Best Songs Ever

ø 4.4 at 26 votes
What’s your rating?

“Holy Wars... The Punishment Due” is the opening track of heavy metal band Megadeth’s 1990 album Rust in Peace. The song has an unusual structure, shifting at 2:26 after an acoustic bridge by Marty Friedman to a different, slower and heavier section called “The Punishment Due”, before speeding up again. The entire song is commonly referred to as simply “Holy Wars”. The lyrical theme of “Holy Wars” deals with the Northern Ireland conflict, and Mustaine’s feelings concerning religion. In an interview with the UK magazine Guitarist, Mustaine says that he was inspired to write the song in Northern Ireland, when he discovered bootlegged Megadeth T-shirts were on sale and was dissuaded from taking action to have them removed on the basis that they were part of fund... Read on...