“One” by Metallica

"One" was the third and final single from ...And Justice for All, Metallica's fourth studio album, in 1988, and it's the moment the thrash band slows down long enough to tell a story, then speeds up until you can't breathe. James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich wrote it, and Hetfield's words put you inside a World War I soldier left blind, deaf and mute by a land mine, unable to move, begging God to let him die.

It opens on hushed, clean guitar, Hetfield and Kirk Hammett picking through something close to a ballad, before the song tightens by degrees into a machine-gun breakdown, Ulrich's stop-start double-kick drumming firing in bursts that some writers call the first of their kind in metal. Jason Newsted holds down the bass, and Flemming Rasmussen, co-producing with the band, keeps the long build crisp and cold.

The black-and-white video, directed by Michael Salomon and cut with scenes from the 1971 anti-war film Johnny Got His Gun, went to number one on MTV, and the band eventually bought the film's rights rather than keep paying to use it. After Metallica played it on the Grammy broadcast in 1989, the song came back the following year to win the first Grammy ever given for Best Metal Performance.

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