Check out the track biographies of the more metal tracks set for inclusion in ‘Guitar Hero 5′, in stores today.

A PERFECT CIRCLE
Judith
2000
Supergroups often come in for a bad name, but A Perfect Circle were always based on the genuine songwriting partnership between Tool legend Maynard James Keenan and seasoned guitar tech to the stars, Billy Howerdel. This classic line-up featured Failure/QOTSA legend Troy Van Leeuwen plus Paz Lechantin on bass and Tim Alexander on drums, and together they made history with debut album Mer De Noms becoming the highest-selling debut ever for a new rock band, shifting a massive 188,000 copies in its first week. The lead single Judith’is based round a seismic Leeuwen riff and fired up by percussive thunderbolts, energised by Keenan’s righteous fury about his mother. Judith Marie Keenan was left paralysed after a stroke when Keenan was 11, and this furious, vulnerable epic sees the singer raging at how  “the saviour abandoned” his mother. Questioning what Judith’s faith did for her, he roars, reasoning, “it’s not like you killed someone, it’s not like you drove a hateful spear into his side.” Indeed, Keenan chooses a Godless life after the trauma of what happened to his mother; “you’re such an inspiration for the ways that I’ll never choose to be.” Strange but true: Later incarnations of A Perfect Circle would feature Smashing Pumpkins’ James Iha and Marilyn Manson cohort Twiggy Ramirez aka Jeordie White.

Bon Jovi
You Give Love A Bad Name
1986
Like a time capsule sent from another age, You Give Love A Bad Name is the mid-80s in one hyper-direct, multi-levelled, hair-shaking, finger-pointing, scarf-draped package. Written by Jon Bon Jovi, guitarist Richie Sambora and Desmond Child – the undisputed king of radio-eating, melodic pop-rock – the song is about a shameless woman – we never learn her name – who has heartlessly ditched her lover. It was meant originally for fellow 80s metallers Loverboy, though Bon Jovi’s version was so completely perfect it would have been madness to take it elsewhere. Built on a series of ever more catchy verses, with brilliantly hook-laden guitar lines it even finds room for its own chant – this song was designed to be enormous – to sound enormous – and it was and remains so. As the first, scene-setting single from the band’s third album, Slippery When Wet, You Give Love A Bad Name was an immediate, massive hit, giving the band their first ever Number One. The album went onto sell in excess of 28 million copies across the world. Strange but true fact: Bananarama did a version of it during their 1989 world tour.

Brand New
Sowing Season (Yeah)
2006
Taken from the Levittown, New York band Brand New’s third studio album, The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me, Sowing Season (Yeah) (as it’s known on the single sleeve) was originally one of nine unnamed demos that were leaked online more than six months ahead of their release. Written by the whole band, the song’s second verse – “To bear to hear the truth that you have spoken, twisted up by knaves to make a trap for fools” – is an acknowledged tip of the hat to part of the second stanza of Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, If, which reads, “If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken, twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools…” Lead singer Jesse Lacey says there was a framed copy of the poem hanging in his home as a child. Musically the song starts as a quiet, softly strummed lament that builds into a great tangle of guitars before exploding into a descending, circular riff. Guitar Hero players should listen out for Lacey singing, “I’m not your lover, I’m not your friend” as a ten-tonne truck of noise is just about to land on your head.

Children of Bodom
Done With Everything, Die For Nothing
2008
Some people say, ‘Hey, you know what? The Bodom are totally melodic death metal…” Others disagree, ‘No way,” they insist. “Bodom are situated right at the symphonic end of the power metal spectrum…” But whatever the truth really is – and will anyone of us ever really know? – it’s safe to say that Finnish band Children Of Bodom combine extreme aggression with powerful melodies and aren’t afraid to throw plenty of swirl-friendly keyboards into sweeten the deal. Done With Everything, Die For Nothing first appeared on the band’s sixth studio album, Blooddrunk which, believe it or not, is the group’s most successful album to date and, indeed, the second biggest death metal recording in American chart history (situated just behind Dethlok’s The Dethalbum – and Dethlok aren’t even a real band, so Bodom sort of win that one). Musically it builds from a screamalong thrash intro, past double-tracked, classic metal squeals to a solo that is so ludicrously over-blown you might need a lie down and a rest after hearing it. Strange but true: a video of the band’s guitarists toting Flying Vs and playing Summer from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has been watched by nearly 3 and a half million people on You Tube.

