“Sonne” by Rammstein

"Sonne" led the way for Rammstein's third album, Mutter, in 2001, and it began life with a surprising brief: according to Till Lindemann, it was written as ring-walk music for the boxer Vitali Klitschko, and the fighter's surname served as its working title. You can hear it. The song marches in like a heavyweight coming down the aisle, a slow, crushing count-off of riffs and drums with the full swagger of Neue Deutsche Härte.

All six members share the writing: Lindemann on lead vocals, Richard Z. Kruspe and Paul Landers on electric guitars, Oliver Riedel on bass, Christoph Schneider on drums and Christian Lorenz on keyboards. Jacob Hellner produced with the band and Stefan Glaumann mixed it, and the female voices hovering in the background come from a sample library, Spectrasonics' "Symphony of Voices", adding an eerie, almost sacred glow to all that industrial thunder.

It went to number two in Germany, the band's fourth top-five hit there and their highest-charting single until "Pussy" hit number one in 2009, and it also made the top 10 in Austria, Finland and Spain. The song kept echoing, too: a piano version of it plays over the end credits of the video for their 2019 single "Deutschland".

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