, sinister creep on Judas Priest's 1990 album Painkiller, and Columbia sent it out as the record's second single, hard on the heels of "Painkiller" itself. It's also the one song on the album where producer Chris Tsangarides gets a writing credit: the guitar riff is his, and Rob Halford, K. K. Downing and Glenn Tipton, the band's usual songwriting team, handled the rest.

Synthesizers had been part of several Painkiller tracks before being stripped out of some, but here they stayed, played by keyboard veteran Don Airey. Between his eerie keys and the slow drums, the song turns into a metal pseudo-ballad with a real chill running through it. Onstage, Glenn Tipton swaps the keyboard intro for a guitar riff. He and Tsangarides would write together again 11 years later, on 2001's Demolition.

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