DARKEST HOUR
Demons
2007
The outer reaches of hard rock have splintered into so many sub-genres that it can be difficult for anyone but the most hardened pogo punk to keep up. You should maybe know that hailing from DC the spiritual home of punk, Darkest Hour were among the pioneers of mixing hardcore punk with death metal. But all you really need to know is that Demon(s) totally rocks. Recorded in Vancouver with producer Devin Townsend, it’s one of the standout tracks from the band’s fifth album Deliver Us, which continued to the band’s commercial ascent, debuting at 100 in the main Billboard chart. A rabble-rousing chorus surfs along, swerving spiralling metalcore guitars, which pirouette all across the song’s furious plea for salvation: “One of these days we’ll no longer betray ourselves in any way – we won’t all look the same way down.”  Strange but true: ‘Demon(s)’ features in the episode ‘Escape From Dragon House’ of hit HBO fangs’n’bangs’n’fornication drama series True Blood.

Iron Maiden
2 Minutes To Midnight
1984
Iron Maiden have never been a band to slack off any and 2 Minutes To Midnight was their tenth single to be released from the five albums they had recorded in five years. In the summer of 1984 it got to number 11 in the UK singles chart, perhaps the only song about the Doomsday Clock, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ method of judging how close we all are to nuclear Armageddon, to do so. In September 1953 the clock was wound forward to 11:58 – two minutes to midnight – when the USA and the then Soviet Russia both took part in hydrogen bomb tests within less than a year of each other. The song is textbook Maiden metal, a solo guitar riff – with a rolling set of bass and guitar punches – that opens up into no-nonsense, heads-down, hair-swinging metal. Great middle eight after the solos too. Lyrically, it’s full-on war-monger baiting, “As the reasons for the carnage cut their meat and lick the gravy, we oil the jaws of the war machine and feed it with our babies…” 25 years after it was written this remains a staple of Iron Maiden’s live shows – it’s appeared on four live albums already.

Kiss
Shout It Out Loud
1976
As punk rock raged across Britain, America was – and, to an extent, still is – in thrall to glam rock and metal like Kiss. Taken from the band’s fifth album, Destroyer, Shout It Out Loud was a deliberate attempt, driven, many believe, by their then record company, Casablanca, to match the success of their previous single, the wildly popular Detroit-anthem, Rock And Roll All Nite. The song was certainly a hit – it peaked at 31 on the Billboard chart – but it failed to give the band the smash it was after. However, in the 30 plus years since its original release Shout It Out Loud has gone onto be one of the band’s most cherished and screamed for live tracks. Musically it’s begins with a big ringing melodic riff from the guitar and bass with a jumping, dancefloor-rocking accompaniment from the drums. The verse leads to a descending piano figure and some judicious hand-claps bring in the first, huge, chorus before the song’s even a minute long. Lyrically, it’s party time – “Don’t let ‘em tell you that there’s too much noise, they’re too old to really understand…” – from now until the end of time. It’s Kiss! That’s what they do.

Megadeth
Sweating Bullets
1992
By 1992, LA metal kings Megadeth had decided they wanted a piece of the big time. They holed up in Burbank’s Enterprise Studios with producer Max Norman with the specific intention of finding a less convoluted, more radio-friendly sound. The result was their fifth album Countdown To Extinction, their biggest-selling to date, shifting over two million copies and netting a Grammy nomination a year later. But while the albums other big hits like Symphony Of Destruction and Foreclosure Of A Dream have outwardly political themes, this is a manic, often comedic song about schizophrenia. Structurally Sweating Bullets light-heartedly apes the effect of multiple personalities, and machine-gun guitars stop and start, with singer Dave Mustaine filling the gaps with manic cries of “Hello me, meet, the real me!” and through smacking lips declaring how “it’s nice talking to myself!” As it thunders into a more conventional metal middle section, multiple vocals are layered over each other and a sense of panic rises, with the character in the song howls how “if this war inside my head, won’t take a day off, I’ll be dead.”

MÖTLEY CRÜE
Looks That Kill
1984
In rock music, as in life, there is dumb and there is clever and the really smart people learn that putting those two things together can be a very good idea indeed. Take Motley Crue. It would be hard to be more dumb looking, more dumb sounding – bassist Nikki Sixx plays the same note for the first 40 seconds of this track – yet the truth is it takes brains to be that simple. Looks That Kill is all riff, no fat, no mucking about, it is a deadly weapon, a piece of deliberately inane hair-metal hilarity that shouldn’t have lasted five minutes but is, in fact, still going strong, still a massive fan favourite after a quarter of a century. That’s clever. Originally feature on the band’s 1983 album Shout at the Devil, the song was written by Sixx and was released as a single in January 1984. Although Crüe were still a relatively new band at the time, Looks That Kill went on to spend 10 weeks on the Billboard chart reaching Number 54. Perhaps it won’t surprise you to hear the video got heavily criticised for its sexist imagery. Strange but true: The main riff from Looks That Kill came in at Number 41 on Guitar World magazine’s list of worst riffs and solos of all time. Which shows how dumb they are.

