"I am the root/I am the progress/I am the aggressor," James Hetfield bellows like vengeance itself in the thundering spaces between Lou Reed's dry, unpitying harangue, in this song of destructive passion from Lulu, the strange-bedfellows record of the year. The full album runs the gamut of Reed and Metallica's respective extremes: his literary violence and love of drone, their wild-boy thrash and crushing power chords. But "The View" – with its crippled-march rhythm, sudden jump to double time and smeared-blues guitar outbursts by Kirk Hammett – is an effective introduction to the logic of this collaboration. Metallica are as raw and punishing, in their Motörhead-loving way, as the original Velvet Underground, while the sadistic need in Reed's lyrics and you-dare-to-fuck-with-me? voice, in this setting, are real doom metal. "Pain and evil have their place sitting here beside me," he sings, armed with the badass band to make you believe him.

Listen to "The View":

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“The Pretender”

This song wasn't part of the planned track listing for 2007's Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, and was put together in a day. "It happened after we recorded a lot of stuff," said Dave Grohl. Yet it ended up as the album opener and the lead single. Grohl called it "a stomping Foo Fighters uptempo song with a little bit of Chuck Berry in it." The singer hinted at the lyrics' political overtones: "Everyone's been f---ed over before and I think a lot of people feel f---ed over right now and they're not getting what they were promised."