PUBLIC ENEMY FT ZAKK WYLDE
Bring The Noise 20XX
2009
Bring The Noise is one of the signature tracks from one of the most influential groups in hip –hop, coming over as a plea for hip-hop to be taken seriously as a genre alongside rock, Chuck D leads the righteous assault, with partner-in-rhyme Flavour Flav spiting interjections as both declare their own awesomeness alongside shout outs to fellow musicians such as Run DMC, Eric B, LL Cool J and, rather bizarrely considering the song’s subject matter, the heavy metal band Anthrax and John Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono. As in house production team the Bomb Squad drop funk samples to dance around scratches and throbbing horms, the song declares the now iconic shout out “Bass! How low can you go?’, and the two freestyle against each other – “black is back, we’re gonna win!” Bring The Noise rightly became a rallying cry for hip-hop and it first appeared on the soundtrack for Bret Easton Ellis adaptation Less Then Zero, later emerging on the group’s seminal album It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. It went on to be named the 160th greatest song of all time by Rolling Stone magazine. This new version for ‘20XX’ has been created with legendary US metal guitarist especially for Guitar Hero 5, and will be compatible with sister title DJ Hero.

Rammstein
Du Hast
1997
How many of us can, hand on heart, say we’ve ever played along with a song that is largely an elaborate play on German wedding vows? Well, now we all can as the very wonderful Du Hast – arguably Rammstein’s most well known song, they play it at pretty much every show they ever play – has arrived on Guitar Hero 5. Musically the song is tightly-wound tech-metal, a glam-tinged (if glam ever allowed itself to be as righteously macho as this is) thrash with scalpel-sharp power-chords, tech-trance keyboards and pounding drums. The lyrics (“Willst du, bis der Tod euch scheidet, treu ihr sein für alle Tage?”) translate as “Do you want, until Death separates you all, to be faithful to her forever?” Instead of answering with “ja” (“yes”), Rammstein’s singer – Till Lindeman – says “nein” (“no”), breaking a few hearts as he does it. Earlier on he had sung, “You asked me, and I said nothing.” Strange but true: There are two versions of Du Hast, one with the first chorus and the verses in English and the last chorus in German, while the other is completely in German. The lyrics to the English version are not a translation of the lyrics in German. The English version is changed to Du Hasst (du haßt) which means, “you hate”.

SCARS ON BROADWAY
They Say
2008
When lunatic politico metal band System Of A Down disbanded after the double set Mesmerize and Hypnotize guitarist Daron Malakian declared that the band were not breaking up, “We’re just going to do a Kiss and release our own solo records.” But while singer Serj Tankian did just that, Malakian and John Dalmayan went on to form their own splinter outfit Scars On Broadway, apparently with the mandate to make more straight-down-the-line hard rock than the later experimental music of SOAD had allowed. They Say was their debut single from their eponymous, and only album to date, and while it takes the same broad political themes of the other band, its pummelling buzz saw guitars and diesel-powered melody pushes forward an altogether more personal lyric, pitting one man against the apocalypse he sees all around him. “Let’s fuck the world with all its trend, they say it’s all about to end.” Strange But True: An early incarnation of Scars On Broadway featured Casey Chaos from fellow US rock heavyweights Amen, although none of the material from that period made it to their eventual recording form.

The Smashing Pumpkins
Bullet With Butterfly Wings
1995
Starting with one of the most recognisable intros in the last decade – singer and songwriter Billy Corgan singing, “The world is a vampire…”, Bullet With Butterfly Wings went on to be one of the Smashing Pumpkins’ biggest hits. Originally the lead single from the band’s hugely successful 1995 double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the song won a Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance and reached Number 22 on the Billboard chart, giving the band their first Top 40 US hit. A very early version of the song was recorded during sessions for the band’s previous album, Siamese Dream, but it wasn’t until 1995 that Corgan added the masterstroke, the key phrase to the whole piece, his explosive yell of, “despite all my rage, I’m still just a rat in a cage” which takes the song from a brooding verse into a savage, super-distorted chorus that runs like a massive spike through the rest of the track. Strange but true: Bullet grew throughout its life into five different versions, some with different intros, some with different instruments and one live version that descended into raw chaos with Corgan screaming the “rage” line over and over and over again.

THE BRONX
6 Days A Week
2008
They may be named after a borough of New York City, but punk diehards The Bronx are Los Angeles through and through, the white hot beating heart of South California’s underground punk scene, their live shows bring barely-controlled riots of blood and bile. But their brutal brawn-over-brain music is hardly stuffed with punk dogma – they signed with major label Island Records after less than twelve live shows. They’ve also fiercely done things on completely their own terms; never ones for unnecessary fuss (or indeed unnecessary titles), all four of The Bronx’s albums have been eponymously titled. By this point, The Bronx were all about doing the same they always had done, just harder, faster and tighter. So by their standards, the verses are relatively restrained, building up barely concealed tension before the inevitable explosion at the bridge, and then a furious and ferocious howl to the band’s own brands of impure pleasure seeking, Matt Caughtran shredding what’s left of his larynx as he extols the virtues of being so badass he only needs to sleep on Sundya – “Six days no sleep! I keep my eyes wide open!” You should be warned though, play this song as it was originally intended and you’ll find yourself having to buy a lot more handsets. Strange but true: Two of The Bronx; members James Tweedy and Joby J Ford used to work for legendary punk label Vagrant.

The Sword
Maiden Mother and the Crone
2008
Hands up if you really, really like early Black Sabbath? That’s every single hand up from the members of Austin, Texas four-piece, The Sword then. Brilliantly heavy, molasses-sticky sludge-metal that is built on relentlessly pressurised riff patterns and doom-mongering imagery, The Sword’s Maiden Mother and the Crone sounds like it could have been written and recorded in 1972 and that is the most sincere form of flattery. The Sword are vocalist and guitarist John “J. D.” Cronise, guitarist Kyle Shutt, bassist Bryan Richie and drummer Trivett Wingo and Maiden Mother and the Crone – the title alone makes you want to cheer – is taken from their second album, 2008’s Gods of the Earth, a success for the band, peaking at number 102 on the Billboard 200 chart, no mean feat for such a deliberately uncommercial venture. Growing from a punishingly heavy bass and guitar riff, the song builds up towards a huge great noisy solo – there is no chance you’ll walk away from this track without at least thinking about growing a moustache and sideburns. Strange but true: the band’s track The Black River was featured in the Guitar Hero: Metallica game released in earlier this year.

Thin Lizzy
Jailbreak
1976
Jailbreak has one of the biggest, most recognisable intros in all of rock history – the one big ringing chord followed by the syncopated bass and guitar riff that bleeds into a fantastic wah-wah melody. It also has one of the most brilliantly silly opening couplets. “Tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak,” singer, songwriter and bass-player Phil Lynott sings, “somewhere in this town…” to which the classic response is, perhaps you should start looking at the jail, Phil? But while lyrics were never the band’s strong point (during the song Romeo and the Lonely Girl, also from the Jailbreak album, Lynott sings, “Oh, poor Romeo, sitting all on his own-eo”), no one does testosterone rock, no one conjures up that mysterious quality of male camaraderie, quite like Thin Lizzy. You can feel the hair growing on your chest as you listen to them. Taken from their sixth album – the one that really broke them in America – Jailbreak has become, along with The Boys Are Back in Town from the same record, one of the band’s most enduring songs, a radio staple for the past four decades. Strange but true fact: Jon Bon Jovi put a live cover of the song on the b-side to their Queen Of New Orleans single.

Thrice
Deadbolt
2002
Thrice could have gone the way of any number of identikit punk bands. Until 2002 that is, when they strode bravely forward with second album The Illusion Of Safety that dealt in lightning-fast, spiralling punk riffs and leading the vanguard of what would become known as post-hardcore, or what the music press talked up as ‘screamo’. Deadbolt is just that, and the perfect showcase for this innovative approach; two-and-a-half bloodcurdling minutes of schizophrenic guitar that boils to a head before collapsing into a plaintive piano coda. Matching this is the anguish of Dustin Kensrue’s howled vocal as he contemplates adultery and promiscuity – especially tough for a band whose conscience runs against traditional ideas of rock’n’roll depravity. “She calls from the doorway ‘stolen water is so sweet, so let’s drink from the doorway if you know what I mean’.” Dustin emerges helpless against temptations of the flesh, eventually begging “What have I done? Is it too late to save me from the depths of this place? From the depths of this grave?” Strange but true: Thrice have always donated a portion of their albums’ proceeds to charity, with the figure matched by their record label. In the case of The Illusion Of Safety, the money went to LA youth shelter, A Place Called Home.